I spent this morning trying to get some writing done, but it just wasn’t really coming to me for some reason. Managed to get maybe three paragraphs in before feeling completely empty. The nascence of coherence teeming just beneath the surface but unable to crystallise. It makes me quite sad.
Fundraising dinner this evening at the church. It was a nice time. First time I’ve been around a number of people in a while. I’ve been struggling a lot lately. Terribly sad, and more often than not, emptier than I thought a person could be. It’s really hard to write about anything because it’s really hard to think about anything. Despite everyone, I feel quite alone in the world.
I’ve just been playing AC Shadows the past couple of days, which is why I haven’t written much. It’s a beautiful game, vast and assured in its emptiness. It reminds me of these nightmares I had when I was a kid, where I’d be watching my father drive away every Saturday in his Civic, the weekly grocery trips, and I’d be sitting there in the family room that’s now my grandfather’s room playing with my Legos peacefully in the corner until after I while I’d realise that they left me behind and I’m the only one in my house, and then the only one in my neighbourhood, and then the only one in the whole wide world. And there’s nothing else to it, probably; any of this, I mean to say. My father sold the Civic to a guy on Craigslist, I think, one rainy day when I was a teenager, maybe. I feel pretty inert, and my sleep schedule has been rather poor too. The days pass quickly and with little commotion.
I’ve been struggling to find the motivation to get any work done this past week, although every day, for multiple hours, I’ve thought extensively about it. I feel very unfocused. I’ve been working on my resume every day, and thinking about jobs a lot. I feel a bit more optimistic this time around, both about my prospects, and the process in general.
I’ve been rethinking the structure of Plan a lot. I feel like the conceptual work has gotten out of my reach. I overscoped a bit too much as usual, got too ambitious. I’ve been thinking about ways to salvage it. I think one way is to start by regaining some focus on the core of it: the strength of the moment-to-moment writing which, at the end of the day, is what I reckon I’m both best at, and interested in. I’ve been looking at examples of text-heavy/visuals-light games for some guidance and inspiration. What I’m really hoping for is that I might find something in one of them that is able to suddenly strike within me the impetus to begin working on my own work. I can feel it fomenting inside of me. I just can’t seem to access it yet.
Felt better today, enough to finish my resume and submit some applications. I took all of yesterday and today off to clear my head. I feel calmer and more collected. I think I’ll be ready to get back to work tomorrow. I actually am looking forward to it.
Today, just like yesterday, and the day before that, and probably the day and days before that one too, is just another one of those days where I feel like I’m nothing more than the calm, creeping accrescence of all my life’s failures and humiliations. Useless.
I’ve definitely hit another slump. Haven’t worked all week, no plan or initiative to try to start again. I’ve been regularly staying up until dawn every night for no justifiable reason. I feel like things are really starting to slip out of my control. My thoughts have become completely disordered and ungovernable. I don’t even bother turning on my work computer anymore…
Haven’t worked in the past few days. I don’t know what’s been going on. Dark thoughts clouding my mind. Impatient and unfocused.
I’ve been feeling a terrible emptiness. Aggravated all throughout the day, angry. Dwelling on dark thoughts. I couldn’t sleep at all last night so I stayed up and forced myself to attend the 8am service. I was the only one in the pews. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I was feeling pretty good the past few days. I don’t know what’s changed. Lost focus, is what it is. Life is good for me when it is small, contained. I lost sight of the immediate comforts and pleasures, started looking outwards again. Inadequate. Can’t do anything right.
Didn’t really work today, mostly just organised things in my room (really, just my desk). After some initial difficulties and a hundred wasted sheets of unnecessarily high-quality paper (I did not purchase this, but instead found a pallet of several thousand sheets of it conveniently sitting in my garage which some now-derelict office had offloaded for pennies into my father’s hands several months ago), I managed to get the printer working perfectly, and printed out a bunch of campaigns, which I’ve prepped for binding. I need to purchase some more binding glue, and locate my awl, which is probably sitting somewhere in the bottom of a box in my closet entangled in excess webbing. The prints came out really nice though, and the paper, while very heavy, feels quite good in texture and will make for excellent material should I attempt fancier prints down the line.
Every day I try to play Work for at least five minutes. I mostly just walk around and look at the environment. It helps to maintain my attention on the project and stimulate my imagination, even if I’m not directly working on it. I have made little progress with Plan in the past few days though, I need to return to it soon…
Not a particularly productive day. Think the streak has ended. A calm, gloomy day, heavy winds, dreadfully overcast. I spent the bulk of it just continuing to rename assets and variables in Work. Although I know it’s important for both my future productivity and my current morale, at times I can’t help but feel like I’m just working for the sake of maintaining the appearance of working. I’d to start making an actual game soon instead of just setting up frameworks. I think once I finish writing this, I’ll try to get some more work done…
In other news, the printer finally arrived, and I was able to set it up with ease. Still haven’t tested it — still haven’t found anything to print — but I did spend a bulk of the afternoon editing a bunch of campaigns I’d written for Delta Green into printable format, which was a tedious but calming process, mostly just formatting text blocks and find-replacing errant text and inconsistencies.
Gotta clean my room soon…
Start of Lent. Took the day off, although not intentionally apropos to the season. Just sat around and played The Division half-heartedly for most of the day. Heavy rain started in the afternoon. I felt an acute sense of loss today.
Sorting and organisation continues. I started a document specifically for outlining in detail a new naming convention, and spent the rest of the day refining and implementing the new changes. I’ve developed a pretty good system for editing files and scripts across entire projects using a combination of RegEx and Bulk Renamer Utility, so once I finalise the scheme itself, I should be able to fairly quickly and efficiently apply it retroactively to Work as well, which I think will dramatically improve the legibility and consistency of the game’s mismatched asset and variable names, which to date stand as much as a testament to my own discipline (or lack thereof) and progress as a developer as they do to its lengthy development heretofore.
I also used Copilot today — accidentally at first, I must admit — and was surprised at how quickly and accurately it displayed actionable results. Granted, my queries were not particularly sophisticated, but considering the last time I attempted to interact with some kind of AI was back in middle school with some barely-functional experimental chatbot, it was really surprising. I can’t really immediately imagine at the moment some pressing need to figure out a way to integrate it into my workflow, but my positive experience with it today has inspired some optimism in me to consider it as a viable option again in the future should the opportunity arise.
I drank a Celsius for this first time this afternoon. “Fruit Burst”. While not entirely objectionable in taste, it left me feeling vaguely uneasy for some time physically, cresting the verge of an electric agitation that seemed to course through various parts of my body rattling the molecules about. It was a bit much; I probably drank it too quickly, having grown accustomed to drinking Red Bulls with the ease of a Rolling Rock. I’m not opposed to giving it another try though, at a later date.
Another productive day. Didn’t sleep much last night, but didn’t feel it much today either. Spent most of the day working on a new draft for the combat screen with updated visuals for the player and enemy entities. I’m fairly satisfied with it. It feels suitably cramped and dynamic at the same time.
In the evening, I decided to revisit the audio. I was rather shocked to discover just how wasteful and undisciplined my previous choices were with regard to the lengths and sizes of the audio files. I imported all of the audio files from Work into the foundation project (I’ve decided to just refer to it as Base from now on, in accordance with my other naming choices), stripped out the files that were too specific to Work, and then renamed all of them to fit a more consistent organisational schema.
When renaming the files, I discovered the aforementioned issue with the file sizes. After doing some research, I decided to just convert all of the audio into OGG format. I cut down the most egregious offenders with regard to track length (one track was 30min of repetitive rain sounds…) and compacted the rest. I haven’t tested it in-game yet, but all of the tracks seem to play properly in-game… I hope there won’t be any issues. I was able to cut the total size of the project by around 200mb, or around a 60% overall reduction, to just under 150mb. About half of the remaining bulk is graphic assets, which I think could use some cleaning as well. Could get the file size down even more by reducing the bitrate of the largest tracks, but at that point I think it just spills over into neurosis…
Felt better today overall, or at least not bad. I wager that having a good bulk of the work involve reading through documentation and trying to learn new techniques helped significantly to break up the accrescence of the sadness. For now, as long as I am able to focus on what’s right in front of me, the abscess is a little bit easier to ignore.
Took a pill in the morning after I awoke and worked calmly and continuously until now. It’s the most productive I’ve felt in years, without exaggeration. I feel like I could continue going for much longer. Dark before I knew it. I spent the entire day cleaning up, formatting, and documenting a bunch of code from Work, and setting up a project containing common resources and code that I’ll be able to use as a foundation for stuff moving forward. It’s good. Being able to just work in Gamemaker again for extended periods of time has helped my motivation a lot, and I feel like I’ve made a breakthrough, even if it’s just temporary. Should see if the doctor can prescribe me some.
I’ve been feeling pretty sad though in general. It’s getting worse, I think. I missed service again this morning. Just didn’t wake up in time, although really, that’s just an excuse. It’s been over a month now. Sad is not the right word. Lent looms close. I feel an intense sense of absence all the time. Phantom shivers. Deep within my bones and in the flickers between synapses. The inescapable feeling that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. That some part of me has vanished so quickly and suddenly the rest of my body hasn’t caught up yet. I’ve read accounts of shootings. You’re falling before you even realise something has ripped right through you. The body understands what the mind can’t, won’t. I’ve tripped and can’t get back up. Don’t want to get back up. It’s a new feeling, I think. From a place beyond myself. Apart from me.
No progress today. Felt useless and uninspired. Spent the entire day watching Godot tutorials only to just give up before I gave myself the chance to try any of it. I feel like I’ve completely lost the ability to learn anything new. No willpower, maybe. Ordered a printer this evening. Ripped and converted a bunch of assets from Condemned. Pointless. Can’t seem to get anything done, just circling the fishbowl in one long drainward spiral.