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I woke up at a respectable time again today but, as you can probably tell given the time of this entry, I have a feeling that’s about to end pretty soon. Despite my early start I managed to completely waste away the entire morning on various trivial activities of which I astonishingly have almost no memory; and then I spent the afternoon labouring away at a handful of pixels at a painstakingly glacial pace. The upside is that I have indeed finished what I was drawing; the downside is that yet another day passes in which I’ve accomplished virtually nothing of substance.

Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true. Haolun came over tonight and after spending a few hours driving around aimlessly and eating fries I felt freshly imbued with a newfound sense of energy and over the span of an hour or so managed to design and implement a better torch effect, which is leagues above the previous one and which I’d even say almost singularly vindicates the failure of the latter. The luminosity of the beam now drops over distance in a semi-realistic manner (had to make some slight adjustments to account for the range of the spaces in-game, so it’s much less powerful than it most likely would be in reality) meaning the further the light is pointed, the narrower the beam, and the weaker the light. It’s a cool effect that dramatically improves the feeling of darkness in the game, allowing the player to navigate and perform basic actions without negating the effect of the darkness (and I’d say that in fact it actually amplifies it). I’m surprised I didn’t think of it earlier.

Maybe I really do work best at night after all.