August is about to draw to a close, which for all intents and purposes, means the summer’s now over. I’ve been making good progress on the game. It feels more complete now than it ever has. I think I will be able to achieve my goal of finishing the plotting by the time I leave here. I feel optimistic again, in a calm, measured way, free from the urgency of mania or neurotic impotence. The work comes to me naturally and unhurried in its inspiration, like it did at the beginning.
I’ve been feeling better these past few weeks, about both my work and the things I want in my life. I’ve achieved a degree of clarity and peace that I’ve been missing this whole time. I don’t think it’s the change in place so much as it is the change in circumstance, which simultaneously gives me hope that I will be able to feel this again and that it is well within my reach; yet also makes me fear that it will not endure the return home.
Turns out the save system that I spent two days working on ended up being a complete waste of time because I fundamentally misunderstood how the systems underlying it worked. I decided to just completely revert it, and instead focus on cleaning up the existing variables based on the lessons I learned from setting up the struct system, to improve legibility and ease of declaration and save-load in the future.
Also reworked and cleaned up the animations for the notebook, and implemented full interaction for them. I have to figure out how to lay the text out on each page (as well as what to actually put down text-wise…) and how to handle the page transitions. I’ve been working steadily but slowly as of late. I’m not optimistic the game will be done by the end of this year, but I am not actively not trying to think about that right now, and instead just focusing on work I can do.
Working on rewriting the save/load system. Migrating from using a whole bunch of manual ds_map read/writes to a (hopefully) more succinct system based around reading structs from a buffer. Converted story variables and config so far. The most difficult challenge has been locating everything and remembering what controls what. I need to develop a more effective system for managing this type of shit in the future.
The sadness has gotten worse. I feel terribly empty and alone, and I’ve started thinking regularly about killing myself after the game is finished again. The worst part is that I truly have no excuse here. I’m eating a lot better, going out more often, in the company of my friends. And yet it still not only persists, but has gotten in some ways palpably worse.