Month: August 2020

Didn’t get much of anything done today, to be honest. I stayed up till almost sunrise last night for no good reason and ended up waking up at almost 1500. My brother left early this morning to move in with his friend, and I didn’t get the chance to say anything to him. It’ll be another three months or so before he returns, by which time it’ll be winter, and the end of yet another year. Well, it’s not like I would’ve known what to say to him anyways even if I had the chance. We don’t talk often and our lives are just too different.

The weather was very pleasant today and I spent most of the afternoon outside just walking around and looking at the sky. I felt a bit sad, but I don’t know why, nor can I even really describe what it was that I felt sad about. I tried to get some writing done, and actually did surprisingly, but it was way too little to feel like anything even close to meaningful. I don’t know why things are moving this slowly. The work itself is not even particularly difficult. It feels like it’s me who’s moving through time at a glacial pace. Like I’m just floating, without current.

Spent most of the day working on developing story stuff, and writing the copy for the objectives. It’s not really particularly exciting work, and I can’t talk about it much further beyond that: although the progress is going about as well as I can really fairly hope, I guess. I talk about this a lot already but it’s hard to feel like I’m making progress when I’m not working on the game directly within GameMaker. It’s definitely the wrong attitude to have, I just gotta keep on working at setting it straight, not much else I really can do…

Another hot and mildly unproductive day. I did manage to do the bare minimum by getting the foundation for the meditation set up – basically, just adding the interaction prompt for it, and having the sprites slide in and out of view accordingly once it’s created – but the rest of the day just kinda evaporated and I don’t really know why or how it slipped away like that. I spent a decent amount of time this afternoon messing around with colour palettes on an image I randomly decided to draw and the results look pretty nice, but ultimately it was a pretty pointless exercise and I can’t do anything really concrete with the results. That’s really the best way to summarise how I feel about most of my efforts these days – a whole lot of work, towards very little concrete achievements. I guess it’s better than doing nothing. But the fact that that’s the general standard now is already a problem of its own.

Woke up around 0800 this morning to discover it was dark and raining, decided to fall back asleep again for an hour or so only to wake up almost six hours later, around 1400. I have no idea what happened, but it completely threw me off for the rest of the day… I just fucked around with my websites a bit, performing optimisations and the like. One of the more immediately obvious changes was that I switched over the fonts on both the main site, and this Tumblr blog: the former to a more generic monospace (Inconsolata did not end up making that much of a difference in feeling, there’s no need to call an entire font library for such a marginal difference), and the latter to a much more legible Arial/sans-serif. In the back-end, I condensed all the CSS calls for the former to a single shared master stylesheet (the rest is handled with inline calls), which saves a handful of kilobytes; and for the latter, I substantially cleaned up the HTML theme file by getting rid of a lot of unnecessary features I’ll never use. 

While I didn’t necessarily waste the day per se on completely unproductive activities, I still feel a bit frustrated that I couldn’t get much of anything done on the game as well. I know it’s not healthy to think this way probably, but there’s also no avoiding the fact that is the exact kind of thing that’s stifled my progress so significantly all this time. I really don’t know how to address it beyond the ways I’m already doing so. I hope I’m able to work again tomorrow.

Spent the morning tuning various stat ticks. I’m pretty satisfied with where all of them are now as is: the next major tuning will probably take place after the first playtest (which I tentatively hope to get done by the end of September). I also fixed a minor glitch with the lighting system that incorrectly drew over certain ground surfaces in room without a parallax layer present.

I spent the rest of the day working on a draft of the objectives system, which I think I’ve basically finalised now. A new option will be added to the actions menu (I haven’t figured out the exact name yet but it’ll probably be something like “Review thoughts” or something), which will put Avery into a special resting state. Once she’s in the state, the player will be able to select different parts of her body – right now, I’ve got her head for high-level thoughts such as objectives, her stomach for hunger/thirst/excretion, her heart for fatigue, and no selection for general willpower – in order to “examine” certain thoughts in closer detail. These thoughts will then float around (I haven’t settled upon a final presentation yet), and the player can click on them to reveal even further details if applicable. For example, when reviewing high-level objectives, she’ll be presented first with the general topic (eg “signal”), which will then expand into several sub-thoughts (in this case, indicating the next available action in that subplot). The presentation of the thoughts changes based on their urgency, and unattended ones (for example, if the player fails to complete certain objectives from the previous day) will accumulate.

I’m pretty excited to see it come into form, and I’ve already gotten the sprites drawn out tonight. The actual technical implementation, at least for the UI, should be pretty straightforward; the backend’s gonna be a little more complicated but I think I’ll wait a bit until I’ve developed at least one full subplot before starting work on it proper, just so I can have a general structure. Working on the outline has also really helped me develop a very concrete sense of the moment-to-moment narrative structure, and has solidified my upcoming work substantially.

Not as much work done today as yesterday, but still acceptable progress. I ended up reverting the save-on-exit feature that I implemented late last night: it effectively renders the actual “proper” save system redundant, and I feel that in that form, it’s too easy to either abuse (which I’m not too worried about, what the player does with their own game is their own problem), but more importantly, it diminishes the intended effect of the proper save system unintentionally even for players who don’t wish to exploit it. My workaround for right now is to allow the player to perform a temporary quicksave using the developer console (maybe I’ll add in a keyboard shortcut for this as well eventually), which will be deleted the next time the game starts. I’ll include a write-up for this in the manual, as well as a warning to players that it is not the intended way of saving the game, and is only meant to really be used for inconvenient circumstances.

Tomorrow I’m gonna start working on the mind-map mechanic I mentioned yesterday. I spent a while thinking about it and how I want to approach it and I’m pretty confident now that it’s the right way to go.

Met with Haolun tonight. We drove around and ate fried chicken with pickled radishes. 

Anyways, today was a productive day. Finished up the first section of stream, terminating in the drainage pool; and implemented a number of general systemic changes, including slight adjustments to various ticks (particularly fatigue and willpower. I also cleaned up the rain audio a bit; for some reason, previously, I had implemented the fade-in/out directly into the audio track itself, which led to inconsistent results in-game as the looping did not work properly (the audio would fade-in and fade-out before looping). 

Lastly, I conducted the first full test for all the systemic ticks, including measuring the equivalence between in-game and real-world time. One full in-game day (encompassing a full 24 hours), takes about seventy minutes of real-time. I’d still like to adjust some of the tick rates a bit – especially for hunger and thirst, which depreciate pretty quickly – but overall I’m pretty satisfied (and remarkably surprised honestly, given how little actual testing I did beyond the spreadsheet calculations) with the rate of progression for the stats across the board, including stuff like daylight and weather transitions. 

Overall it’s gotten me thinking about how I’m handling the presentation of various needs again, and I’m once again reconsidering building a mind-map-esque approach to Avery’s various needs, desires, and objectives, similar to how Pathologic 2 handles it. I think I’m gonna start experimenting with it tomorrow so hopefully I’ll have a rough draft by the end of the week; but basically, I think it’ll be a unique state Avery can enter while she’s resting (either in the world or in a static location such as the outpost/at a campsite) with its own animation and UI, somewhat similar to meditation of sorts.

Also

adjusted some of the weather states to reflect more diverse atmospheric possibilities; and implemented a fast temp save on exit, which quickly saves the game should the application suddenly or unexpectedly close (also works for normal exits). A more elegant implementation would probably involve creating a new temporary save file specifically to handle these kinds of cases, which is then deleted upon game start. I don’t know if I can be bothered to do that, though.

Just another day like any other. More environmental work: the first of the streams is almost done. If I’m able to wrap up the last two rooms tomorrow, I’ll be ahead of my schedule – at least for this week – which would be a pleasant turn of events. I’ve been feeling terribly lethargic lately, and it’s gotten hot again during the days for some reason. I’ve been waking up later and later, even though I go to bed relatively early every night. Some days, when I’m just lying there looking up at the ceiling, I get the feeling as if suddenly everyone else in the world has just disappeared and I’m the only one left.

I finished Crash Landing On You last night (or earlier this morning I suppose), and it’s left me feeling in a rather strange mood overall, somewhere between the warmth of happiness and the floating sensation of sudden loss. I had a really good time with it but now I feel like I’m adrift, or more so than I was before, at least. It’s reminded me a lot of my life when I was younger, all the love that filled me back then, for all things. I recognise now in retrospect that it was just the thrill of youth, and that the feelings would not, probably could not endure the casual cruelty of the “real world”, as they said. But it felt so real at the time and although I also remember all the stupid, painfully horrible things I said and did as well, at least back then I still believed in the potential of the brightness within me, the fantasy of something better than me, someone greater than I could endure. Now I don’t even have that for consolation. I think I’ve let myself grow too cynical. I think I’ve hardened my heart too much to the world, to myself. I don’t know how to return, if I’m even able to at all at this point.

Nothing special to report, just the usual. It’s been getting hotter again, and I can feel my concentration starting to slip earlier in the day. I’m lucky if I can get three hours of decent work in these days.

Spent the day working on more environments, as usual. Today’s progress was acceptable, although I only got two cells done. Fortunately, there’s only a couple more left; hopefully I can get this area done by next week, so I can finally move on. The next major difficult sections are gonna be the bridge – which is only one or two cells at most thankfully – and the visitor centre, which will not be easy, to put it lightly. 

Was gonna spend today building new rooms but instead I got sidetracked a bit by some visual effects, and ended up working on those for most of the day. The most time-consuming one involved implementing variable z-depth to certain structures such as bridges and platforms, which Avery can pass both beneath, and over: it doesn’t seem like a particularly challenging issue until you really try to work through it. I thought I’d have to make some pretty extensive changes to the way the depth-sorting works overall – which would have been a monumental task, essentially needing to restructure it to include a third dimension (right now it’s only sorted by the y); but I actually ended up at arriving a solution much faster than I thought, to my surprise. The final solution is actually even quite elegant I think, and is pretty easy to implement in a modular fashion, requiring only a handful of sprites and a single child object.

I also overhauled the water effects a bit, to allow water to appear more seamless beneath large ground tiles. The results are rather impressive and I’m pleased with how much easier it’ll be moving forward to work with bodies of water with more complex shores such as ponds and lakes; as well as smaller features such as puddles. Today’s the first day in over a week now that I’ve felt satisfied with my progress.

Spent the entire day working on assets for new rooms, and although I’ve assembled them, I’ve begun to feel increasingly disappointed with what I feel to be the lacklustre structure of the world at large. A large part of this feeling I imagine is certainly due to the general lack of interactive mechanics, which is something that hopefully can be remedied moving forward: but I also feel like more broadly, the world seems to lack cohesion or purpose of some sort, so that even just the act of wandering no longer feels remarkable. This is a huge problem, for obvious reasons: and while I want to give myself a bit more time to parse it, it’s definitely a matter of concern now.

I can’t really remember what I did today to be honest, which I guess means I didn’t really do anything of worth. The GMS2.3 update went live in stable release today and for four hours this morning after waking I struggled to update the project to it, ultimately to no avail. I think after that I must have just been so frustrated that I wasted away the rest of the day out of spite. I’ve been feeling a whole lot of that these days. It comes and goes in waves. Surges of hatred. I wish I wasn’t this way, you know. But for as long as I can remember… Maybe I should look into counselling again. Just the thought of dealing with all the paperwork though makes it basically unfeasible in practice. I suppose you already know all this though.

Worked for a short while this morning, once again touching up the areas around the stream. I think they’re more or less at their final versions now, all the audio masks and collisions as far as I’m aware have been implemented. Just gotta figure out the textures for the stonework on the bridge and mess around a bit with the collision, and it’ll be good to go. Coming up with new environments, especially around the border, is easily the hardest and most time- and energy-draining aspect of development, without a doubt. Well, it’s too late to turn back now. 

Another pretty low-energy day. It was unusually cold today – like autumn – and overcast. I woke in a sombre but not altogether unpleasant mood, apropos to the sky. Got a bit of work done cleaning up some of the sections of the stream. I think I’ll spend this next week just working on environments.

Took the day off from work proper, just worked on and published this month’s write-up. I spent the rest of the day reading and engaging in contemplation; and played some games with friends in the afternoon and evening. The anger which has been clouding my mind these past several days has subsided enough to the point where I feel I’m once again able to see, if not clearly, then at least not so dimly. Now I’m just tired…

Felt even worse today for some reason: just a constant fugue of anger and frustration, and the sensation of imminent wrath. I spent most of the day just lying in bed too exhausted to even sit upright, staring at the ceiling and coming up with a hundred different ways to get back at all those sons of bitches who told me when I was younger – that are still probably convinced to this day – that I was doomed to failure, that I was beyond their help, that I deserved no good and would have no future. Most of all though I’ve just been angry at myself, all the stupid, wretched things I did for reasons I can no longer even remember. Why is it always these moments that come back to you one by one? What about all the good I’ve done? Why can’t I ever seem to remember any of that?

When I was sixteen or seventeen, after my third suspension or so, the vice principal of my high school told my mother – who then, in a moment of supposed concern which was really just thinly-veiled spite, told me – that if I continued acting the way I was acting, my future would be bleak: the world would crush me. I dunno, maybe he didn’t say that second part. Maybe that was my father. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter. I realise now that they were right. They were right because the world is not a good place, it is not a kind place; but a mean and vicious one where people like them float to the top, where people like them write the rules and set the guidelines and expectations and philosophies for how everyone else should live. Where otherwise decent people become cynical and cruel in their desperation to just survive, to bring home a few more dollars to save up for a room with a slightly better view. 

Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. We are told to trust in the judgement and grace of God, to forgive the transgressions of others against us as we hope God will forgive ours against others. In that sense, violence is its own kind of cynicism, its own kind of desperate selfishness. That recognition alone is the only thing that really keeps me some days from just letting myself slip. I wish I was a better person, someone with a calmer soul, a greater sense of compassion and a greater capacity for forgiveness. But I’m just another wretched son of a bitch in a world full of wretched sons of bitches. Only God forgives. So be it.

Anyways, I just continued working on the foraging system today during the moments I was able to focus for a bit. I implemented the sprites for the plants/fungi and adjusted the statistical algorithm which determines distribution of resources and conditional probabilities for picking up various ingredients. It still needs some work with the tuning – I really managed to come up with a pretty convoluted system – but the comforting thing is that at least it seems to work. 

Another slow day. Woke up around noon for no reason – I even went to bed fairly early last night – and still felt exhausted for a while. All throughout the day this steady tide of anger and spite just ebbed beneath the surface of everything. I felt overwhelmed by the desire to really hurt someone just because they had something I don’t, to beat them down and drag them to my level. Days like these are the worst. 

Anyways, I spent nearly eight hours just working on these sprites for the foraged plants/fungi, and my inefficiency just pissed me off even more. I did another reading for someone tonight though and hearing from her that it helped her a lot and that it was able to provide her with some clarity made me feel a bit better about things, about myself. 

Every day is just a constant uphill battle against what seems like an impossibly overwhelming cynicism, and the concomitant temptations of viciousness and violence. The only things that really manage to keep it back, however little at a time, are the moments in which I realise I actually can still help someone else. That I’m not yet completely obsolete.

Spent the day working on new sprites for foraged plants/fungi, just have a few more left to go before all of them are finished, after which all that’s left is implementing them. Otherwise, my progress today was slow at best; although Julia and Vikram visited for the first time in a long while this evening, and I had a good time with them. It’s always nice to see my friends after a long while. 

Another alarmingly hot day. I felt exhausted throughout most of it and almost fell asleep a few times, although I managed to catch myself at just the right moment. Despite that, though, I managed to put in a decent amount of work regardless.

As I said yesterday, I managed to fully implement the visuals for foraging, at least for all insects currently. I haven’t yet started on the plant matter but the only thing that really needs to get done on that front are the individual sprites for each ingredient, which shouldn’t take too long.

I also started integrating a verlet physics solution to handle stuff like cloth. While it isn’t significant in any manner I do think it’ll add a bit to the presentation overall once I figure out how it works and get it set up properly. Of course, the success of it is largely contingent upon that latter condition, which, at this point, is not looking so feasible… I’ll give it a few more days though before drawing any hard conclusions.

Lastly, I’ve implemented a few general QoL fixes such as dynamic resizing of the letterbox depending on the length of the status text, and updating the position of the status text relative to the height of the letterbox rather than at at a fixed position.

It got very hot again today. I drank a bunch of Rolling Rocks real fast this afternoon and ate almost an entire full bag of Cool Ranch Doritos along with it and to be honest, I don’t feel so good right now. Hopefully it’ll pass overnight…

The foundation for foraging – at least for insects currently – has been successfully implemented. Avery can now search for ingredients anywhere, either via a keyboard shortcut or through the action menu, and different locations/times of day will produce different material yields (including nothing). The UI for it right now is a bit stark but I’m currently working on drawing up unique sprites for each of the ingredients. It’s coming along quite nicely, better than I initially expected. I’m quite pleased with the result so far, and hope to be able to finish it within the next day or two.

Insubstantial progress today. I started working on the percentages for the foraging system but realised I didn’t have any wood log objects, so I set out to draw those, but must’ve gotten distracted along the way. Tomorrow I have to finish those sprites and hopefully get the rest of the percentages in so I can start properly testing it. Man, there’s so much work left to get done…

Minor work today: improved audio for undressing, fixed collision boxes for several items. I woke up incredibly tired today for some reason, as if I hadn’t slept properly, although I’m fairly certain I did. My ability to concentrate has been pretty poor all throughout the day, and I feel physically weak. 

Spent most of the work day today on an animation for getting into generic beds. Stupidly enough, the hardest part wasn’t actually figuring out the animation itself, but trying to work through the mechanical implications of how I wanted to handle generic beds without creating for myself a ridiculous amount of work. At first I wanted to have Avery spread out her sleeping bag over the mattress first, but then I realised that I’d have to create a separate animation just for that, as well as figure out what happens if she’s not carrying her pack, etc…. it was a real logistical pain so then I tried to justify why she’d be comfortable sleeping in someone else’s bed in an effectively abandoned location. 

After wasting about an hour trying to work through that I gave up on justifications and just ended up implementing the mechanic after all. Some stuff still needs to be touched up – namely, the audio, as well as a better transition into and out of her clothing – but it should otherwise be good to go, at least as far as the visuals and implementation are concerned.

Been out of power for the past two days because of a hurricane, and have been working primarily off of a rather limited generator and battery power, meaning I’ve only really been able to work three or four hours a day at best. The power company’s predicted that most people on their service will get power back by the 11th – which is next week – so it’ll be like this for a while unfortunately; but I think I’ve started to get used to it by now.

I’ve spent most of my time these past two days finishing up the exterior of the tower, and then cleaning up a bunch of collision and caster implementations, specifically for doors and walls. While the list of things I’ve accomplished since my last attempted post are too numerous, here are the most significant ones: 

+ Created a teleporter object (backend, not in-game) allowing the player to transition between unconventional spawn points and enter into unique world cells (for example, the upper part of the tower). 

+ Added a slight dithering effect to the occlusion effect when Avery passes behind doors; added the same occlusion effect for roofs as well.
+ Added keyboard shortcuts while in the system menu for opening menus (File, Info, Options) moue input. 

+ Fixed reflections on mirror. 

+ Created spatial limiter objects (ROOM_SCALE_W/H) that allow the traversable width and height of rooms to be manually taken into account during transitions, meaning that transitions in narrower spaces are now dependent upon the relative dimensions of the available walkable space rather than the raw dimensions of the entire room (most of which would otherwise be inaccessible, and shouldn’t be taken into account).

EDIT: The power’s now returned, shortly before 2100. Although I’m glad in some sense that I can now return to work, I felt immediately as the lights came on a kind of profound melancholy, like a small vacuum opened up somewhere inside me. The truth is that not only had I started to get used to it – not just the lack of power, but more so, the concomitant slowness and the deliberate sense of contemplation it forced – but I’d actually started to welcome it I think. For the first time in a long time, these past two days felt genuinely empty in a way that I haven’t felt in a very long time: not empty as in the sense of being devoid of meaning, like most days, but empty in the sense of feeling like a kind of receptacle, open to any possibility. The way I felt when I was younger, in high school: that time was wasting but that it was okay. 

It was rather cool when I awoke and I spent the entire morning until noon sitting outside and staring at the sky. Later, I worked on building the exterior elements for the northern tower. The exterior – which basically includes the walls, the roof, and the tower itself – are complete, although I still need to create the transition point, as well as touch up the visuals a bit. I should be able to take care of that pretty easily tomorrow; then it’s time to develop the interior furniture.

A hurricane is supposedly passing over the area tomorrow. I hope it’s able to abate, however temporarily it may be, this wretched heat that returns every day by noon and clings on until late into the night. While it’s certainly not as bad as it was just a week or so ago in terms of pure temperature, something about it feels somehow just as bad. Maybe it’s just my constant sense of physical exhaustion…

Set up the foundation for the north tower. I’ve decided that certain interior spaces are gonna be treated as separate world instances, meaning that there will be a visible transition in order to enter/exit them, and they will have their own unique rooms. It’s gonna involve way too much work to figure out all the depth sorting and collisions and whatnot for every interior in the game to have a seamless transition. While the effect certainly looks good, it’s just too much of a time sink at this point for an ultimately inconsequential feature, and I don’t think anyone will even notice anyways. I’m gonna start working on the interior tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be able to set up a relatively stable template moving forward. 

The first day of the month’s passed without incident. I decided to take the day off after struggling to find the energy to get anything done this morning. I just feel constantly tired all the time these days. It gets especially bad around noon, at the lowest point of the day. My head gets clouded by idle thoughts and longings, all these memories of the past… I feel simultaneously exhausted yet also restless, and it becomes nearly impossible to focus on anything, let alone work. 

Last day of the month. I’ve reached that point in development where active boredom hasn’t quite set in, but there’s also little excitement left, and all forward progress at this point just comes down to discipline and focus. Seeing as it’s the last day of the month yet I still have so much left to do, it’s safe to say that I’m not gonna hit my intended goalpost at this point. I should sit down one of these days and redraft the timeline proper…

Spent the day working on visual effects mostly, focusing on the colour palettes. I ended up taking a more conservative approach to the default choices but added in support for user-submitted custom palettes that can be easily customised and swapped in/out. It offers a surprising amount of versatility for a very little amount of work, either on my end or the player’s end. I’m pretty satisfied with the results.