Checking out early tonight. I spent some time today proofreading and polishing the various public pages and uploaded the trailer everywhere it needs to be seen, but that was pretty light work all things considered and I was effectively done by noon. My work for the year is done and I’m taking the next few days off until launch. I’ll be in the city until probably the first or second, meaning my posts here will most likely be sporadic although I will try to make one for New Year’s Eve reflecting on my progress this year, and my thoughts moving into next.
On a slightly tangential note, ever since my PlayStation Plus subscription expired a week or two ago my overall interest in playing games has noticeably receded even further and now that I’ve finished my work, the amount of downtime has become physically palpable. I decided today to attempt to start reading again – I haven’t read a book in over a year, I’ve now come to realise – and made some progress with Book 6 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His work overall is really quite moving and reminds me in many ways of what I enjoy most about Joyce’s stuff. I’m a much slower and less attentive reader now than I was even just a year ago, I’ve come to realise with some ambivalence, but honestly maybe that’s better in some sense – or at the very least, indicative of some kind of positive internal change. Well, at least I hope that much. In all likelihood though it’s probably a sign of nothing more or less than the fact that I just haven’t read anything of considerable weight in over a year since rather dramatically renouncing any and all interest in theory or literature and in doing so probably sacrificing the one thing which has afforded me some clout over others all these years. In any case, I now know it wasn’t worth it.
Finally finished the trailer today. It’s about as good as it’ll ever get for now under my control, anyways. Currently uploading it to all the relevant places: it feels good to be done with it. I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety about the release, honestly, but it really peaked tonight after a remarkably petty coincidence (or maybe not so much of a coincidence, but more truthfully, a consciously escalated series of ill-advised choices). I’m feeling okay now, I think, but it really hit me and caught me off-guard.
I spent some time with Aurora this evening. We talked a lot about sentimentality and sentimental things, which I suppose is apropos to the time of year – and to the fact that in two days (well, less now, actually) she’s leaving for another city, first for a few months in a sublet and then maybe for good. Her residency’s in the spring, which means next I’ll see her will be, at earliest, some time around May or so, more likely in the summer… Well, whatever happens, I hope she’ll be okay, and that she’ll find what she’s looking for out there – and that it’ll be good for her when she does.
Made the mistake of rewatching a Makoto Shinkai film tonight – The Garden of Words, in this particular case – and man, was it a mistake… it’s been a while since I’ve last seen a romance film (not that Garden is a traditional romance story in particular, or even a film about romance at all; I just can’t think of a better term in the moment) and I remember now why I stopped watching them.
There’s just something really painful about how beautiful it all is: Shinkai excels more than basically anyone else I’m aware of at taking the most mundane and unremarkable artefacts of daily life and elevating them into something beyond cinema or even art in general, where the world seems to become positively imbued with this kind of unbearable, untouchable beauty whose most remarkable and lasting effect is the horrible wrenching sensation that washes over you the moment the illusion breaks. It almost feels like taking some kind of incredibly potent opiate: the sense of euphoria is powerful enough to tear you away from reality for just a moment, long enough to feel the slightest glimpse of some other possible life, before rapidly receding, leaving you painfully, acutely aware of how dull and petty your own life seems in comparison.
Do I hate it? I don’t know – no, I don’t think I do. In fact, I think I love it: being able to not just see but feel that other possibility, even if for just a moment. But man, does it hurt… it tears me to pieces every time. The only way to sustain the feeling is by reaching further and further into this ever-receding warmth, this impossible light, which will not and cannot sustain itself. The deeper you get into all of it the darker the real world seems in comparison. Sooner or later you’ll have to face it anyways.
Man, I feel nauseous…
Spent the day working on post-processing effects again for the trailer. Nothing specific to talk about although in general I do feel as if I’m getting better at editing – or at least getting a better sense of what does and doesn’t to work – and occasionally I even start to think that I’ve begun enjoying it. I suppose though that’s a dangerous kind of thing to think in its own right…
I think I’ve been feeling more easily aggravated lately, especially by people online. I have a difficult time telling if the things I’m reading are getting progressively stupider or if I’m just growing more impatient but a whole lot of stuff I’ve been seeing lately has really started to get on my nerves. It’s not that I lack the ability to understand where these people are coming from, or even recognise on some abstract level the validity of their grievances: it’s that I just don’t care about how they feel anymore precisely because they’ve been feeling it so long and so acutely and as a consequence I feel as if I’ve become utterly inured to the banality of their suffering.
I thought I was becoming a nicer person, but I don’t know where all of this is coming from: the anger and intolerance, the sheer disgust of it all. I think that’s what I’ve been feeling now more than anything else, the one feeling that’s caught me offguard the most: disgust. I feel like I look out at the world these days and more and more I find myself gazing upon it in absolute contempt, a kind of overwhelming disgust that I can’t explain or understand or even articulate myself. I don’t want to feel this way, I keep on telling myself. But clearly some part of me does.
Started working on post-processing on the trailer. It was an incredibly taxing process just to get everything set up as not only did I have to familiarise myself with the basics of Premiere but I had to acquire a copy of it in the first place, which turned out to be an entire ordeal on its own as I needed the most recent version which was frustratingly difficult to obtain for fairly obvious reasons. Well, in any case, I was able to finally get everything set up. After working on it for a few hours it’s become increasingly apparent that my hardware is just not up to task to handle tasks like video editing in any respectably efficient manner: rendering performance is pretty horrendous across the board and things like overlay effects – the bulk of my work heretofore – are almost prohibitively taxing. Nevertheless, as Sawyer’s fallen sick somehow and isn’t available to work anyways, I’ve gotta take over…
Missed last night’s entry because I was too tired by the end of the day but Sawyer and I finished up the bulk of the trailer and were able to cut a final draft just in time for the holidays. There’s a few more relatively minor edits to make before I feel it’s fully ready for publishing, which we’ll work on when we meet in a few days for the new year, but all in all, it came out looking really good, almost better than my expectations, and I’m quite proud of it. I think it’s our best work yet, and I’m looking forward to being able to publish it.
Went to a Christmas party tonight where I met with some old childhood friends. I was surprised how nice it felt to see all of them again – that even if we don’t really talk to or interact with one another at all outside of these gatherings (let alone regularly), somehow every time we meet every other year there’s always this feeling of real… kinship, I suppose, although a better way to frame it is probably as this unique sense of shared history, a kind of enduring memory of the passage of time. It’s such a fundamentally banal yet strange thing: that we all grew up together as children and now, almost a decade and a half later, we’re all more or less adults. In some sense I reckon we’re almost witnesses to each other’s lives in a certain and very particular kind of way that most people aren’t so fortunate to have, and there’s something oddly moving about that. I dunno, maybe I’m just too sentimental, and the spirit of the holidays – however little of that there is left, anyways – has started to get to my head. In any case though, seeing them has made me feel better about the future and the past alike: being able to have faith in the stability their lives have offered, and will hopefully continue to offer as a parallax to my own. And in turn, I hope I’ll be able to offer the same to all my friends in the days to come.
Implemented a new effect for the camera zoom, designed to somewhat emulate both in visuals and audio a quasi-focus shift effect in digital photography. It was pretty straightforward to implement in terms of the basic steps: I already had different zoom levels mapped so all I really did was increase the speed of the zoom factor, and added a mild chromatic shift + Gaussian blur effect after every zoom. For whatever reason it took me a while to figure out how to actually implement the effects – I spent an hour or two stupidly trying to combine the shaders themselves – but eventually I just ended up with a standard surface stack.
Basically, how it works is that there’s three layers at work (only two of which are relevant for this):
- SURF_CHROMA (the irrelevant one), which stores the application surface after the chromatic palette is drawn
- SURF_GLITCH, which applies a glitched-out filter over the chromatically-shifted SURF_CHROMA
- SURF_BLUR, which applies a basic Gaussian blur to the visually distorted SURF_GLITCH
Each one uses its own shader and draws the previous surface using the respective shader. It’s almost definitely incredibly inefficient and prone to performance issues so I’m monitoring it closely, but so far I’ve been able to address all the issues that’ve arisen heretofore.
All in all, I think the effect looks pretty good, if I could say so myself.
Spent the first half of the day trying to come up with things to work on, before deciding that I’d work on environments. Well, I gave it an earnest attempt I think but it turns out that no matter how much I would try otherwise, today was just not meant to be my day.
Ended up inadvertently taking the day off. Felt a vague sense of unrest throughout the day; no identifiable source. Nothing else to report.
Finished the medical treatment UI for now, and compiled three more clips for the trailer. It turns out I have about a minute’s worth of footage left to record, and roughly twenty (nineteen, to be exact) potential cuts to account for. I’m thinking about creating a few more cinematics as well – maybe four or five – which reduces that number a bit. There’s a lot of miscellaneous actions that I can showcase which can fill a good bulk of the required volume but the main issue is that I’ve yet to figure out a way to showcase them in an interesting manner, as I’m not confident zooming in for the footage which means that at least for now I have to have diverse environments for each individual action, which is a total pain in the ass. It’ll no doubt be worth it in the long run, though. I suppose what I work on will ultimately depend heavily on how I’m feeling over the next few days. I’ll try to work on some new environments tomorrow.
Started working on the medical treatment UI today since I realised I needed to get it done anyways as part of the trailer. Managed to get the general graphics laid out – placement, size, basic interactivity – so tomorrow I’m gonna work on text. I think for the trailer I’ll just use a sketch of the final version as the internal framework is gonna take far longer than I’m willing to dedicate right now for what’s probably gonna end up to be a five second shot at best.
Freezing rain. The branches and needles and leaves were all covered in this thin and brittle encasing of ice but at the right angle in the right light it looked rather beautiful, in a strange and inexplicable kind of way. Today was the first time I’ve been outside for a significant period of time during the day time in a while. The air felt cold and clean and the sky was a real dismal, lonely swirl of grey.
Made good progress on the trailer today with Sawyer: finished up the initial draft, meaning the entire intro and most of the major structural elements have been successfully coordinated and executed. Now it’s up to me again to start working on additional content to fill the remaining space – just over a minute of fairly rapid cuts, which is honestly much better than I expected – over the next two weeks or so. Most of it is already in some stage of development so it’ll just be a matter of implementation. Luckily, a lot of it is also very UI-based stuff meaning I can get away with repeating some environments since most of the screen will be obscured significantly, if not entirely anyways. In any case, having gotten this much work done today at once has substantially improved my optimism moving forward for the next few weeks and I feel freshly motivated. If this feeling endures, it’ll be an excellent way to start off the new year.
Small but significant update this morning: implemented Steam integration (the game now shows up in the Steam library, although there’s no store page info as I’ve obviously yet to publish that), and created a new icon and splash screen for the game. I also sent in the Kickstarter for review – a process that apparently usually takes around two to three days, but which, much to my surprise, was cleared almost immediately after submission. I don’t know if I just got lucky or if their approval process has changed and the information page just hasn’t been updated accordingly, but whatever the case, I’m glad that I encountered virtually no friction here.
On a semi-related note, I’ve decided to push back the release date of the campaign and Steam page to early next month. Not only does it give me more time to work on assets for the trailer, but it also works better from a strategic point of view. Releasing around the holiday season as it turns out would have been a pretty risky maneouvre.
Failed to make an entry yesterday as the internet was shut off for the entirety of the day. I’ve mostly just been working on more cinematics, and have managed as of today to more or less complete the intro sequence. I’ve also edited the music for the trailer a bit to feel better aligned with the more stark and minimalist pacing of the visuals. It’s been over a week now since I’ve worked on anything in the game itself and it feels strange. Now that the most major work is done though (well, hopefully, at least), I can get back to working on new environments again. In two days I’ll have reached the original deadline for having finished production on the trailer.
I’ve been feeling pretty disturbed lately lately, and the one day without internet really crystallised that feeling for me into a tangible reality. Today I fell asleep at 1300 and slept for almost twelve hours with few interruptions, experiencing a number of incredibly strange and vivid dreams whose physical toll I could feel in my body after I awoke. I had an argument today with my mother – the usual things, what else – that further exacerbated my general unease into an overwhelming cloud of palpable dread and anger. I thought I was getting better this entire time, that I was improving and becoming a better person… calmer, kinder, more forgiving. In reality though, maybe it was just because I went unchallenged for too long, that I developed a false sense of progress. That this whole time I’ve just been under some kind of delusion of self-improvement. Well, it’s as they say. It doesn’t matter how many things you do right, as long as you manage to do one thing wrong at just the wrong time.
Haolun came over again late last night, the first time we’ve met since Thanksgiving. We went to the diner as usual and then drove around until 0300 or so. I felt pretty exhausted throughout the day but still managed to get one cinematic cel completely done as I hoped yesterday, and started on two others which are structurally finished but need to be tweaked and cleaned up a bit. I’m hoping tonight I’ll be able to correct my sleep cycle so I can once again return to a normal schedule of work.
Managed to recover some momentum today: worked at a steady pace throughout the morning on a new cinematic, and arranged the framing/pacing of the previous ones. Although my rate of production was technically under expectations I don’t feel too bad about it as it’s still an improvement over yesterday.
Looking at the amount of work I have left for the trailer, I’ve realised that it will probably be worthwhile both for the sake of its quality and my sanity to extend the deadline for it a bit, maybe a week or two. With the holiday coming up, it’ll be difficult to coordinate meetings which means that for at least an entire week I’ll basically be unable to implement anything anyways, which works to my advantage at the end of the day as it buys me more time to develop more interesting assets.
Completely lost momentum for some reason. I woke up early, stepped outside and looked at the sky, and immediately realised right at that exact moment that I would get nothing done today. I don’t know why. It snowed last night but most of it didn’t last past noon. I spent the day in a restless, listless mood, pacing around my room in circles and staring at spots in the ceiling that appeared for a moment to be patterns. I’m too tired to do anything else tonight, let alone work. I hope tomorrow is better.
Another productive day. Once again was able to not just meet but in fact exceed my target goal by evening, and also managed to draft out what I believe will be, with minor tweaks, the final layout for cinematics. I haven’t opened the project in several days now; I hope the rest of the week goes according to plan and I’ll be able to return by next week to working on stuff in-engine.
My sleep schedule has become compromised as of late, although I’ve yet to feel any noticeable negative consequences. I have a feeling I’m wasting away my nights, but it’s also hard to work during the day too. I feel more easily distracted than usual… so far it hasn’t presented any serious logistical problems but it’s something I should definitely seek to address moving forward.
Got two more cinematics done today, which means I’ve started off the week on schedule. I’ve been encountering a lot more difficulty than I initially expected getting Avery’s facial features consistent across multiple angles – it turns out I overestimated my ability to maintain facial consistency across multiple angles entirely without references – but to be honest I actually quite enjoy the challenge since I can feel myself improving on a moment-to-moment basis as I gain a better understanding of her features and angles. I have a strong feeling that a good part of my disorientation stems from the fact that her facial structure and body type are both ones I’m pretty unaccustomed to drawing, which makes it harder for me to visualise what she looks like from different perspectives. Either way though I got it figured out for today and I feel satisfied with my progress.
Started working today on some cinematics for the trailer. I spent the entire first half of the day trying to figure out how exactly they’d look, which is almost always the longest and most difficult part of the process: but once I got the first one sketched out everything else fell into place almost immediately afterwards. I’m gonna continue working on them for the rest of the week: hopefully I can average around two or three a day, to a total of a dozen or so. Since I’m working at a smaller resolution, hopefully it’ll be a bit easier. All the images are gonna have to be drawn and assembled at 4:3 (or 1.33:1) aspect ratio which is gonna be a little bit of an annoyance because it’s not a resolution I’m really used to working at but I reckon I’ll get used to it pretty quickly in due time. I’m looking forward to this week’s work.
At some point this afternoon I fell asleep in such an odd position that upon waking I found the entire left side of my upper body uncomfortably stiff, unable to turn my head left without feeling considerable pain in the neck muscles. Although it’s subsided a bit the pain and stiffness are still both very much present hours later…
I worked today on mixing two new tracks which I recorded yesterday. Although I was initially hesitant on having any kind of music at all I realised that the slightly distorted nature of the recording (which I did via my phone) actually suited a diegetic score very appropriately, leading me to reconsider my earlier reluctance. I’m thinking that each outpost will have its own theme that plays automatically the first time upon entering, and can then be replayed via a console. Listening to music will help improve Avery’s mood, as well as improve the quality of her sleep.
Speaking of sleep though, maybe it’s time I should get to sleep…
Skipped yesterday’s entry for no reason whatsoever beyond sheer lack of will. Sawyer came over, we discussed the details of the trailer and then we set up the Steam product page. I worked on that a bit more throughout today, and everything now except the trailer is basically complete. Everything about it is a fucking trial to work through, to say the least… I remember it being pretty goddamn bad but it’s somehow even worse than I expected.
My goal for next week is to finish all of the scenes for the trailer. I’m considering the possibility of making some brief cinematics shots throughout: I’ll start on those over the weekend.
Decided to take today off. Nothing to report.
A cold bright day. Nearly all the snow has melted away. I spent the entire day working on assets for the Kickstarter page and made a substantial amount of progress. I’ve managed to finish nearly all of the key visual assets, meaning the only things left to do are the trailer, and some miscellaneous headers/interface elements. I imagine it should only take about another week or two at this pace, which puts me far ahead of schedule: if all else goes well maybe I’ll be able to finally get back to working on stuff I’m actively interested in again sooner than I expected.
Moderate snowfall all throughout the day. The sight of it made me feel rather listless and disconnected from myself and the outside world. There’s this curious sensation often associated with fresh snowfall called anosmia: a near total lack of smell. The snow blankets the environment, trapping and burying beneath it the usually dense cloud of natural odours and scents lingering in the air, which our minds on a regular basis barely register on a conscious level as anything above ambient noise. The whiteness of the snow, combined with the general lack of sound, combined with the near total lack of scent – there’s something terribly eerie about it all, an almost praeternatural kind of stillness to the world for just a few moments. For just a moment you become intimately aware of just how much stuff is actually going on at any given moment which you’ve just filtered out into the fringes of your attention; and only in its absence are you able to finally recognise, if not distinguish its presence. There’s a real loneliness to it. It makes me feel both calm, and slightly uneasy.
I’ve spent the past day or two writing up the content for the Kickstarter campaign. All of the text is mostly done, although I have to go over it a few more times over the next week or two to edit for consistency across sources. Tomorrow, I’d like to start compiling images for the page (which I’ll most likely recycle as assets for the store pages as well).
The first snowfall of the year, and with it, the arrival of December. For some reason, lying in my bed just looking up at the ceiling, I was overcome with a sudden vision of spring which both seemed like so long ago yet not so far away at the same time. The past few months have been permeated with a particular creeping sense of melancholy whose origins I can’t quite place, and which itself remains teleologically elusive. I can’t tell if something’s just a little bit off in my life, or if it’s something beyond my control… it’s frustrating, to say the least, especially since it seems to be affecting my overall productivity pretty significantly, in ways I have difficulty articulating, let alone defining.
Another month gone. I want to say I’ve made significant progress because I feel as if on some level I have, but also, I’m not really sure. I do know for certain though that I wasn’t able to complete all the intended objectives for the trailer in time. I’ve realised that actually the consequences for that aren’t as dire as I wanted to believe: I have most of December to continue brushing up on pre-existing assets, as well as creating new ones, on top of writing all the copy for the Kickstarter and Steam pages (most of which is already written to some degree). That should be more than enough time – if I don’t get complacent like I have been most days these past few months, that is. Just gotta keep on keeping on, as they say.
