Finally finished up the bed animation, and got it implemented as an interactive. It doesn’t look great, but it’s perfectly serviceable, meaning I just have to design the actual sleep mechanic now… I’ll probably just build the rest of the interactive objects though over the next week and then get started on fleshing out each one.
In other news, GDC has been “postponed”, which means for all intents and purposes it’s been cancelled. They probably made the right choice, for less-than-right reasons. Either way though, that leaves me with little choice on my end. On one hand I now no longer have to assemble a build by the 15th as there’s now no more event to attend. On the other hand, there’s now no more event to attend and to be completely honest, I was in some respect very much looking forward to it despite my wariness. Of all the years a fucking pandemic-level outbreak has to hit…
A very slow day. Woke up late and worked pretty inefficiently on the hunger mechanics, before starting to feel restless so I started working instead on the sleeping animation again – which is still not finished, to no one’s surprise. The month’s almost over and I’ve accomplished not even a single week’s worth of work, even being generous. I didn’t really feel distracted so much as I just felt aimless, although I’m certainly not lacking concrete aim. I just feel very unfocused in general and all the work I have to do right now seems fundamentally tedious, although it has to get done and in reality once I see the results I think I’ll actually feel quite invigorated. I’ll try to finish up and implement the bed animation by the end of tomorrow; I suppose it’s the least I can do in terms of completion.
Woke up late again, although I managed to work consistently throughout the afternoon into the evening. Although I initially had planned on finishing up the animation for getting into bed I felt absolutely unmotivated to work on it so instead I decided to get back to work on the hunger system, which led directly to the realisation that actually, this entire time, the entire time system had at some point become undone. I spent a few hours fixing that, as well as remodeling the time scale and display to be built around minutes rather than half-hour intervals. One in-game minute now corresponds to around five seconds of real-time, which I feel is a good pace.
I’ve also decided to add an additional unlockable item in the form of a biometric tracker, which will allow the player to view numerical biodata such as stomach capacity and caloric intake/output; it’s a useful solution to the issue of ambiguity – for example, does Avery feel thirsty because she’s just not drinking enough, or because she’s contracted a disease which dehydrates her at a much faster rate than usual? – while remaining diegetically consistent. I’ve added it to the list of things to take care of down the line but I imagine that once I get the biomechanics done for digestion I’ll be ready to start working on it sooner rather than later.
Today has just been one long series of mounting aggravations and frustrations, almost entirely due to poor decisions on my part.
First full work day in a while: spent most of it fixing up the interaction text, which I feel is now consistent and legible enough to my standards. Basically, there are two variations so far: a) situational text, which appears as text bubbles over small objects such as stones and sticks that can be picked up in the world space, and b) captioned text, which appear in the bottom margin of the letterbox and indicates either a more significant action (such as opening a door) in white with parentheses; or a thought, which appears in yellow (no parentheses). I’ll obviously keep iterating on it moving forward, as with all things, but for now it displays consistently across all available cases and looks pretty legible. Tomorrow I’m gonna start working on animations for other processes in the outpost. I should be able to get at least two full ones finished by the end of the day.
Woke up at exactly noon after accidentally connecting to an active call, and ended up playing games with my friends for nearly twelve hours straight afterwards. While I had a pretty good time overall there is no doubt in my mind about just how profoundly unacceptable it was on multiple levels. I’m gonna be making an active effort to ease up a bit moving forward, while investing a significantly greater amount of time and attention towards work. The month’s nearly over and I’ve gotten way too little done; I’ve definitely fallen behind schedule at this point, especially if I want something even remotely presentable at GDC. Gotta just clear my mind and reestablish control.
This morning I went with my mother to help my father pick up a refrigerator. The area was up in the mountains, a large stretch of townhouses. It was the first time I’ve been outside for an extended period of time in what feels like quite a while. The air felt very clean, almost rarefied. It was a very pleasant day today.
I spent most of the afternoon working on animations for Avery undressing and changing her clothes. I managed to get all the standard animations – walking, idle stances, basic actions such as opening doors etc – finished but I still have a few transitional ones to take care of such as getting dressed and loading/unloading the washer. I’ll get those done tomorrow along with proper text captions and effects, which means that hopefully the entire entry sequence for the outpost should be more or less finished by the end of the weekend. Next week, I’d like to ideally start working on foraging and cooking.
Didn’t work much today at all, although I did manage to finish up the animation sequences that I mentioned yesterday. I’ve spent a lot of time these past few afternoons and evenings playing games with my friends and while I certainly don’t regret the time I spent in their company, I do feel a sense of guilt that I’m perhaps dedicating too little time, relatively speaking, to actual work. It’s not that I feel burned out or even just tired or bored of it in the slightest; it’s just very difficult for me to choose between the two because they’re both things I value very much. I don’t know why, but it feels like I’m running out of time again. Just like how I felt at the end of high school: like all of a sudden, without any apparent reason, my endless days had just became very numbered and very soon, I’d wake up one morning and discover that the world was exactly the same as when I went to sleep the night before, only a little bit different. That feeling filled me with anxiety and fear back then; now though it just makes me sad.
The router got replaced this morning, so the connection has been incredibly fickle all throughout the day. I felt an enduring sense of dim unease all afternoon for some reason, although I was able to successfully finish the animation I started yesterday. Tomorrow I’m gonna finish out the rest of the set and get them all implemented proper. Hopefully the internet situation stabilises by the time I wake up.
Woke up pretty late today, around 1500; for whatever reason I stayed up until almost 0600 earlier just lying in bed watching videos about things that were evidently not that important after all, as I no longer have even the slightest memory of what they were about. Regardless though, I made good progress with the remaining time, which was spent almost entirely on a rather extensive character animation I’ve yet to finish; I also managed to finally fix the issue with closed doors clipping into the player, resulting in them getting stuck in the door when attempting to close it. Minor progress, but still steady progress…
Woke up a bit late, but still managed to get in a good amount of work today: finished implementing all the essential elements of the outpost’s layout, tomorrow I’ll work on adding a final few finishing touches in terms of optional interactives and decorations before beginning on the individual animations for each major piece of furniture.
Jacob, Nate and I tried out a group call this afternoon as well, kinda meant to simulate working in a shared physical environment. It helped me stay on focus and maintain productivity throughout the day, and it was also nice spending time with them in general working towards something. I hope we’ll be able to do this more often in the future.
Got some work done today; disconnected my computer from my main workstation and moved downstairs, and found that I had a noticeably easier time concentrating for sustained periods. I successfully implemented functional mirrors with complex (ie, accurately – for the most part… – reflects player direction relative to the mirror) reflections, as well as a rudimentary developer console which allows me (or rather, will allow me once I actually start building commands into it) to have a greater degree of control in-engine, which I hope will make development slightly faster and more efficient in certain regards. I hope to be able to finish laying out the interior of the outpost completely by the end of tomorrow, so I can finally start working on animations and interactions.
No work today despite what I said a few days ago. Instead I went to see Birds of Prey this evening, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was a fun and straightforward affair that looked great and didn’t demand much of me. I had a good time with it.
Tomorrow I really do have to get back to work proper. It just struck me suddenly earlier today that February is already half over and my rate of progress has begun to slip considerably behind acceptable levels. I feel like my discipline’s been wavering a lot recently – as of the beginning of the year, I mean – and I strongly suspect a lot of that is the direct result of some kind of growing instability in my overall mood, although I don’t know why. I’ve been getting very easily frustrated and even angry lately, at things completely out of my control; and it’s definitely taken a palpable toll upon my general ability to concentrate or maintain focus on things.
Wrote up a new update for Kickstarter, then took the rest of the day off. Not much more to say for now…
Woke up around 0900 in a queer sort of mood, as if someone had peered into my skull when I was asleep and groped around inside. Decided to just take the day off (will most likely make up some of the work on Sunday instead) to reorganise my desk.
The new computer arrived today – it’s exceeded expectations so far, and has not only performed excellently, but was remarkably easy and quick to set up – so over the next few days I’m gonna dedicate some time to figuring out how to incorporate it into my workflow more fluidly. I picked up some more Guinness as well. I’ve been burning through money a bit too quickly though for my comfort and after this week I’m really gonna have to start reeling it in and regain control of myself. This has gotta last me until at least the end of the year…
A mildly productive day. Woke around 0800 but just stayed in bed and stared at the ceiling for another two or three hours. The sky was filled with fog and darkness all throughout the day, casting a dim pallour upon the day’s activities. Regardless, I managed to implement a number of smaller but still important changes, most of them QoL-related including:
+ Created and implemented new animations for opening doors (might go and significantly rework this some time very soon to look more natural)
+ Initialised a number of furniture objects as physical instances
? Finally fixed the occlusion masking shader which allows the player to appear as a silhouette behind doors in interiors
The money from the Kickstarter finally cleared and came in, although it’s gonna take a few more days to process probably. Tomorrow I’m gonna start writing up the release for the campaign about my plans moving forward, and a projected timeline. It shouldn’t take too much time, I imagine (famous last words)… I’ll probably release that for #screenshotsaturday.
I woke this morning feeling mildly agitated as the direct result of a very vivid and troubling dream I can no longer quite remember. The day’s work as a result progressed slowly, although I did manage to get some things done: the rain audio should be completely fixed now for both internal and external audio (instead of using an approximate check based on a place_meeting with the roof object or whatever, I decided instead to just risk redundancy for the sake of ease of mind by creating an independent sound mask object which directly controls the volume of both the normal rain audio and the low-pass one for interiors). I’ve also started drafting out the interior of the outpost and began separating the various pieces into individual sprites; tomorrow I’ll initialise them as independent objects and sort out their depth, so hopefully I can start working on them proper.
A more productive day: I woke up pretty early, at exactly 0700, and worked steadily until about 1300. I managed to successfully draw and implement the roof for the outpost, as well as adding external details to the front wall; which now means the exterior of the outpost is more or less entirely complete. I’m thinking about adding some additional structures such as the water cistern and the sewage treatment operation, but those might work better when placed into their own separate rooms. For now though, the exterior is finished finally; now, onto the interior…
I also managed to implement a number of smaller but still significant changes to the backend, including:
+ Added a new variety of generic bush
+ Added new sound effects for the outpost’s outer and inner seals
? Reversed the angle of the sun, which previously implied an inverted polarity in which the bottom of the screen was geographic north; the shadows now display at such an angle where the top of the screen represents geographic north
? Redesigned the collision masks of all the buildings, so that the player can now properly walk behind the back wall and be appropriately occluded
I also finally got the Platinum trophy for Siege today! At long last…
Another day with no progress. I woke around 1400 and the sky was dim with rain. I didn’t even really try to work today; I just felt constantly tired. I did manage to do a pretty extensive (~3k-word) write-up for an interview about the game, which I suppose is something… although honestly I was too tired to bother reading it over so I have no idea about its quality or coherence. I hope the money from the Kickstarter comes in soon so I can finally write up the “moving forward” post for the campaign. I’m gonna try to go to sleep earlier today, hopefully tomorrow will be better.
Took the day off. I’ve been feeling incredibly tired lately in a physical sense, and I spent the better part of today asleep. Tomorrow I’m gonna get back to work proper; my goal for next week is to finish up the outpost’s exterior and begin work on the interior elements, which includes all the various interactions (and animations) associated with them.
Didn’t get much work done today, just minor QA adjustments. Felt particularly prone to anger and frustration all throughout the day for little discernible reason.
Spent the day fleshing out the the UAV interface, it now looks a good deal better and is fully functional in terms of measuring all the things it’s designed to measure. I also removed the tracker for now in favour of an automatic FLIR-styled effect which highlights the player (and other sources of significant heat) while darkening the rest of the environment. I think I’ll modify it a bit tomorrow to dim out other sources of heat as well, as the sensor is specifically tracking Avery and not general IR-based phenomena; we’ll see how it looks though.
Among some more significant changes beyond that, implementing the bloom properly – ie, so it wouldn’t render UI elements illegible – forced me to completely reorder the post-processing stack. Before, it went application surface to palette shift to digital distortion to Gaussian blur + bloom; now it goes application surface to Gaussian blur + bloom to palette shift to digital distortion. It was pretty annoying to keep track of the surface stack order but eventually I got it done. Reordering everything also managed to produce an interesting fringing effect when using certain lighter palettes (or really anything that doesn’t use a flat black as the dark tone) where the edges of all the objects become pronounced and, with the rest of the post-processing effects on, kinda ragged, similar to how lower-quality VHS tapes or TV signals would display on older television sets. I’ve decided to keep it in as the default although it can be toggled off like everything else with the other lens effects.
Didn’t get much work done today, I woke in a strange mood and found myself frequently distracted by vague and generally formless thoughts. I did manage to build in an uptime clock into the HUD, which measures the total duration of the current session.
Started working on the ID verification sequence for the outpost today, and successfully completed the initial draft, with full implementation including audio. It turned out looking a lot better than I initially expected and I feel a sense of accomplishment for today’s work, even if I didn’t make too much progress in the grand scheme of things.
I felt a spike of anxiety earlier today as I was hit with the creeping concern that, at the rate of progress I’m moving at, I’ll be unable to hit my intended deadline on time. I do certainly think that that concern is not without basis – there are plenty of days where for whatever reason I struggle to get anything done, let alone of substance – but I think I just have to learn how to accept the possibility eventually while maintaining as best of an effort as possible in the present, both to remain optimistic and to try to get some work done, no matter how little, every day. I really don’t want to have to delay the game’s release at all but also I think (or rather hope) that people will understand and be sympathetic as long as I maintain good communication with them, which heretofore I feel I’ve done decently well.
In any case, it’s best not to think about these things too much for now and just keep on keeping on. Not much use in trying to predict the future.
Finished cleaning up the general ambient audio, started working on the exterior of the outpost. The latter has gone surprisingly well; all of the major generic environmental work has been finished, I just have to build a few more unique assets, the biggest (in both the sense of the size, and the amount of work required) being the roof. I’m probably gonna dedicate most of the work tomorrow to getting that done. Once it’s finished I think I’ll be able to have a presentable #screenshotsaturday ready for the weekend.
Not much progress today, mostly just technical fixes and minor graphical updates across the board. I attempted to implement a new effect where water droplets appear on the camera when raining but the sample I used wasn’t that good so I’ll have to either find a new one or alternately just completely cut it. I went out earlier today to the reservation again to record new audio for the general ambience; it was rather cold but I think it was worth it because now I have a few hours of significantly cleaner audio with few birds, which I think will considerably amplify the sense of unease. Will probably continue working on audio tomorrow.
Nate, Jacob and I watched You Are the Apple of My Eye tonight. As always I had a very good time with them and they seemed to enjoy the film as well.
Took the day off today again, went to the diner with Julia this morning for lunch and then a little bit later in the afternoon, met with Staoue. We picked up some ice cream cake to celebrate the success of the Kickstarter and then went to the parking deck at the IKEA, where we sparred for a few hours. It was nice seeing my friends again. Tomorrow I’m getting back to work – most likely on finishing the major outpost sequences.
Woke at 1640 today; the sky was already beginning to dim when I opened my curtains. I experienced a number of strange and vaguely feverish dreams last night which left me feeling very disoriented when I awoke. I decided to take the rest of the day – or, well, what remained of it anyways – off, and went out for about an hour around evening to pick up some more Guinness and go for a walk.
It was the first time I went out for an extended period of time in several weeks. The air was cool and pleasant and I started feeling a bit better about things. At the Rite-Aid I met a girl while waiting in line. Her name was Marisol, and we talked for a bit afterwards about random things, various bits and pieces of our lives, before parting ways. She seemed like a nice person, and she was pretty in a kinda nondescript manner. Both of those things made me feel pretty anxious at first, but then just sad.
In any case, it was a lot less intriguing and romantic than it probably sounds. I think she just started talking to me because she was bored on a Saturday night; and I had made the strange and potentially reckless decision to offer to pay for her cigarettes after I watched her card get declined once, twice in a row. I don’t know why I did it. It was a very instinctual motion that happened before I even really consciously registered what was going on. The truth is it made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be there. I felt I needed to do something or else I’d be there for a very long time, or else the situation would never end.
But regardless, the whole encounter just left me feeling kinda uncertain in a very broad, maybe existential sense. I didn’t know how to really process her presence on a very fundamental level. I don’t know if it was just because it was such a strange and unexpected series of interactions or if there was something about her in particular or something wrong with me but whatever it was it left me feeling somewhat sad, in the sense of a kind of acute weariness or maybe melancholy. Maybe it’s because the unexpected success of the Kickstarter has had such a profound effect upon my thoughts lately, in reorienting them towards some vague idea of the future. I dunno.
January’s now over. Stayed up until 0600 in a nearly incoherent state working on the postmortem for the Kickstarter, which I’ll probably read through tomorrow (or, well, later today, that is) and end up completely regretting in its entirety – after which, of course, it will already have been too late. Well, I have nothing more to say about this.
