Month: February 2021

Recorded a short showcase for the new environments, and then took the rest of the day off. I feel ready to get back to work tomorrow.

I finished up the last few rooms in the forest today, which means that, in terms of the exterior world space, the forest is now completely finished! I still have two days left in the month to go over and renovate existing spaces. I think my first priority tomorrow will be to improve the trail system, so that the world feels a bit more immediately cohesive to navigate.

I’m very close to finishing the map now: just one more day of work to finish off a handful of miscellaneous transition cells, and laying down trails, and that’s basically it! Of course, there are still a number of free-standing tasks remaining – further beautification of existing areas, interior cells, placement of events and containers – but for now, once this month is over, I think I’m gonna take a week or two off to focus on building the foundation for the next stage of this project. Probably the most interested I’ve felt in it in a while…

Just continued working on environments today. I improved the forest generation algorithm to dynamically adapt the types of flora to the position of the cell within the map grid. I think I might be able to finish the map tomorrow… although I do want to put in a few more structures overall, which will take some time to build. I think tomorrow I’m gonna try to finish at least another fifteen rooms, and get the camper trailers built and implemented into the world (the interiors can wait a bit, although I should make a note to myself to not forget about them entirely). I wasn’t able to find time to work on the PDA home screen today, but I have a pretty good idea of what it’ll look like, and the functionality itself shouldn’t be difficult at all to implement. I should be able to get the PDA completely done by the end of this weekend if all goes well…

Spent the day rebuilding the backend of the PDA system away from the strictly inventory-based framework it was built upon earlier, towards a more flexible free-form approach. The PDA can now be accessed at nearly any time anywhere, regardless of whether Avery has her pack or not; and its intended functionalities have been significantly expanded beyond just serving as a glorified inventory management system. Today, I more or less completely finished building the map application, of which I’m quite satisfied. I’d like to get a home/landing page built tomorrow and finish up at least fifteen rooms. Only four days left in the month to get everything done…

Set up the backend today for working with dynamic world progression, along with the requisite daily rooms. I have just under 50 left before I’m completely done with the map…

Essentially, how the world event system works is that each room is assigned a “tier” based on the global world tier (dictated by the player’s progress through the story). Certain rooms have alternate versions that can be dynamically swapped out with the default ones depending on the world tier and player progress (which can be advanced either through completing certain objectives, or naturally with enough time). Today I built in the system that allows for that process of detection and room switching to function dynamically, without any (hopefully) hard-coded solutions. I also built in the world tier to the save/load system, which is something that for whatever reason I never got around to before.

All that’s left now to do in this regards is figure out how to semi-randomly generate event locations. I’m thinking that maybe there’ll be a function that runs at game launch, which chooses one location from a list of possible spawn points for each defined event and then clears the other rooms from the list. I’m not exactly sure how this is gonna work to be honest…

Another possible alternative may be accomplished with the “room_assign” or “room_duplicate”; the base room would have a special name (ie rmHouse), and then be either duplicated or assigned into one of several potential special cells. In this scenario, the special cells will always default to generic layouts, which prevents them from being messed with if not assigned properly. I think this is actually the best option, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see…

Got basically no actual work done today, but I did still end up making the bare minimum on the room count, for what it’s worth. I also spent some time this evening (or whatever 4am counts as) gathering resources for the camper trailers, which I hope to get processed and implemented in the game tomorrow. I’m hoping that by the end of the week I can get interiors done for all of them as well… either that, or finish off the exterior of the map completely. Less than a week left in the month now…

Didn’t manage to get any work done today, I stayed up way too late last night and ended up slipping into a series of waking dreams which kept me in bed until 1630 this afternoon. I dreamt I was at a water park in Mexico with a few old friends (or, well, they weren’t really my friends at all in reality, just people I happened to know back then). The entire thing had a strange sheen to it, the colour and tone of that somewhat-decayed vintage filter you see in old homemade videos shot on the family 8mm. I felt at once exhilaratingly free, yet also hopelessly trapped. 

Got a new interior done, the audio could be a bit better but for now I’m not gonna worry about it too much as I feel like it’s gonna be too much of an uphill battle trying to get some form of reverb working without resorting to some stupid bullshit like with the interior audio track for rain. In the mean time I continued building out the environment to the bottom-right, which is almost finished.

I also fixed some minor issues which slipped my attention earlier, mostly dealing with the way collision messages were detected (or in this case, not). All special collision areas should now properly display their appropriate collision messages. I may have potentially messed something up in one very specific room in terms of z-depth sorting but that should be easier to fix through brute-force than to try to build the entire system around accommodating for that one irregularity.

Woke up really late, decided to just take the day off and record some videos. I have a good feeling about this weekend. I think I’ll be able to get a lot done – maybe even finish the map, now that I’m taking a good look at it actually. Best to keep my hopes measured for now, though, and just commit to the work ahead. Almost there…

Yet another day of environmental work. Made steady progress into the right border, where I was having some troubles before. I’m very confident now that I can get the map done by the end of this month. Tomorrow I’m gonna investigate the potential of setting up some more interesting looping structures for the borders, and try to finish building the western trail.

Wasn’t able to get anything done today. I was just in a weird mood… not really sure how to describe it. It wasn’t necessarily bad by any means, just uneasy. The end’s now within sight, although in such a way that feels almost discouraging: like realising just how much further you have left to go when you feel like you’ve already gone far enough.

Just some more environmental work, nothing of note. I wanted to get a couple more structures built today but it turns out I just didn’t have enough energy for that, so I touched up a few earlier areas I wasn’t satisfied with and built a few more filling out a bunch of blank spots I’d overlooked previously. The sense of progress is steady, but somehow unfulfilling at the same time…

Normal work. Spent the first hour or two finishing up this month’s update, and then the rest of the time building a bunch of new rooms. I also fixed an issue with the inventory backend for the firekit: it should now properly sort and display only the materials within the kit itself. I built a small framework for it which should be pretty easily applied to the other container inventories down the line.

Spent the day just working on room templates and mapping stuff out, didn’t end up getting much in-engine work done unfortunately. On a positive note, I think I’ve settled on the final concept for the map, meaning that all progress from this point forward is tied solely to my ability to produce the necessary assets in an efficient and timely manner. Once I finish writing the monthly update tomorrow, I’ll begin working on those. I’m fairly confident now that I’ll be able to finish the map by the end of this month.

Ended up taking another day off, although that’s not really what I’d intended. I got distracted by some fairly meaningless tasks and by the time I was finished it was already late evening and I no longer felt like doing anything. I think I’ll be able to make up the lost work though tomorrow. I have a good feeling about it.

Decided to take the day off in preparation for a long haul this weekend. I’m gonna try to get the lower-right corner completely finished. If so, I think I might be able to actually finish the entire map by the end of this month – meaning I would actually be back on schedule again. There are a lot of days left, but also not as many as it seems. Here’s hoping I can maintain the composition to hold steady these next few weeks…

Not much work done today, I don’t really know why and I can’t at all recount what I actually did with the day. I suppose that means I didn’t do much of anything… although I did start writing a new song, actually. One of my goals for this year was to become a better singer and as part of that I’ve been making an active effort to write at least one new song every week, and record all the stuff I play so I have a record of my improvement (or lack thereof). I don’t think so far that my vocal abilities have improved much at all, to be honest… although lately I do feel as if I’ve gained a better understanding of the kinds of songs my voice is naturally suited for, as well as the kinds of songs it’s not. And as a part of that I guess I’m also in a sense learning to appreciate my abilities for what they are, rather than what I wish they could be just because I heard someone else sing something one way. It’s too early to say anything I think. I probably won’t become a better singer in any meaningful way. But at the very least I hope I’ll learn how to be more content with the things I am capable of. I hope one day I’ll feel that way about everything I do.

Got a bunch of miscellaneous rooms done (as well as a new visual variant for the standard birch), setting up a foundation for work on the right-hand side of the map. I would like to explore the possibility of altering the flora spawning script to reflect gradual changes in the vegetation over the region. I don’t think it would be too difficult necessarily, it’s just a matter of figuring out what goes where (as well as probably continuing to expand the variations of potential flora overall). 

Well, we’ll see how it goes. At worst I’ll just have to manually edit things. Which reminds me that I also found out today that child rooms can actually be manually edited while retaining inheritance from the parent room… that would’ve been useful to know a few months ago. In any case, it’ll make working on the trails much easier moving forward.

Got nothing done today. I started working around noon but I ended up just looking at the ceiling most of the day. Better luck tomorrow…

Another heavy snowstorm today. Helped to stabilise my mood a bit. I made steady progress all throughout the day, finishing up older rooms and building a bunch of new ones as well. I also managed to finally identify and fix a long-persisting bug that duplicated containers at the origin. It was, like most of these kinds of things end up being, the result of a single typo on my part.

Decided to take the day off, although I did feel marginally better compared to yesterday. I was just tired, mostly. Tomorrow, though, I’ll get back on track.

Not much progress today. I tried working a bit more on some environmental stuff but I just felt awful and I wasted nearly the entire working day in a state of heightened malevolence, debilitated by thoughts of violence and vicious, petty paranoia. Maybe it’s just that time of the month for me. It’s been like this for a while now actually. As long as I can remember. At least one week out of every month… well, actually, it just comes and it goes. Fairly senselessly, without apparent reason or cause. 

Anyways, I ended up playing some Siege with Jordan tonight and we had a good time, enough to hold my attention and convince me that tomorrow I might have a better chance of getting through a proper work day. Well, we’ll see when I wake up, I suppose.

Back to work on the usual environment grind. Got a few more rooms done today, mostly above the sinkhole. Accounting for the topographical difference turned out to be slightly easier than I’d initially envisioned, which was nice. I hope I’ll be able to finish the sinkhole completely tomorrow, it shouldn’t be too much more work I think, just a matter of filling in the spaces. I’ve been making good progress this past week or so, it’s slowly restoring my morale.

Split the day between revisiting a few older rooms to add a bit more variety around the border – the most conspicuous ones are the addition of a small pond and waterfall, and a revision of the old cabin, whose exterior has been redone to fit more seamlessly with the updated visuals – and setting up a system that generates a “liminal” border once the player reaches the ends of the map. It inherits the same properties as the generic forest cells, except when the player moves further in the direction of the border (for example, moving left when the player has reached a left-border liminal cell, or up or down), it will loop them back to another version of that cell. 

As long as they continue moving in any direction but the one directly opposite of the border (so, to use the previous example, any direction but right, which is back towards the main world region), they will continuously be looped into theoretically endless stretches of procedural forest. Only by turning back in the correct direction will the player be placed back into the normal world area, where they will be spawned in at a randomised location along the border, respective to the axis of movement.

It’s a neat concept that I think works well conceptually, although I’ll have to experiment with it a bit more in the future to see if it holds up in terms of consistency, both technically and visually. I’ve been facing a few performance issues lately with the rain splash particles (which I attempted unsuccessfully today to convert over to the built-in particle system) which has tuned me in to thinking about performance at large. So far, up until this point, it’s been a non-issue but just in case, I should make an effort to be more vigilant moving forward, especially when it concerns less visible kinds of performance decay such as slowdown caused by memory leaks.

Not too much to write right now because I mostly just worked on graphics today (and also because it’s both cold and late). I implemented the feature I discussed yesterday, which gradually blurs the screen and occludes the player’s visibility over time during rainfall. Pressing the interact key at any time (I still have to develop a better check for collisions with other interactive objects) will put Avery into a special state in which she wipes the rain out of her face, temporarily clearing visibility. The effect itself features a base Gaussian blur applied evenly over the entire screen, and a sprite-based vignette which slowly fades in depending on the level of the blur. I’d like to experiment with making the vignette darker but in the meantime I think it works well, and also sets up a good precedent for further vignette use later on.

Heavy snowfall all day: the deepest it’s been in a real long while. Supposedly it’s gonna continue coming down tomorrow, maybe even into the next day. I hope it continues for a while, although it probably won’t. I like it when it snows. It’s one of the few times when I feel alone, yet at peace. There’s this strange kind of thrumming melancholic hum that settles in over everything, blankets out all the other usual anxieties and palpitations, leaving only a sense of coldness: detachment without alienation. The utter absence of sensation, good or bad. It’s like a sadness devoid of pain.

Anyways, I finished up the camera FX for the sinkhole and spent the rest of the day touching up the rain. I started by revisiting the audio, which turned out to be much quieter than I remember. I went back to some recordings I made over the summer and layered into the original second, denser rain track. I think it sounds a lot better now: there’s a greater sense of impact upon vegetation especially, which was pretty lacking before in retrospect.

I also re-implemented the splash decals on the ground surface, and significantly increased the amount to “realistic” quantities, depending on the number of droplets currently active in the room. As part of this process, I revisited all of the existing cells and mapped out no-rain-splash regions in all of the relevant ones. I had to turn down the effect pretty substantially for certain rooms – currently, the outpost and the generic forest areas are most impacted – so hopefully I can figure out a more elegant solution than just spawning in hundreds of objects every step. Either way though, even if I can’t find a better solution, it probably won’t matter that much: it looks okay as is.

Lastly, I added a new VFX overlay for rain, which features a pseudo-dynamic lens effect that simulates water droplets accumulating on the screen. It ended up looking a lot better than I expected. I’m currently

investigating the possibility of implementing some kind of basic system that reduces visibility over time when it’s raining, forcing the player to manually direct Avery to wipe away rain in her eyes every few moments. I think that would significantly deter players from spending too much time out in the rain directly (on top of the existing dirtiness accumulation), but I have to figure out how to implement in a way that makes sense visually first. Hopefully I can get that in by tomorrow…

Got the zoom working more or less as intended – although that’s just about all I was able to do today. The animation, especially when coming out of it, is still rather jerky but at this point there’s little I imagine I can do to remedy it given how poor the camera implementation is in general. In the process I did revamp the zoom code slightly: the zoom is much smoother now and allows finer control instead of just jumping between preset levels. 

I felt like absolute shit today. What a waste of a month.