Barely got in any work at all today. I woke at 1700 after being unable to wake up from a strange – but not altogether unpleasant – dream. It was already dark by the time I finally got out of bed. I attempted to start working but it was doomed from the start. I’m just gonna give up on this trailer for now and return to my normal schedule. I still technically have just under a week… but with the holiday coming up and my utter lack of imagination lately, I doubt anything will come to me soon. Disappointing, but expected, I suppose…
Watched Tenet tonight with Nate and Jacob. I liked it a lot. I wasn’t able to get any work done today though. I’ve been stuck on the second half of this trailer for several days now and it’s ground down whatever little momentum I had finally started to build up to a complete halt. If I’m not able to come up with anything tomorrow I think I’m just gonna stop working on it altogether for now and get back to my regular schedule. I’m wasting too much time grinding away at this without any progress.
Didn’t end up getting much done today unfortunately. I’m pretty stuck on the second half of the trailer, specifically the visuals. What few ideas I was able to come up with turned out to be much more difficult to actually create in practice. I struggled through many different assets this afternoon, none of which can ultimately be either used, or salvaged. The utter lack of progress combined with the high amount of wasted work has left me in a considerably worse mood, which doesn’t bode well for the immediate future. I can only hope that some kind of inspiration visits me between now and tomorrow when I start working again…
Didn’t get much done in terms of in-engine work today, but I made a good amount of progress on the trailer, which makes up for it. Depending on how progress goes on producing new assets for it – which honestly is the only thing I have left, I finished putting in all of the existing ones today – I might even be able to get it done by the end of this week, which will be pretty exciting.
Got my five new rooms done today, including at least one unique one. I also cleaned up the loose item descriptions in some of the Create events. Except for the character-based ones (ie examining beds adjusts to Avery’s fatigue level), all of the observation ones have been consolidated in a single script, which will make translations – amongst other things – much easier to deal with should that become an issue in the future.
Lastly, I spent some time working on audio. I manually cleaned out all the birdsong from the daytime forest ambience, so it feels a little bit more empty now. I also added a very low-frequency drone to the ambient audio sublayer. I’m not sure if it’ll have the intended effect… but I suppose that can only really be determined by playtesting. I’ll leave it in for now, and continue to experiment with it as I go about re-inspecting and readjusting the audio where necessary.
Although I started working on a few new rooms today, I got sidetracked a bit and instead ended up working mostly on UI stuff. I fixed a number of bugs, mostly involving mouse-tracking, with the system status bar, and then decided to improve the letterbox-less experience. It’s now fully functional – meaning all UI elements will dynamically appear and disappear contextually – and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.
I also added in a small QoL feature that displays a coloured highlight behind the mouse pointer, making it much more visible. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later lest it slips my mind, I have to add in a toggle for it in the options, which will unfortunately require me to rather substantially rebuild the framework for the options menu. Well, I suppose that’s what I reap for taking the easy way out all those months back.
Tomorrow I’ll get those rooms done for good. I’ve also been thinking about revisiting some of the audio, especially the general forest ambience, and touching it up a bit. While I’m not entirely dissatisfied with the way it sounds now, I do feel like it could be more interesting in terms of the layering. I’ll keep it in my mind in the days moving forward.
Missed yesterday’s entry for no particular reason. I wrote the final update for the year. It snowed all day yesterday, a very steady accumulation. The night was lovely in its stark stillness. Too bad it’s already started to melt.
After a bit of reflection, I’ve decided to commit myself to a new schedule over the next month. Starting from tomorrow, every day I’m going to produce a minimum of five rooms until I’m finished. At minimum, it’ll still take me over a month at that rate – closer to a month and a half, I suspect – to finish the rest of the map, but it’s certainly much better than the piss-poor rate of one room a week, if I’m lucky, that I’ve been “progressing” at lately.
Started working on this month’s update, which is to say, I sat in front of my computer for several hours and wrote barely three paragraphs. This month’s got an odd number of days so technically I’m still okay on the timing as long as I get it out by tomorrow, but honestly the problem is that I just don’t know what to write about, seeing as I accomplished so little this past month. I guess I can just talk about that a bit… as well as do a review of this year’s activity, and my plans moving forward into next year.
Slowly trying to get back to work. Rearranged a few rooms, and parented the generic forest cells beneath a single master room, which will make organisation much easier moving forward. I also removed the restriction preventing the player from leaving the world cell the backpack is dropped in; its position is now saved, meaning the player can potentially lose track of the pack entirely.
I feel like each day, I’m just drifting in and out of existence, slipping through and in between the pores of my memories. An old friend – well, maybe not even a friend, just someone who talked to me for a very brief moment a long time ago – reached out to me earlier tonight, on Tinder of all places. I wish I hadn’t talked to her. My heart’s become twisted with a wretched longing for a past that I’m deliberately misremembering. That horrible, wrenching fondness for people who are no longer here, who might as well not even exist anymore. I wonder if I were to go back and sift through the detritus of my life, if I could find the exact moment, that precise point at which a hairline fracture appeared and bloomed so quickly into this bitter, rotten metastasis. It’d do no use at this point except to confirm my paranoia. When I was young people told me all the time that I could be someone someday, that they were excited to see who I would become in the future. I let them all down, and most importantly, I, who believed in all those stupid things people said, let myself down. Not only did I not become someone, I became less than no one.
I talk a lot about the importance of sincerity when it comes to creating things, but the truth is, I don’t think I even live up to that myself. Or rather, I’ve come to realise, I believe, that the sincerity I practice is sincerity not towards a good thing – that is to say, perhaps, love – but rather, far more often towards spite, and envy. I’ve found that my creative urge manifests most directly and strongly in the moments of my most profound anger and bitterness; when I feel overwhelmed by my hatred for others, and myself.
Realising that is painful, and inconvenient. But what’s even more painful and inconvenient are all the moments – like now – when I feel that anger swell up within me, but there’s no release.
Didn’t work today. I was planning on it when I woke up… but I found myself paralysed somehow and ended up just grinding pointlessly through the afternoon for several hours on nothing, so I just gave up. I don’t know why it’s suddenly so difficult for me to work these days, especially when I know exactly what needs to get done. I always tell myself that hopefully tomorrow will be better, but it rarely ever pans out that way. I think my inspiration has just completely dried up… not only in terms of my work, but just in general. I feel utterly unmoored, and absent of guidance.
A bit of a change of pace today. Decided to start working on a new trailer, got Premiere downloaded and set up both the audio – much more straightforward this time around, very light custom edits – and what I believe will be the first few seconds of the opening shot. I still have a lot of structural work to do – as of right now, I have no idea how I’m gonna fill the next two minutes or so – but I’m optimistic that it’ll come to me soon. I hope that I’ll be able to finish up and have it ready in at most two weeks’ time. That’ll put me in a good position for release. If not, well…
Spent the afternoon retouching a few areas in the lower-left region, and working on new environmental assets. Not much else to report, just the same kind of work as usual.
No work these past two days, made the most likely questionable decision of instead grinding out nearly 80 tiers of the season pass for The Division 2 after realising this weekend that there were only three days left in the season. I can’t say I feel particularly proud or accomplished… but what’s done is done, I suppose. It’s time to get back to work for good tomorrow.
Not much work today, just fixed up the area around the stream a bit.
For whatever reason I was extremely exhausted last night – even more so than usual, somehow – and ended up passing out before I could make an entry. I made decent progress though between yesterday and today, completing a few more areas and in general developing a better sense of the world layout and additional points of interest. At this point the only thing I’m focusing on is just getting the map done as quickly as possible.
I also edited the palette swapper to accommodate a full 255-colour range, which significantly improves the appearance of gradient-based elements like water and fog, and renders the separate background layer in certain rooms obsolete, meaning palette_bg.png can be discarded. It’s a small change, but it still feels like meaningful progress.
A little bit better today. No hard progress, but I finally got around to the evaluation of the map and was able to finish inventory on the remaining world spaces. I’m not gonna go too much into it right now – both because I’ve yet to fully work out a plan moving forward, and also because the conclusions were rather bleak – but it’s given me a much better idea of what needs to get done moving forward.
Here we are, final month. Every day I tell myself, “Today didn’t go so well, but tomorrow, I will…” and yet tomorrow arrives and once again, nothing gets done and the process repeats. It’s getting to the point where just the realisation alone that that’s draining my will to work is in itself directly draining my will to work further. But maybe tomorrow, I will…
Last day of the month… and yet another dead day. The sky was dark with rain from the moment I awoke. I don’t feel as if I’ve accomplished anything this month: in fact, I think it might just be the least productive I’ve been since I started working on this project. I really don’t know what’s been going on, honestly. I don’t even feel that bad, at least as far as I’m aware. Just… languid, I guess. Completely unmotivated and unenthused about anything. Every day I fail to work I fall behind my schedule further and further. At this point I honestly have no idea when I’ll finish, my mood’s just too unstable. It feels at once as if there’s not much work left to do until I’m done, and yet when I actually sit down and look at it, it feels like there’s an almost overwhelming amount of work left. And then I start thinking about the fact that it’s not just my work schedule that I’m actively wasting away each and every day, but the hours and days of my life as well…
