Worked a bit on the UI for the observatory, and got the foundations of the XMIT/RECV framework set up. Didn’t get much done today though otherwise: there was heavy rain all day and it left me in a tired, but not altogether unpleasant mood. If this persists tomorrow I think I’m gonna take the day off from in-engine work and just focus on writing the scene descriptions: the framework is there so it’s just a matter of filling it in once those get written.
Almost forgot to make today’s entry… Finished up the entirety of the layout of the observatory, including doors, which have dynamic casters. I’m still not particularly satisfied with the final presentation of the doors – I think they’re a little bit too inconspicuous right now, especially with the post-processing on, so I’m gonna spend some time tomorrow trying to figure out a way to make them more distinct. Other than that, the two biggest things left to do are to build a more unique UI framework for interaction text – I have some ideas already that I think will end up looking pretty good – and to write and place all the item descriptions for each piece of furniture. I’m thinking that, since everything’s so abstract anyways, I’m gonna double-down on the scenery and item descriptions. I’ll probably start writing those tomorrow in tandem with the UI work.
Finally finished placing all the casters in the observatory. All that’s left now is to properly map out the collision masking, which shouldn’t take long – then the layout of the observatory will be completely finished. I’m thinking about adding a basement level as well, but we’ll see. In reality, the only thing down there would be storage for astronomical instruments mostly. I’ll have to figure it out pretty soon though.
No work today. Shortly after I woke Sawyer came over to celebrate my birthday and we spent a few hours at the lake working through a bottle of Southern Comfort and some fried chicken. I’ve been talking a lot about God these days with my friends for some reason. I don’t know why it’s been on my mind so much lately. Back to work tomorrow.
Added audio for the sonar pings, as well as a rudimentary HUD (it’s basically just the normal satellite HUD right now, but I’m gonna work on refining it a bit more moving forward). I think I’ve basically finished up the effect as best as I can for right now. I still need to finish up the collision mask and place all the necessary casters but that’s only about a day’s worth of work; after which I can start working on the event system for it. The nice thing about this segment is that it’s self-contained, meaning as soon as I’m done with it, I’m done with it altogether and won’t have to revisit it again. Hopefully I can finish it by next week, maybe even the end of the weekend if I’m lucky…
Another birthday come and go. I wish I could say I did something special, or experienced some kind of revelation of sorts, but it just passed like any other day, to be honest. Just another day in my life. Every year I feel the same kind of sadness, only each time it feels a little more acute than the year before. I guess that’s just the nature of these things. They accumulate silently, until one day you just discover it’s all too much, all at once. I had a call tonight with some old friends from school. It was good hearing from them again, and in a few weeks, they plan on coming over to visit. I’m looking forward to seeing them.
I spent the afternoon working on some more visual effects for the observatory. I got the pulse looking basically how I want it to look I think, although I still have to figure out whether I want the FoV effect enabled or not. I think it definitely achieves the level of abstraction I want, but I’m also wary about it making the space a bit too abstract, to the point of illegibility. I’m gonna continue working with it. I hope I can reach a suitable resolution by the end of the weekend.
Spent the evening driving around and talking with Haolun. We talked for a real long time. Earlier today I decided to pursue a new direction with the observatory interior after struggling for way too long with the wretched curve of the dome’s wall. I’ve decided to commit full-force to the top-down perspective. It’s saved me a tremendous amount of time and work and is also pretty interesting in its own way, which works well with the intended mood I’d like to convey. I’m gonna have to build new visual effects for it – basically, a sonar pulse that gradually reveals outlines of surfaces and objects temporarily, and a tracking interface – but I don’t think they’ll be too difficult and I’m honestly pretty excited to work on them. I think the end effect will look pretty good. Here’s hoping…
Yet another day of work on the observatory. Rearranged the exterior a bit to accommodate some adjustments in the interior layout. The dome is easily the most painful part of the process and for a good few hours today I genuinely considered just rebuilding this entire section in a top-down perspective because I was struggling so greatly not only to build but even just visualise how all the walls fit together. I ended up disabling the FoV system in the observatory because it was getting too difficult to work with; I might still end up re-enabling it later on as the casters are still present, meaning the advanced lighting system will work by default with it which is basically the same kind of effect.
Work’s been real slow lately as a direct result of my utter ineptitude at visualising 3D space, and it’s been quite testing on my patience, to put it gently. If I can get this shit finished though by the end of the week the actual furniture should be smooth sailing. Fingers crossed.
Nothing exciting, just continued working on the interior of the observatory. Finished up all the shadow and collision masking for the exterior walls today, started setting up the interior as well for work tomorrow. Slow but steady progress.
I felt a bit better today than I did yesterday.
Turns out it probably wasn’t a cold after all, just my body adjusting to the temperature. Nevertheless, I still have a bit of a runny nose at times, and I felt tired all throughout the day again. I got a bit of work done on the observatory, beginning to lay down the interior walls: I think it’ll be simultaneously more and less involved than I’d initially anticipated somehow. I think I’ve finalised the interior layout so at this point it’s just a matter of getting the colliders – and of greater concern, the casters – in the right places. I hope I can finish the observatory by the end of next week… at least visuals. It’ll be a huge boost for morale once that’s out of the way.
Woke up today and felt like shit, got nothing done. Had a runny nose when I woke – I must’ve left the bathroom window open last night, it dipped down real cold and I didn’t sleep too well. I hope it’s nothing serious. Gonna rest early tonight and try to recoup some energy for tomorrow.
Not that much progress today. Cleaned up the lighting (especially when toggling between the two systems), and improved the appearance of shadows to allow the fronts of buildings to be illuminated. I also started working on the interior of the observatory again, and set up the walls. I’m gonna continue working on it tomorrow, and make a full checklist of the things I specifically need to get done for the release gameplay. Even though I feel I have a pretty good idea of what needs to get done in my head, getting it down on paper will solidify it and give me something concrete to work towards in the weeks ahead. A September release date for it is completely unfeasible at this point, but I think mid-October might still be possible if I really commit to my work moving forward.
Stumbled upon an annoying bug with the lighting system where objects with z-depth (ie those Avery can pass under and over depending on her position) would always draw over the gradient, resulting in some pretty awful consistencies that ended up being too frustrating to deal with due to the way I built the depth-sorting (next project, remember to use a custom z variable instead of the built-in y…).
I solved this by adding an option in the options menu to toggle between gradient-based and 1-bit dithered lighting. I’ll have to test how the gradient-based lighting works in a variety of other settings but right now it seems to be working okay in the rooms I’ve tested it in so far.
I’ve also added in a keyboard shortcut (currently bound to F1) that allows the player to fast-toggle all of the post-processing effects on and off. While testing it I realised that I haven’t seen the game in its original state, without any post-processing, in a very long time: it almost looks and feels like a different game in some ways. It was just interesting to observe.
Yet another day with basically no progress whatsoever. These past few days I’ve really just been kinda adrift; although I know exactly what I need to do and even how to do it, I just can’t find the energy to actually do much of anything. My ability to focus feels completely frayed and my sense of time has gotten a lot looser: somehow September is already halfway over and I’ve yet to achieve anywhere close to the progress I’d hoped to accomplish by the end of this month. I’m gonna try to set things straight tomorrow, but we’ll see how it goes…
Spent the entirety of yesterday procrastinating uselessly for no good reason, so I wasn’t able to finish this month’s update in time for publication today. I somehow ended up playing Modern Warfare for nearly five hours straight without even consciously wanting to, and I even forgot to record yesterday’s entry because of that. Well, in any case, I was consequently forced to spend the rest of the day finishing it up in turn, and as a result I’m now pretty exhausted. There’s probably more to say about it but I’m too tired now to come up with anything else so I’ll just leave it at that for now.
Ended up taking today off as well, for reasons I can’t quite remember. Didn’t even open GameMaker today; I must’ve been real tired. In any case, tomorrow I’m gonna have to do the write-up for this month’s update, which I think will focus more on story/lore stuff. I haven’t really thought about what exactly that actually will entail beyond that, but I suppose I have the better part of the day to figure it out… I’ve been getting stuck as of late on this lighting question – which is to say, whether I should bother spending the time and effort to implement the more complex lighting system or not – and I feel it’s begun to drag down my motivation. I think I’m just gonna move on from it for now, and redirect my attention back to developing the observatory.
Took the day off, spent the afternoon at the lake with Sawyer. The weather was very pleasant today. I had initially planned to work at night but I was pretty tired by the time evening came around and ended up falling asleep for some time. I looked briefly at an open-source lighting system earlier today which I’m thinking of implementing as a replacement for the current lighting system, which is a bit convoluted in terms of how it actually works. The problem with the potential replacement though is that it’s pretty heavy in terms of the number of things I need to import, which will be annoying when it comes time. I’ll think about it more tomorrow while I finish setting up the interior of the observatory.
Spent the entire day reworking the way the lighting works, with the goal of improving the overall texture and feeling of night-time environments. I started by creating three separate light layers – previously, there was only one, which was essentially just an overlay, which made the effect look cheaper – separated by artificial height: the lowest for light cast upon the ground, the middle for light cast upon objects, and the highest as a general masking overlay effectively identical to the previous implementation. There’s a bit more depth now to the shadows, although it still needs a good amount of work, especially with objects (ideally I’d like for objects in the foreground to be completely blackened out until Avery passes in front of them).
I think I’m gonna continue working on it for one more day at the most. The current implementation is not great, but I think it’ll work well enough for its intent, which is to create a constant sense of uneasiness and disorientation for the player, and to make night-time traversal difficult (to encourage players to take shelter).
Started working on the interior a bit earlier today but got distracted with an interesting new visual effect I discovered while messing around with the shader stack, trying to see if I could implement a slight chromatic fringe. I’ll have to experiment with it more tomorrow but I spent the afternoon setting up the technical foundation, which should be ready to go tomorrow: now it’s just a matter of figuring out how I want it to look and work with the existing systems.
Finally got back to working in-engine. I implemented the exterior of the outpost, including foliage in every room except one (still have to figure out how to handle the transition from the road to the standard ground). This involved reordering the rooms a bit: I had to shift the entire region of the observatory down two cells to make it conform to the dimensions of the map, which I’m beginning to realise more and more is becoming something of a handicap rather than an aid.
I also created the transition door for large interiors, which functions more or less identically to the teleporter object, just with an added interaction prompt first. As part of this, I sped up the fade-in/out effect when moving between rooms by 200%; it feels a good deal smoother now, which is both good and not-so-good depending on what I’m going for with the final feel of the game. I’m gonna stick with it a bit and see how I feel moving forward. The interior space – which I’ve decided for now is going to be one single continuous space, about 720×720 or so – is completely unplanned right now but the transition definitely works and, as far as I can tell, the dither pans smoothly with the camera, which was the major issue before that prevented me from creating rooms larger than 480×480. I’m gonna start working on the interior layout tomorrow and see if I can get all the walls done by then. Windows are gonna be tricky because of the altered world space but I suppose we’ll get to that when we get to it…
Finished the exterior of the observatory today. It could still probably use a few cosmetic touch-ups here and there – a bit more weathering on the roof in particular – but the overall structure is now complete and ready to be placed in-game. I’ve decided to only include one of the telescope domes instead of all three; although I think I’m gonna add in an array of radio telescopes instead along the upper roof (which would also help disrupt the otherwise continuous texture a bit).
I woke this morning from a beautiful dream. It was the rare kind of dream that, even though I longed to remain in it, I didn’t regret leaving it either. I saw all my old friends again. It was the last school trip we all went on together. When I woke I felt much better in general, at least for a little while.
I spent the day working on the exterior of the observatory. I made good progress today, although there’s still a bit of a ways to go on the second side of the building. I realised just now in writing that that the temporal scale of the game is pretty off when it comes to the spatial scaling of building, and particularly interiors. I think tomorrow I’ll spend some time adding a modifier that slightly slows down the passage of time when in large or windowless interiors (so ones that are separate world spaces, most likely; and the outpost).
I also spent about an hour this afternoon cleaning out my phone, deleting a bunch of stuff and uninstalling a lot of apps I haven’t used in a while. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect at work but it actually does feel a bit more lightweight now, like it runs just a little cleaner. Even if it didn’t result in any actual technical improvements though, I still feel it was a good idea overall.
I was beset all day by an unusual lethargy which made it difficult to concentrate for even short periods of time. However, I managed to finally get at least one thing done: I drew up the base for the road outside of the observatory. I’m gonna try to finish up the exterior of the area tomorrow so I can start laying the blueprints for the building itself. It’s definitely one of the more involved pieces of work but the work is fairly straightforward and doesn’t really require any strenuous mental labour: I just have to put the pieces in the right places. I’m hoping it’ll help to provide a reliable and stable structure for me to gradually ease back into a normal workday over the next week.
No work today either. Didn’t sleep at all last night so I spent the entire day in a state of dissociative haze. I honestly can’t even remember anything I did today, that’s how bad it was. In the evening though Staoue came over and we sparred for a bit at the lake, before getting fried chicken and spending some time at the IKEA, where I did a reading for him. It was a good time, and a much-needed diversion from the ennui that’s been settling over my life as of late. I also feel tired enough to actually get some proper rest tonight. I hope that this has given me the energy I need to begin again tomorrow.
Still no meaningful work, but I think I’m making progress in overcoming this lull. I managed to stay focused and think about work for about two hours this evening, going over logistics for the thought system and looking through potential references for the final visual layout. I hope that by tomorrow I’ll be ready to start sketching it out – at the very least as a formal blueprint, if not in-engine.
Didn’t work much at all in-engine today either. I implemented a very basic save system for doors to check if they were un/locked but failed to actually implement the system for picking up and saving keys, which I deliberately thought about and chose not to do for no good reason. I’d like to be able to say that I worked instead on the writing a bunch but unless pacing around my room for several hours struggling to figure out whether I want to create a full animated cutscene (and commit myself in the future to making more cutscenes) just so I don’t have to redo a few dozen frames in the rappelling animation counts as working, I didn’t do anything of worth either. I’ve gotta get something done at least this week for Saturday…
No work today. I took a sleeping pill late last night because I was having trouble sleeping and I ended up sleeping for way too long, and it completely threw my sense of things off. I think in general I’m starting to enter a slightly mild state of depression. It’s not too bad right now but I definitely feel the onset. It’s difficult to concentrate on anything or find the motivation to get started when I wake up, and it feels like I haven’t done anything these past few weeks in my own time except think about how I’m not getting work done. I took the day off because I felt too tired today but hopefully I can get a bit of work done tomorrow to make up for the deficit.
Last night I had a rather vivid and unsettling dream in which I got into a physical altercation with a woman whom I didn’t recognise but who claimed I’d stolen something from her, and ended up accidentally killing her in the process after hitting her in the head several times with a drilling hammer. I found myself in a place that resembled my house, except it was dimly lit and the hallways seemed to go on forever, leading to rooms that I didn’t recognise. Everywhere I went I was confronted with people from my life – old friends, current ones, acquaintances, authorities, even some strangers I must’ve seen at some point in passing – who each showed me some wretched, shameful thing I’ve did. There were so many of them that no matter which direction I turned I saw at least one of them, although the house appeared empty if I didn’t fix my gaze. I couldn’t find a way out even when I found myself at the front door; when I looked out the windows, the sky was overcast and the clouds seemed to move by at unnatural speeds. I was certain that if even if I had been able to escape I would’ve found that the other houses were just two-dimensional facades, and that at the end of my street was the end of the world. I’ve had this dream many times before throughout my life, from as early as when I was in middle school even. I don’t know why I’m having it again now. There was no escape from that horrible grey place. The simultaneous claustrophobia and emptiness of it all.
I worked today on a new structure to the north. I was able to successfully finish the exterior elements, at least of the structure itself, although the surrounding flora still could probably use some more work. That entire section of the map is a mess right now in terms of the order and placement of rooms; I really need to figure out the organisation soon and get it together. I’d like to be done with that entire half of the map by the end of this month – and hopefully with the relevant plot stuff as well by mid-October at latest. We’ll see about that though…
Tomorrow’s September… which, even though technically I suppose it’s not so, means for all other intents and purposes that summer is over, and autumn has begun. It certainly feels that way in the weather, which has gotten cool enough that the days are now consistently bearable, and the nights even a bit cold. When I was younger, even just a few years ago, every month and year’s passage felt so profound, like a chance to start anew, although I rarely ever did. Around this time I would’ve been going back to school, which was always a bit of an ambivalent event in my life; but at least it was there, you know, as a way of understanding my progress. Now though there’s no more external structure. No more meaningful units to demarcate the moments of my life, good or bad or really just nothing at all: to prevent all the days and nights from just slipping into one another. I’ve never been more simultaneously oblivious to the coming and going of seasons; and yet also acutely, painfully aware of their passage. I never realise it until it’s too late – and by that point, all that’s really left for me is a sense of emptiness, and nostalgia.
Sawyer came over today and we celebrated his birthday together at the lake. I had some tteokbokki and fried chicken delivered beforehand, and we ate it with soju and Asahi. The weather was exceedingly pleasant – cool and dry, with a slight breeze – and the sky was bright and filled with light. It was by all means as close as one probably gets to a perfect day, barring any extraordinary miracles or circumstances. And yet I also can’t help but feel a sense of sombreness as well for some reason: a tinge of sadness, in many ways probably tied to the changing of the seasons. I have the feeling that this winter will be particularly hard, although I hope I’m wrong. I don’t know why these kinds of things make me feel like this, although as long as I can remember, they always have. I really do wish I was more of an optimist by nature.
