Last night out here. I wasn’t feeling much before but now, as I sit here thinking about home, I’m a bit scared to go back. To be alone with all of it. It feels like it’s been too long, yet it’s barely been two weeks. I can already feel the sadness starting to return…
I’ve had a very pleasant time here. The odd thing is, the more we drove around, the more I began to miss the city in a strange way. I’ve been feeling really small in the world lately, and I’ve been having a very hard time maintaining focus and motivation of any kind. I’d been feeling this way for a long time now, but it’s gotten unmanageable as of late… I don’t feel settled in my life anymore. I feel really restless and trapped within myself. I spent all day trying to learn stuff in Unity but just came away physically exhausted with nothing to show of it at the end of the day.
I’ve been tired all day. Fell asleep early last night, woke up real late today. Struggling a lot with motivation… I feel really stuck in the design. I downloaded Godot today to see if it might spur any kind of action in me; but the truth is, looking at the interface and realising I would need to learn an entirely new workflow, I just gave up instead, almost immediately. I’m psyching myself out too much thinking about logistics and planning. I’ve just gotta settle on something and try it out. I remember, very vaguely, that when I first started making games, I didn’t know anything about how involved it would be technically, but it didn’t matter: I just started messing around because it was interesting and sometimes being able to get something working as intended was a cool feeling, but mostly just because it was interesting. I don’t feel like the actual process of making games is interesting anymore. I think I’ve become too focused in the past few years on end products and what having an end product would mean for myself, both existentially and practically. It’s necessary to think about that stuff, to be sure, but I think I do it too much, in a way that’s become counterproductive…
I’d like to check out Unity tomorrow. I think it’ll be slightly easier to stomach as far as the transition goes, given that I have a decent amount of familiarity with it historically. I also want to start setting up the initial Gamemaker project itself too.
Worked on animations today. I decided to just animate something from some footage I captured from Condemned (which I finally managed to get working). I doubt it’s gonna make it to the final product, but for now, it’s given me some motivation to actually work on implementation, instead of letting myself get so bogged down in the planning. I think if I work steadily and diligently tomorrow, I will most likely be able to get the full animation done. I felt calmer and more focused today, despite not sleeping well last night on the account of a particularly noisome creature who pestered me throughout the night and later, a rather sad dream.
I went to the zoo today and saw many interesting animals. It was very nice. I got a lot of good photos and videos. I’m struggling a bit with the game. I can’t figure out the interface, specifically for the combat sequences, and it’s really disrupting my ability to visualise the rest of the game. I keep on flip-flopping uselessly between thinking I should scale back the visuals completely and relying almost entirely on text or committing to full animation packages for each individual character, which would be terribly involved in terms of actually making those animations. I spent a good part of today genuinely wondering if I should learn how to sculpt and animate 3D models specifically for this use case: which in turn led me to wonder why I shouldn’t just switch entirely to a 3D format after all. It’s stuff like this that’s got me so disoriented when it comes to settling down on decisions. I routinely feel my ambitions outpacing my actual skillset these days. I don’t know if I should just scale them back, or try to rise to their occasion…
It’s been a week. Being in Texas has helped to dissipate the worst of the feelings when they hit. There are moments though when it just tears through me like nothing else. All at once. It’s been difficult to concentrate on work, but I’ve been trying my best. Made a very small amount of progress today on the layout, mapped out fonts and font sizes. I was lucky enough to find some random repository containing TTFs of all the most important body fonts. The only thing that needs to be handled through sprites, it seems, is the title header: the horizontal spacing needs to be condensed. I want to get it done by the end of the weekend, at least the structure, if not the visuals.
Got a decent amount of work done today: first time in a week or two that I’ve felt I’ve palpably made some progress for a change. Made significant progress on the UI today, finally have a framework in place to build upon. I also got some writing done too, and made a firm decision on stats-based gameplay. I’ve decided to implement stats into the game after all, most prominently in The Stranger’s plot. I think it’ll add some more mechanical intrigue down the line, and help maintain the RPG-influenced approach for myself as well in designing encounters.
Did some more research for the UI, and started drafting sketches. I feel pretty good about the newspaper-oriented design: it’s thematically impactful, visually compelling, and fairly novel as far as I’m aware. I think I’ve also settled on the usage of non-pixellated fonts for now. The ones I’ve sourced currently are Stilson for sub-headlines, Cheltenham for headlines, and either Lato or Georgia for body fonts. There’s no need to maintain a veneer of diegetic verisimilitude this time unlike with Work, so I feel a bit freer in the design. Ironically though it’s made it a bit more difficult to settle on one that I will both like now, and in the future…
Service cancelled this morning on account of a major snowstorm. A slow day. I started modding Skyrim again after stepping away for three weeks. I find that it helps to stimulate my attention when I’m feeling sluggish, and it gets me into the right mood to start working on technical stuff, which most of the time I really struggle to focus on.
Still, I wasn’t able to do any in-engine work today. I did manage to get some writing done though. I want to start writing an actual plot this week. I hope to be able to get the first draft done by the end of the week. I’ve been reading sourcebooks to help inspire some structure. I’m currently working my way through God’s Teeth. I might prototype this in text-based format first just to see if it feels interesting enough to play without the visuals.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t get anything done today as I had planned. I did manage to write a bit, but nothing in-engine. The problem is that I get too distracted in conceptual work, and absorbed in the “why” of everything. I can’t seem to design a single mechanic or think of an image without immediately trying to resolve the question of why it’s present in game, and what its implications are relative to the greater fiction. I spent four hours this afternoon researching prisons in the greater Cincinnati area and trying to plan out viable routes for prisoner transport before realising that this was a largely pointless and wasteful endeavour: the player will neither notice nor care about these kinds of details and they occupy a space in my mind that goes beyond pointless although innocuous frivolity to active, harmful distraction bordering, I suspect, on inadvertent procrastination.
I just need to not think so much about this kind of thing, both right now, and in general. I don’t really have the luxury of wasting entire afternoons trying to devise logistically viable portrayals of prison assassinations based on accounts of guard schedules and local prison cultures and architecture much longer; and even if I did, it would be a colossal waste of time. If every single thing in the development of this game went like this then it would be no different in level of struggle from Work, which is precisely why I wanted to take a break from that project to begin with, and try to pursue something less cognitively taxing.
Lacking sufficient will of my own, what I really need is someone to regularly and actively counteract me on these kinds of things and encourage me instead to just focus on more imminent, tangible things. I wander too easily on my own…
Was away for a couple of days to see some friends. It was a nice change of pace from the usual, and made me feel better. I’m going to attempt to set up a proper work schedule starting tomorrow. I’ve set a public deadline for myself for the demo release in January’s update, targeting sometime in March. That’s a bit close for comfort, but I need the pressure or else I don’t think I’m gonna start at all. I’ve been working on the document a bit more, but I don’t think I’m working on the right things: it’s too high level right now, and while that stuff is exciting for me to think about, it doesn’t really lead to any concrete things. I just need to start actually building stuff in-engine. I’ve been too stuck on conceptual work for too long.