Still haven’t worked. I suspect I’ve lapsed into another depressive bout. I don’t understand why I can’t ever seem to shake it. I know that working helps, but I just can’t seem to be able to get started. I’m just watching the days of my life bleeding away from me uselessly…
Didn’t return to work today, after all. I’ll just be honest: I’ve lost momentum, is all. I spent the day reading and lying down. Taylor held a going-away party last night. I will miss her deeply, and quietly. I’ve been thinking too much about Ana lately. I have terrible nightmares. It’s exactly as she’d feared, I guess: there’s not much of a living human presence left in all those thoughts these days, after all. It’s been long enough that things have grown too indistinct. I’m no longer able to reconcile my memories of her with the ongoingness of an actual person in the world. It’s exactly as I’d feared, I guess. And yet —
There is no use in any of it. I’m useless. I’ve let myself get distracted again by all this. I will make an effort at cleaning tomorrow, and then I will attempt to resume work in the evening. It will be nice to see the doctor again.
I’ve decided to take the past two days, as well as the rest of the weekend off. I’ve mostly just been catching up on sleep. I’ve been catching up on reading as well although honestly, it’s going at such a glacial pace that I might as well just not bother. It feels nice to be able to just genuinely rest though. I look forward to getting back to work on Monday.
I took the day off today and just slept through most of it. I feel calmer, and more relaxed. I think I’ll work a bit tomorrow, and then take the weekend off.
I’ve hit a bit of a dead end as far as my motivation goes. I did get some work done today on the furniture for the outpost, but my progress — and more importantly, my drive to actively get things finished — has waned significantly over the past two days. I’ve been oversleeping, and when I sleep, Ana’s there, and when I wake, I’m always so tired. My discovery that the 25th was only the deadline for those invited was the initial impetus, but the real catalyst for the acceleration of my despondency has been the publisher largely failing to keep me updated on whether I should actually submit on this date or not. I know I shouldn’t blame them too much though, it’s my fault that things have gotten pushed around so much.
It’s funny. In the midst of writing this, a resolution has already come. I’ve gotten the go-ahead just now to skip the deadline on the 25th, which means that I’ll have nearly a full additional month now to have the demo built out as best as I can. What a relief, honestly: in every way. Man. I’ve been feeling real agitated lately, always on edge. I’ve let my attention fall once again to largely frivolous things. But it’s not so bad as it feels most of the time. I just have to calm down, get my head back in order. Things are manageable, things are actually going quite well. Just gotta level back out.
Seeing Ada made me feel a lot better, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to get much work done during the day on account of my tiredness. The worst of it has passed though. I was able to get a bit of stuff done in the evening when I awoke: I finished the visual asset for the worm farm, and have begun to draw animations for Avery for the interactions. I don’t know if I’ll have the time right now to create full close-up shots of each of the farm layers, but I’d eventually like to add those. I hope that tomorrow I’ll more productive.
Got basically nothing done today. I felt terrible, and terribly distracted. I did get some research done into the worm farm in the evening, and I have a much clearer idea both of what it’s going to look like, as well as how it actually might function. I reckon I’ll be able to finish it in a day once I’m able to get started. Seeing Ada will help me get me out of this, I think.
I’m no longer certain if the 25th is really a deadline. It turns out that it’s only applicable for games that were selected to participate in promotional materials: mine hasn’t, at least not yet. I’m not holding my breath on it, to be honest. If it ends up being irrelevant, then that gives me a full additional month. As helpful as that will be for giving me to time to polish the experience, right now, I must admit that it feels rather deflating.
I’ve come to dread the idea that I will have to leave home again soon, especially for so long. I can no longer really afford the time, least of all the distraction; and more importantly, I don’t want to. I just want to stay home and work. It’s too late now though to cancel and lose all that money. I suppose I should just accept it as a direct consequence for my rashness. I must learn to not be so impulsive in the future…
We baptised someone this morning. A baby. It was oddly moving. I didn’t sleep well last night. I made the mistake of drinking an energy drink before service in order to keep alert. Around noon though, I began to feel uneasy, like I had become ensnared in the moment just before waking. I was unable to work for the rest of the day, or frankly, do much of anything at all, on account of my lethargy. It’s not great that I’ve completely lost a day, but I think I should still be good if I accelerate my progress a bit tomorrow and not let myself get distracted.
Woke up late again today, felt vaguely unwell but was able to push through it and get stuff done. I finished the file transfer element for the static PDA interface when interacting with the field camera, and am quite pleased with how it came out looking. I might make one further modification to it later by adding in a subtle animation for inserting and removing the cable into the camera itself, but for now, it’s good enough.
I’ve moved on to the interior of the outpost, where the rest of my work will be concentrated. The plan for the next two days (hopefully) will be to finish all of the relevant tasks in and around the basement, particularly revolving around the worm farm. I significantly improved the legibility of the entrance to the basement, although I still feel like I need to come up with better signposting to direct the player to recognise as an actual interactive element. It’s not the end of the world if I can’t, but right now, as it stands, it only passes barely.
Tomorrow, I’m going to start by cleaning up the visual interior of the basement itself, which I imagine will take quite some time, and build all of the furniture. At the very least, it will be a great boost to morale to see it finished, and help carry me through the next few days.
Woke up late into the afternoon on account of an unusual tiredness, likely the consequences of the past few nights of disturbed sleep catching up to me. I was unable to focus for some time, resulting in only about three hours of productive work before being pulled away by general tasks. During this time, I was able to draw and implement the static PDA animation while initiating a data transfer with field sensors.
At night, Haolun and I went for another drive, and discussed a great number of troubling things.
Reasonable progress today. I’ve counted eighteen unresolved items on my list, which means every day, I should seek to complete at least two. Some of these, of course, are significantly more involved than others. Regardless, I think it’s doable, especially once I get towards the end of the list. The most time-consuming stuff is easily the interface stuff. I can probably do two a day if I work steadily into the night, which I plan on doing tonight. I just finished up the spritework today for the PDA interaction with the field camera. What’s left is the implementation, of which the most laborious part will be the alignment of elements that I have to draw in by code. After that though, I’ll be completely finished for the time being with elements outside of the outpost. I’ve been thinking about adding some more observable POIs in the environment, which will be very quick work comparatively. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow on break.
Didn’t get any work done today beyond doing the write-up. I woke up late on account of staying up too late last night (also not really doing anything except procrastinating) and then immediately had to go take care of a number of necessary non-work-related tasks, which took up most of the afternoon. By the time I arrived home, I made the questionable decision to expound the rest of my energy on writing up the monthly update which, fortunately, I was actually able to finish, so at least I have something to show for the day.
This rate of progress, or lack thereof, is unacceptable. I’ve already burned away two days. Tomorrow I need to get something substantial done. I’ve created a list that breaks everything down to the molecular level. My plan now is to get everything built in place structurally, and then fill in the animations afterwards. I’ve been getting too bogged down by all this sprite-work otherwise. I’m going to sleep early tonight, and when I wake up tomorrow morning, I will begin properly.
Finally had the call with Raw Fury this morning. They’ve given me the green light to proceed on the demo, after all! Now I have to actually get it done.
In practice, this more or less necessitates me to work continuously with little rest for the next ten days until the 25th, which is the soft deadline for builds to be approved on time for the start of September. Although I understand that, as far as concepts like “best practice” and “healthy work/life balance” go, this should give some cause for concern, privately I must admit that I actually welcome it: not only because it is the first time, not just in recent memory, but possibly in years that I’ve felt genuinely interested in not just the project itself but actually working on it as well, but because the constant external pressure grants me the perfect excuse to withdraw myself from the world, and avoid unpleasant thoughts.
It catches up to me as soon as I stop. My dreams these past few days have been increasingly filled with odious, monstrous things too appalling to recount. I spend most of my forced breaks either obsessively “maintaining” this site (I strongly suspect its very inception was a decision born far less from actual judicious planning, than a product of unsettled restlessness), or ruminating over Ana and other humiliating personal failures. I feel emotionally stifled, and work feels like the only real reprieve from it within my immediate control.
At the end of the day, I guess it’s not a terrible place to be, though. I could feel like this, and also not be working. As long as things are getting done on time, maybe it’s not so bad after all. I’ve come to realise that it’s only when things are like this that I have genuine hope that I’ll be able to finish this.
Slow, tiresome day. I made a mistake staying up last night: it turns out the meeting is today, so I stayed up until sunrise for nothing. I woke up way too late as a result, and in a thoroughly discombobulated state. To add insult to injury, I have to do it again tonight, for real this time.
Work has been slow and fatiguing on account of the inherent tedium of the animation process. I have one more set of animations left — flipping the page forward and backward, and then two or three transitional frames between states — before the worst of it is finished. I should take a break tonight with the time I have remaining before the meeting, and implement the existing assets in-game before I embark upon drawing out the remaining ones.
Continued working on the animations, although with limited progress. I hope I’m able to pick up the pace soon once this stuff is done, I just realised it’s already almost the halfway point of the month.
I completely rebuilt the site tonight, and moved it entirely over to WordPress. I discovered to my great consternation that Tumblr had finally decided to force the usage of its new post format, which completely altered the internal structure of the posts themselves and in turn destroyed the interactions I’d built for it into my main site. Honestly, I’ve been looking for an excuse to do it for a while now anyways, as I was getting sick of the advertising on Tumblr, and constantly having to reset the theme to light mode.
Unfortunately, moving to WordPress means I now have to completely rebuild the functionality within the website itself. I took a brief look at WP’s API and immediately concluded that I have little interest (or time, to be honest) to figure it out right now. For the time being, I think I’m just going to hide it until I have the energy to figure out a more elegant solution. At some point, I should also look to update everything for design consistency…
Vaguely distracted throughout the day, worked inefficiently. Spent the entire day animating the opening and closing interactions with the field notebook. It’s still not done, but I am certain I can finish it by tomorrow.
I’m a bit apprehensive about how I’m going to handle page-turning, if I even want to do that at all. I could do it programmatically with a 3D surface and a shader, which would allow me to authentically preserve the contents of each page with the flipping animation since they’d be rendered directly onto the manipulated surface – but then that would compromise the quality of the animation, and I’d have to do a lot of coordinate positioning of the hand movement itself, which will be a exercise in abject tedium.
Alternately, I could animate it entirely by hand, with pre-drawn text on the pages that are affected directly by the flip. This involves a lot of sprite work, but it’ll guarantee that the hand and page turn animations are synchronised properly. The problem is that it severely limits the amount of dynamic information I can place upon each spread, as the face that will be turned has to be fixed since it’ll be pre-drawn in the page turning sprite sheet itself, instead of being rendered mathematically.
That means that, on the starting spread, only the lefthand page can be drawn via code; and for any following spreads that the player can flip to and from, only the righthand page can be drawn.
Actually, this will work well. I can have the collected IDs pinned on the lefthand side, and related notes and thoughts Avery has about them “written” on the right. This could in fact even be a hand-drawn sprite for each page…
It looks like my work is cut out for me for the next few days.
Didn’t work as much as I’d have liked today. I was overcome by a dim cloud. Most of today’s work was custodial, going through all of the flagged code instances and making the necessary adjustments. I don’t know how much any of these changes actually matter – I don’t think any of them really do – but at least now I don’t have to look at any more warnings.
I’ve decided this morning that, unrelated to the previous, I will switch my code editor entirely to a proportional font for my next project. The compulsive need to ensure typographic alignment, even when doing so is outright destructive to legibility, has severely impaired my ability (or perhaps desire) to abide by reasonable standards of consistency throughout this project. I long for the future.
Work has been going really well. Not only has the work itself been getting done, but I feel a great sense of fulfillment getting it done, even on days like this, when the actual measurable progress feels so slight. It’s the strangest thing; as if suddenly, the long fog that’s so thoroughly eclipsed the past two years of my life cleared away with such abruptness that I find myself astonished to even recall it was ever there. I’m so terribly happy that I was there to share in its witness, but I think it’s over. No one’s coming back, I’m sure of it now, and I can no longer be moved to leave. The city’s emptied out, the nights are getting cooler, the summer will soon draw to a close. Things will never be like the way they were again. I have to find my place in all this again, and I think my place is right here. I’m plummeting through my memories. I know I shouldn’t have done it but the other day I found myself on the L and by the time it’d passed by 1st I’d already stepped out into the evening, careening, against my better desires, the trees far greener than I remembered and the light warmer, and by the bitter brine waters I sat down and from deep within my lungs I heaved forth what felt like the last of the winter, all winter, pooling across the parkway. It catches up to you, I guess. I don’t think people change anymore so much as they just seem to fall apart, unravel, first at the atomic level, and then in whole systems and tectonics. No one seems to take circumstance seriously until it’s the only thing they’ve got left to talk about. I felt it again tonight for the first time in a long time, you know, the real thing, lying there in my bed, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what the night breeze is like right now in Austin. It wasn’t fear, or heartache, or longing, or even sadness, really. Just plain loneliness. Ah, man.
Uninteresting but necessary work today. Cleaned up the tutorial prompts and some save events to improve the onboarding experience for new players. Work has been coming easier after this weekend. Maybe the sadness is not so bad after all. It feels more familiar to me. I think I’ve been too distracted these past two years. Maybe this is finally an opportunity to return to where I belong.
Tawanda’s left New York for good. I guess that’s that, then. I know things aren’t gonna change much but things will change a lot. He never came back to New Jersey, at the end of it. A profound sadness has come over me over the last few weeks. Too tired to stay awake, possessed by an insatiable hunger. There are days and nights when I miss Ana so terribly that the ache seems to seep into my bones. I’ve fallen behind the pace of my life.
First day back to work, and first entry in over a month. I’m not really sure what to say. I’ve been real tired lately, a full-body fatigue. They’ve got me working on a demo for the October Steam Next Fest. I don’t know, there was some kind of confusion on the timing of when this build would be due. They haven’t updated me on it yet. I don’t know. I don’t really care anymore. I have two weeks left to get it done on my own terms, I don’t care what happens on their end internally: I’m submitting it, come hell or high water. I need the public release at this point. Without it, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recover enough morale to finish this thing. Hell.
