Month: November 2019

Spent the first part of the day improving environmental assets, then decided to cut a new track for the trailer after realising how difficult it’d actually be to actually pace the footage to the old one. Everyone who’s now heard the new track says that it’s a significant improvement over the old one both in quality and tone, and I’d tend to agree: it feels more unique I think and does a better job setting the mood. Best of all it heavily samples a track by a buddy of mine, whose work I’ve wanted to feature for a while since I met him back when I was working on MA. He hasn’t worked on music in a long time I think but hopefully this will be able to turn him some new followers, for whatever it’s worth.

Didn’t end up seeing my high school friends after all: some logistical fuck-up as per usual when it comes to these kinds of things. Well, we always have next month, during the winter holiday – or so it goes. Thankfully it meant I had more time today to work on things, which is always good. Tomorrow I’m gonna clean up the track and add some finishing touches, and start working on a new environment. Two more days till December…

Started the day off in a rather dark and dare I say frangible mood, which thankfully resided over the course of the day into a more stable kind of melancholy. I was able to get a bit of work done today, mostly focusing on lighting effects for the interiors, but I’m still dragging at an unacceptable rate in terms of overall assets. Tomorrow, I might be visiting some old friends, meaning my schedule is once again uncertain, and Sunday, Sawyer’s coming over to begin work on the trailer, meaning the only day I have left to actually devote fully is Saturday. Well, I suppose I only have myself to blame for this rising wave of nausea building within me.

Woke up after sunset feeling like absolute shit. Nevertheless, perhaps spurred by the dismal state of my affairs, I immediately set about work and was able to maintain a reasonably steady pace for the rest of the night. I’m almost done with the environment I’ve been working on the past few days – probably the most difficult one actually, since it’s an indoor location and requires the implementation of fairly advanced lighting paths (which I finished up today) – so it’s just a matter of persisting and not getting distracted. Just a few more weeks and all of this will come to fruition…

I woke up at a respectable time again today but, as you can probably tell given the time of this entry, I have a feeling that’s about to end pretty soon. Despite my early start I managed to completely waste away the entire morning on various trivial activities of which I astonishingly have almost no memory; and then I spent the afternoon labouring away at a handful of pixels at a painstakingly glacial pace. The upside is that I have indeed finished what I was drawing; the downside is that yet another day passes in which I’ve accomplished virtually nothing of substance.

Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true. Haolun came over tonight and after spending a few hours driving around aimlessly and eating fries I felt freshly imbued with a newfound sense of energy and over the span of an hour or so managed to design and implement a better torch effect, which is leagues above the previous one and which I’d even say almost singularly vindicates the failure of the latter. The luminosity of the beam now drops over distance in a semi-realistic manner (had to make some slight adjustments to account for the range of the spaces in-game, so it’s much less powerful than it most likely would be in reality) meaning the further the light is pointed, the narrower the beam, and the weaker the light. It’s a cool effect that dramatically improves the feeling of darkness in the game, allowing the player to navigate and perform basic actions without negating the effect of the darkness (and I’d say that in fact it actually amplifies it). I’m surprised I didn’t think of it earlier.

Maybe I really do work best at night after all.

Woke up before dawn and worked without pause for the entire morning, which allowed me to accomplish a good variety of unexpected tasks including revamping the general ambient audio, implementing a pointer-based hand torch, and adding furniture and paneling to the interior of the cabin. 

For all the things I managed to get done though I still somehow feel it wasn’t enough. I was supposed to work on a new environment today but for some reason, once again, I just did something completely off the schedule. It really frustrates me in a way that I feel is actively burning me out. I have to keep on persisting though. It’s a shame that this period had to coincide with the holidays, when all my friends are coming home. Maybe I can take a few days out. Either way, just a handful of weeks left before I can get back to feeling more normal…

Aurora and I went out to the reservation today and looked at the water.

I enjoy spending time with her. We’ve known each other long enough that our conversations are imbued with a certain kind of history and understanding that only longevity can grant, even when it exists beyond our articulation. 

It was the first time I’ve seen her this month, as well as the first time I’ve been outside proper in several weeks. It was a warmer day – relatively speaking, anyways – and the air felt clean and bright. For a moment I felt properly invigorated, my mind and spirit eased of the fog of my work, and I felt I could finally look clearly at myself and the world around me. I became aware of the sensation of what I can only really describe as a kind of brightness emerging within me… which lingered for just a moment before giving into this wave of immense sadness, or perhaps more accurately weariness: the sudden realisation of the fact that my work is not as profound as I sometimes believe it to be, and that my actions will most likely have no great weight or bearing upon the lives of others in any foreseeable manner. But before I could confront it with any proper sincerity or reflection, the feeling vanished and was replaced instead by this kind of dim, melancholic ebb that lent to the rest of the day a kind of somber and wistful quality. I fell asleep some time around evening and woke with the acute sensation that I’d just drifted through vast stretches of time with no consequence.

I guess all of this is to say that maybe I really just need to start getting out more. 

Spent the first half – well, over half technically – of today asleep, and didn’t wake until 1600. It was already beginning to darken outside by the time I finally came around, and recognising that, on top of the fact that I’d basically wasted the entire day, filled me with a sense of profound disappointment. 

I immediately set about working when I finally got up, and managed to significantly increase the density of several pre-existing areas, which now look suitably forest-like. I also worked on several new generic environmental assets, and cleaned up some old ones. It turns out that at some point through some adjustment or other I’d disabled shadows on all the trees without realising it, so I fixed that as well, and added a bit of directional randomisation to all flora instances to further increase the complexity of their appearance in-game.

Next week I plan on working exclusively on environments for the trailer, and I’m very seriously committing to getting one done per day. At that rate, if I’m able to maintain, I’ll be able to get all of the new environments I needed done on schedule. Once Sawyer returns from Thanksgiving holiday we’ll get to work on the trailer. I’ll spend about a week planning the layout with him and brushing up assets, and then commit the rest of the month to producing promotional materials and documentation for the Kickstarter.

Didn’t end up visiting Norah after all: turns out she was too hungover apparently from whatever she was doing last night and felt too tired to meet. Well, no surprises there, I suppose. This happens nearly every time: we’ll schedule some time to meet and everything will seem fine right up until several hours before the agreed time, when she’ll tell me that for whatever unpredictable reason she no longer wishes to meet. She’ll then offer to schedule it to some other day but both of us know that it’s just a displacement of responsibility for the moment. I guess in some sense her ability to disappoint never quite fails to disappoint.

As they say though, fool me once…

Anyways, that ended up completely throwing me off so despite starting off the day in a productive mindset, I ended up losing control and slipped back into a state of vague uselessness. I just sat around all day and played video games in a state of mind so disconnected from the tasks at hand that I can’t even recall in any detail what I actually played today. I’ll have to make up the lost work tomorrow.

I have to stop placing so much emphasis on the presence of others when it comes to planning. People always end up coming up with some bullshit excuses and honestly, I can’t really blame them, because I do it too, and I’m even doing it right now, probably to a more harmful degree, pushing the responsibility for my frustration and the resulting ineptitude onto the (in)action of a convenient other. But who wants to confront their own shortcomings willingly? At the end of the day I suppose it really is just best after all to place one’s faith and sense of balance in work above all else. At least that way the only person I can blame for letting me down is myself.

Another early sign-off. Trying to improve my sleeping schedule so I can spend more time working in the daylight. Today was productive: I woke up around 8 and worked throughout the day creating and improving assets, including some new animations, and further refining the pointer system. It now consistently tracks real-time mouse movement instead of simulated (meaning the pointer speed is much more predictable now), and checks for overlap between the cursor and the entire sprite of the target rather than just the bounding box (which has to be smaller to accommodate the depth stacking system). The pointer now actually feels good to use. I’ll leave it be for now. 

Tomorrow, I’m visiting Norah so I’ll be gone for most of the day but when I return I plan on working on more environmental assets. There’s just over a week left in the month and a bunch of stuff I’ve yet to finish but I’m confident I can get it all done on schedule.

Checking out early tonight, I feel incredibly drained for some reason. Another day with decent but irrelevant progress: I implemented a pointer-based text interaction system that allows me to implement a dynamic and semi-randomised array of item descriptions (ie, flavour text) upon hovering the mouse over the object. I’m also considering switching the direction of the hand torch from being dependent upon Avery’s current walking vector – which makes for a rather awkward and imprecise control scheme – to being tied instead to the mouse, which allows finer and more intuitive control over the light. I’m considering tying Avery’s direction as well to the mouse, at least when she’s standing still: if the mouse’s x-position is to her left, she’ll face to her left, and vice versa. In order to do that, I have to figure out what the hell is going on with the mouse cursor in the first place.

All of that sounds good and all, but truth be told, it’s completely not what I should be prioritising at the moment. Why do I keep dragging on this shit? I know exactly what needs to be done, yet for some reason I just never actually commit to doing it, and instead end up doing some totally non-urgent task that’s just enough to convince me that I’ve accomplished something for the day even though – and this is the most frustrating part of it all – no one’s actually being fooled otherwise, myself in particular. What a monumental waste of time. I have to get started on actual work tomorrow. This time for real.

Just another day. Spent a good while this afternoon writing log entries for Avery, which turned out better than expected. It’s not exactly a total waste of time seeing as I did get a good amount of content done, but it’s also not what I should be prioritising now, which is stuff for the trailer.

I really hate this feeling – of feeling guilty for doing the wrong thing, just because there’s something else that needs to be done first. I mean, of course, there are priorities and deadlines, that’s the nature of work; but it just feels like it wasn’t so long ago (although I suppose it really wasn’t, not even a full half-year since I’ve started) that I could just do whatever I felt like doing and enjoy it in the moment. Well, no use complaining about it, it’s just the price I pay, and one I’ve chosen to pay.

A decently productive day. I decided to stream again, during which I was able to successfully finish two fairly involved animations. Although admittedly I don’t particularly enjoy streaming, it definitely helps keep me focused for sustained periods of time, which is probably the area I struggle with most. The awareness of persistent surveillance and external scrutiny ensures that I’m actually working instead and not getting sidetracked by random pitfalls. 

The month is almost over, in less than two weeks. The plan was to have all of the content assembled for the trailer by the end of the month so that I could work full-force come December towards getting the trailer and campaign out in a coordinated manner. While I’m still confident I can make the upcoming deadline, I have to admit I’m cutting it a bit too close for comfort, and as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, my rate of progress but more importantly my mood these past few months has been concerning. My pace is practically glacial at this point and the only thing that really keeps me going consistently is the sense of structure I’ve enforced upon myself. I hope there are no issues regarding the trailer; if it comes down to it, I might have to end up cutting it myself after all, which is a contingency I have to be prepared for.  

There are some days, I have to be honest, where I don’t feel as if I’m working at all. Or as if I don’t even feel like I really exist anymore. It’s when I see what other people are doing – my old friends – with their lives, earning money, moving away to distant corners of the country, even just grinding away at the jobs they hate, day in and day out. There’s a certain kind of envy I feel. Not for their work itself, which I’d hate to do, but for the sense of externalised purpose and meaning. Their work is not solitary like mine is. It’s grounded in something beyond themselves. However petty that ulterior purpose is, they’re part of something – and for now, at least, I’m not. My friends and I, we’ve got each other’s backs and we’ve got others in whom we can entrust parts of ourselves… but at the end of the day, our work is solitary and it’s unbearably lonely, even to one another, and there’s no solace from that, not even release. We’re here I suppose because of that: because we couldn’t fit in with others, because we couldn’t tolerate the stupidity, the redundancy, the sheer repetition of the world. But I’ve discovered now that in all of that, there’s something else too, which we don’t have: the reassurance of one’s place and purpose. I wish I could say the same for myself; but honestly, some days, I just feel lost.

It seems as if my weekend of malaise has, completely unsurprisingly, spilled over into the work week. I sat at my computer for the better part of the day just staring at the screen basically. Eventually I did get some work done drafting out the food system. I still need to get some of the details figured out – exact quantities and weights mostly – but I think by and large the system’s now fully planned out.

1. Basically, raw food materials must first be found and/or collected in the world. Avery can hold up to 1.5kg at once in her pack.

2. Raw food materials must then be brought back to the outpost and loaded into the Food Processing Unit, where over the period of one in-game hour, they’ll be processed into a cartridge of usable materials.

3. These cartridges must then be loaded into the food printer, and a ration schematic must be selected. Different schematics have different requirements, and produce rations with different properties and advantage. The rations will then be printed (each one takes about ten minutes of in-game time to print).

I’ll start on the animations for it tomorrow.

I woke this morning feeling in a strangely unmotivated mood but I set myself to work anyways and managed to achieve some minor successes, the most major one being the conversion of the bulk of my notes to Trello, where they’re now organised in vaguely coherent outlines. I must admit, for a moment while transcribing some of the projected plans, I felt struck by a sudden sense of anxiety as I realised just how much work still lies ahead. 

I reorganised my desk today, and as a result, I think I feel marginally less distracted, although it’s probably just a placebo at work.

No work today, just posted my #screenshotsaturday – which admittedly was kinda half-assed and didn’t look anywhere near as good as I intended – and then did nothing for the rest of the day. I felt unusually choleric today for no discernible reason, although lately as a whole I feel as if I’ve grown more prone to spikes of unexpected anger. I don’t know what’s causing it, but sometimes, it almost feels pleasant in a way, at least in the moment…

I’m glad to report another productive day. I got a lot of work done on environmental assets, including furniture for the outpost as well as a denser wooded variation. I think I’ll present the latter tomorrow for #screenshotsaturday after a few touchups, and then I’m gonna spend the rest of the weekend implementing the furniture. Next week, I’ll start working on animations for the outpost assets. 

I realised with a start just now that the month is already halfway over. Although I’ve making good progress so far and for all intents and purposes I’m still well on schedule, I felt a sudden spike of anxiety or perhaps more accurately this creeping sense of unease that somehow I’m not gonna be able to finish on time. I don’t expect that to actually happen, of course – in fact, I not only will do but am currently doing everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t happen – but it’s still there. No doubt I reckon it’s just the usual fare for any kind of major deadline… 

Although overall these past few months have, all things considered, actually been pretty good, that sense of foreboding has really begun to mount lately, in tandem with the aforementioned anxiety about the launch. The days seem to be passing by faster and faster and I feel like I’m losing track of time, as if the parallax has disappeared from my life: all of my old friends have either moved on and slipped away or they’re still here but they’ve become similarly dislodged from time like me. 

I don’t necessarily mean that in a particularly negative sense, but I can’t help but feel at times like it is something negative, in the quite literal definition of the word: like there’s something missing, an absence of sorts where previously something else had filled it and given it form and shape. Well, I suppose that’s actually exactly what’s happened: I’ve lost external structure and the world outside has by and large, at least on a day to day, moment to moment context, ceased to matter. A good friend of mine says it’s because of repetition: you do the same thing every single day and after a while you stop noticing the passage of time because your body and mind become accustomed to the flow and rhythm. I trust him on that.

In some ways it feels nice, because I no longer feel burdened with all the stupid responsibilities and bullshit expectations that used to just constantly crush me. But on the other hand, lacking those, I’ve come to realise that actually my interior is rather quite empty – and more than that, it’s empty in a way that’s neither profound nor interesting, but rather actually quite horribly mundane. I suppose that’s just how it is for most people though, hell, maybe everyone. I suppose a large part of growing up is learning to come to terms with that.

Anyways, in more grounded terms, I’m running out of money, so I really do have to prioritise the success of the Kickstarter campaign now. In a fit of mild frustration earlier today I caved and bought a pizza and although it wasn’t that expensive – $13, which is actually a pretty decent price – it forced me to realise with sobering clarity that my bank account is running precipitously low and has been, over the past several months, leaking continuously, a trickle of what I at least thought at the time to be negligible purchases having culminated over time into something grotesquely unwieldy. As much as I hate the thought of it, I do have to start pulling in some income pretty fucking soon, or I’m gonna start facing some real issues, to put it lightly.

Didn’t get anything done today in terms of in-engine stuff, felt a bit distracted and unfocused for whatever reason. Every time I sat down to attempt to get something done I’d just feel this weird urge to get up and start pacing or something. I instead just decided to work on graphical assets, starting with the splash screen. 

Eventually I ended up revisiting Avery’s portrait, which I believe I mentioned previously I was displeased with, and I spent the entire afternoon basically redrawing her portrait because the angle on the arm/hand was inarticulately awkward. The new one I finished today looks a bit better, I still feel the posing is somewhat awkward although anatomically it’s now correct and all the lighting seems consistent now as well. I also painted her an alternate portrait as well, with her coat on. Tomorrow I plan on streaming some environmental work.

I have a difficult time believing the week is already over – and yet somehow it is. Today was a really productive day. Haolun stayed over again last night and after we woke we went over to the creek and hung around for a bit, although it was uncomfortably cold (somehow it’s dropped down to 22F, wind chill included, over the span of about a week). 

After he left I got to work and successfully managed to port over the system UI from But For Now We Are Young over the next few hours. Aside from needing to update the text on the various information screens, everything else is completely functional, and I even added an additional pop-up window for when volume is changed, which was intended for but not implemented into Young around the time I suspended it. Tomorrow (or later today) I’ll finish up the final touches on the system UI but otherwise it’s working really well and I’m really surprised I managed to implement it so quickly and with so few hiccups. I also managed to create a really cool ASCII version of Avery’s portrait, which looks far better I feel than the original. I wasn’t really considering planning on having a major nondiegetic introductory screen, but now that I’ve seen just how good it looks…

Staoue came over tonight and we drove around for a while, and looked at architecture manuals at the bookstore. Shortly after he arrived we had a pretty hilarious encounter with a police officer who, while turning into the train station where we had parked, apparently saw me gesticulating wildly through the passenger window and pulled over to check in on us. We quickly cleared up the misunderstanding and in the meantime piqued his curiosity about what we’d been talking about so animatedly (we were real up in laughter). Well, I’m not gonna tell you what we were talking about because I don’t want to record it in what’s supposed to be a semi-serious log but needless to say after we told him what we were discussing he too joined in on it briefly and we all had a pretty good laugh about it. He looked pretty young, just a bit older than us maybe. He seemed to have genuinely enjoyed the conversation, and I hope that he had a good time and that the experience had a positive effect on his night. 

For some reason that interaction had a very positive effect on my day, which was already going pretty well (and continued to go well afterwards). I dunno; I guess it was because it was the first genuinely positive encounter I’ve had with someone who wasn’t already an established friend in a real long time. It really surprised me – in a positive sense – and made me feel more, well… optimistic, I guess. 

Ended up finishing a region of the world map today, at least in terms of the structure. Created a few new varieties of underbrush although I’d still like to improve a bit more on it: add some fallen / bent tree variations, vegetation clusters, etc. Density is improving now, which is a good thing; however I have a feeling that performance is gonna start being an issue real soon, if not already.

I’ve made the decision to scale down some of the rooms – ones with smaller focal points, mostly – from the standard 480×480 to 480×256. That gives me the opportunity to make more visually interesting and diverse rooms without having to worry about leaving half of it empty or filled with repeating underbrush (however realistic that may be). No important content is really being cut by the reduction and in fact the smaller size means I can dedicate the space in a more focused manner. The smaller room size also means improved performance in a number of regions due to trimmed-down instance count.

If I can average one new room every day or two for the next two weeks, that would be an ideal pace for the trailer… then I can get back to working on mechanics. 

Didn’t end up working on environments after all today, although I did get a good amount of work done on conceptual planning: broad overview stuff like narrative structure and various topographical connections, etc. I woke up early today, around 0800, and although at several points throughout the day I was very tempted to go back to sleep, for some reason each time something arose at the last moment to convince me to stay awake. I spent the entire day too tired to really focus on anything substantial yet motivated just enough to feel guilty going back to sleep. It reflects in the quality – or lack thereof, I suppose – of my work today: Avery’s portrait really kinda sucks to the point where I’m strongly considering just redoing it altogether, I fucked up the anatomy real bad because I wasn’t thinking straight (not to mention the lighting angles, or inconsistent shading, or hell, even the proportions in some parts are questionable, etc). 

Well, it was just for fun, anyways. No need to get too worked up about it.

Spent a few hours this afternoon working on world-building stuff, just establishing various organisations and schools mostly, as well as some geography. Coming up with authentic-sounding and linguistically-consistent (well, internally consistent, that is) names is remarkably difficult. Anyways, it’s not really anything I can talk about, both for obvious spoiler-related reasons but also just because there’s not much to actually talk about in terms of the process. It mostly just involves a lot of reading and double-checking references. Time to get back to work tomorrow…

Last night it dropped down to 22F, and the cans of beer I left in my bathroom were perfectly chilled when I examined them in the morning. It’s strange: it already feels like winter yet I barely noticed the passage of autumn. One day the trees were just on the cusp of reddening – hell, there were plenty of green leaves left, even – and then by the next, quite literally following a particularly severe overnight storm, all the leaves were swept away and since then the trees have just stood completely bare. The temperatures have routinely started dropping below freezing overnight. I haven’t actually gone outside for any meaningful period of time in a week.

Today was a generally productive day. I started integrating a new room – ftaires! – into the main game for the trailer and was able to get a #screenshotsaturday post up showcasing the new room as well as the full animation for setting up and entering the tent. I also started work on some new posters for characters. Next week I think I’ll start working on new locations for the trailer. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, from here on out I’m no longer be posting publicly about story-related content such as new locations etc. It’ll still be logged in Github for later viewing, though.

Finally, a productive day for once. I woke up pretty early – well, “early”, that is, relative to my waking schedule the past several weeks – and, upon sitting down, felt an immediate sense of motivation. Or rather, perhaps more accurately, what I felt instead was the conspicuous lack of that dim, cloying fog that usually seeps away at my energy, robbing me of the ability to focus on my work for any meaningful period of time. 

I spent several hours today in a state of focused work and was able to complete a rather complex and lengthy animation for the player entering (and exiting too, as surprisingly, it ended up being pretty reversible) the bivouac. It turned out a lot better than I’d initially envisioned and in the process of making it I was able to gain a better understanding of multiple angles which I’d previously considered but hadn’t really bothered with because I thought they’d be too complex to visualise. Well, they were, to be fair; it just turns out I’d overestimated just how difficult they’d be to actually implement.

At night, I played several hours of Siege while drinking with a bunch of friends. It was a great time, and I had a lot of fun. In a kinda curious way, it reminded me a bit of how I used to feel back in high school: that sense of open, careless enjoyment of the physicality of the moment, imbued with the warm haze of alcohol and raucous laughter. It felt pretty good. I hope I can share more moments like these with my friends in the days to come.

Another completely unproductive day. Woke up around 1600 from a strange dream. I was in school still – it looked like my middle school, but I was much older – and there were two girls with me, who were also around my age. I recognised one of them, but the other… she seemed like a friend I knew, but I’ve never seen her before in waking. The sky was bleak and the clouds seemed to move at unnatural speeds. We drove back from the school through an incoherent town that felt like the place where I grew up but wasn’t, to a field that felt like my home except it wasn’t. There was a massive tree in the yard before my house and when we arrived it was engulfed in flames. The sight of it filled me with a feeling of profound sadness and awe. 

When I was younger there were many trees around my house but in time they were all removed. I distinctly remember that there was a beautiful tree with fragile pink leaves right in front of the main door. One night I got angry – over what, I have no idea – and I started ripping away at it with an axe. It bled to death slowly over the next year and a half, becoming black and withered. A thick amber fluid leaked from the gashes I’d opened up in its side. Looking at it filled me with a sense of immense shame and regret. My father cut down all the other trees around the house over the next several years. Tore them all up by their roots so that no trace of them remained except in photographs and other artefacts of memory.

Anyways, when I awoke, it was already late into the afternoon yet the sky outside was dark and filled with rain. I sat around for a while staring at the blank canvas of the sprite editor, copied and pasted a few frames, but got virtually nothing actually accomplished. These past few animation cycles have been unbearably difficult to get through for some reason, both on a technical and a personal level. On top of that I feel like there’s been this hazy fog encroaching upon me these past few months, that’s draining me of my ability to work effectively. I can’t tell though if it’s because of work, or in spite of it. I’ll give it another try tomorrow…

Didn’t work at all today on the game, although I did spend some time cleaning up some of the public pages. I also wrote the release for But For Now We Are Young, which goes over, amongst other things, the general state of the project currently and what I plan on doing with it in the future. I’m pretty satisfied with the way the write-up went and I feel I successfully managed to achieve what I set out to communicate with it. In writing it, I feel like I’ve achieved a certain kind of peace with the project for now. I’m glad I took out the day to finally get it done. On the plus side, I also now have one more entry to add to my portfolio, for whatever that’s worth.

I’ll get to the animation for entering the tent tomorrow…

Yet another day of slow progress. Implemented, amongst other things, the animation for setting up the tent, so now the player is able to unpack the tent tarp from the pack (the unpacking animation still needs to be fixed because the backpack is open when the player goes to retrieve it, but closed when the tarp is detached), carry it to a location, unroll it, plant the stakes, and set up the interior framework. Tomorrow I’ll work on an animation for entering the tent. 

I have great difficulty getting anything done during the daytime, and it’s only really these last few hours at the end of the night, between midnight and 0300, that I find myself really able to focus on what needs to be done and, more importantly, actually get it done. My mind wanders far too much during the daytime, over the slightest divergences and distractions: even now, though, every other word I type, I find myself standing up and pacing around for a few moments before being able to move onto the next sentence. This has always been a problem throughout my life but some days it gets more severe than others and I feel like lately it’s been getting worse, despite the fact that overall I feel a clearer sense of purpose than the last several years combined. I don’t know what it is or how to fix it, or if there even is anything I can actually do about it. Like always though, I suppose the only thing I really can feasibly do is just continue working on schedule and hope it goes away on its own.

I saw this interesting quote today on Twitter from Brian Eno (excerpted from a 1995 book of essays called A Year With Swollen Appendices), which I’ve since clipped for posterity:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

I was able to finish up the animation for erecting the framework of the bivouac today, although I think I’ll remove the guylines from it for the sake of convenience and efficiency. The animation took a rather long time although I’m glad it’s finally finished. Tomorrow I’ll implement it in gameplay, and if I have more time after that, I’ll also start working on the teardown as well. 

The next thing to be done in terms of visuals is the animation for entering and exiting the bivouac, which, depending on how I’m feeling when I wake up, will either be very straightforward, or unnecessarily involved. Hopefully it’s the former. I’m actually kinda looking forward to getting it done because once I do, not only will the bivouac be functionally complete (only missing audio), but I’ll be able to start properly working on the sleep system, which is something I’m very interested in. 

Didn’t actually end up working at all today, although I really should’ve. Well, the work week resumes in proper tomorrow. I’ll have to go back and clean up a bunch of old stuff: audio for kicking out fires, implementing the other lighter types, animations for erecting the tent framework and pinning the lines, audio for the entire tent process, taking down the tent… 

In short, there’s a lot of stuff that, in my desire to meet each weekly deadline (a deadline that I must remind myself doesn’t even actually exist in any meaningful external sense), I’ve been neglecting to take care of properly and it’s really beginning to show its effects, both in the numbers and my overall satisfaction (or lack thereof) with my work these past few weeks. It’s important to produce things in a timely fashion but it’s even more important to ensure a consistently high level of quality and if I had to sacrifice one for the other ti’d be the former without hesitation – yet somehow I seem to have forgotten that. 

Haolun came over last night and stayed over. It’s funny how in the intimacy of darkness the anchors underlying all our pretences and acts in the light finally surface: at the end of the day all there really is and ever was, the dim parallax of our existences, are girls. He compared the act of speaking into the darkness to a phone call: trusting the other to your voice and to your feelings, all the while never knowing whether the other was still there, still listening, or if they’d fallen asleep, or the connection had been dropped. For a moment I felt a sharp pang of… I don’t really know what it was, let alone how to describe it, but what he said reminded me of Lacey, and that filled me with a kind of brief, immense sadness. 

Later, Sawyer came over and we prepared dinner: cuts of lamb steak with potato and rice stew. It turned out very well. I showed him how to make a White Russian – well, my version of it, at least – which he liked very much. It was a very pleasant evening and the air was crisp and bright, and the sky filled with a hazy vanilla light. We watched the first two episodes of Watchmen afterwards. 

I was able to successfully complete the bulk of the work I had set out to accomplish for today’s #screenshotsaturday post by mid-afternoon, and get it live shortly thereafter. I was also able to publish the entry for firestarting that I’d said I’d eventually post two weeks ago: so today was a productive day, all things considered. My next post will most likely be about either hunger, or sleep. I think I’ll do a bit of work tomorrow as well: I’m gonna start recording and compiling some stuff for the trailer and put it up in a folder. The sooner it starts to take form, however rudimentary that form may be, the better I’ll be able to visualise it, and the more I’ll have to work with.

November has come, as they say, and with it a considerable drop in temperature, down to freezing. The storms cleared overnight but left in their wake an entire forest of bare trees. It feels like winter’s already come.

I got a decent amount of work done today on animations, although the latter half – erecting the framework, tying down the guylines, and then the entire disassembly (although I’ll worry about that part later) – are still yet to be finished. I have to implement the stakes tomorrow morning (or whenever I get around to it, just some time tomorrow), although the spacing on them will be complicated: I’m thinking about spawning with the foundation for the tent four invisible objects at each corner – hard-mapped, of course – and setting each of those as an interactive binary trigger which in turn will, upon player input, switch the player state. That’s probably the simplest solution, although maybe not the most elegant. 

Whatever, elegance is overrated.

Well, here we are, at the end of October, and with it, the end of Inktober. It’s been raining the entire day, from the moment I woke till now. It’s apropos to my overall mood, I guess: I’ve been feeling a kind of creeping melancholy set in these past few weeks but I felt it especially acutely today. I hope it’s not the onset of something serious. If I can make it to the new year I’ll be okay. 

I’ve been thinking about getting back into reading. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything outside of work. I can’t really remember the last time I read anything out of strictly personal interest, to be honest. It seems like a really long time ago: even all the way back in high school, I can’t remember reading much for personal fulfillment. A full-length book, I mean. The thing is though, I just don’t feel like I have the time right now…

Work continues at a painfully glacial pace, but it’s getting there. Tomorrow I’ll make one final push to get the tent implemented in full before Saturday. Today I finished the unrolling animation completely and implemented it in-engine, so the player can now unpack the tarp from the pack through the menu, carry it over to a spot (with the placeable icon), and then unroll it into place. It’s pretty unrealistic admittedly, since in reality you’d usually unroll a ground sheet first and then, over that, the main tarp, and finally the bedroll… but that shit is way too complicated for me to animate currently and it’ll really cut into my progress and consequently morale if I get too caught up in it. I just need to get this shit done as soon as I can, upload it, and then start working on some new content for the trailer. Starting from now, I’ve got 1.5 months – six weeks, to be exact – to get the trailer done, which means that I have just about a month to finish the content for it to a point where it’s presentable. 

No time to waste… yet all it feels like I’m doing most of the time is wasting time.