Author: Spencer

Much less productive today: felt oddly agitated in a mild but undeniably palpable and perhaps even troubling way, at least to the degree where it distracted me enough throughout the day where I found it very difficult to focus on much of anything. I had an uncomfortable dream – well, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose – about Hana last night that left me feeling physically drained when I woke. Shortly after, I spent almost an entire hour after waking trying to shake off a vague sense of persistent nausea that came over me as I found my thoughts inevitably drifting again towards Alexandra. Well, I suppose this isn’t the place to talk about these kinds of things…

Nearly all of my friends with whom I keep in regular contact seem to be in troubled or otherwise generally disrupted spirits lately, but especially today; I wonder if there’s anything to it.

In other news, the Kickstarter cleared tonight, meaning that tomorrow, I’ll have to begin writing the final update for the campaign cycle, which includes the postmortem. That’ll be a real substantial piece of work… I’d like to have it done by tomorrow so that I can release it either tomorrow night or maybe even the following day for my #screenshotsaturday post… but we’ll see how I’m feeling when I wake up (and given the time right now as I’m writing this post, that probably won’t be until well into the afternoon). 

Another day with decent progress: I finally got around to implementing a proper options menu allowing the player to configure a variety of visual settings. Along with that came the necessity to implement a whole bunch of new toggles – for things like film grain/noise and even letterboxing – which has made the overall design feel a lot more modular and customisable to individual tastes (and now I’ve also preemptively secured myself against complaints that the VFX look like shit). I even got the save/load features done for it. The menu still needs some work down the line just touching a few elements up but it’s basically finished now at the foundational level. Overall I feel pretty satisfied with the progress I made today.

Spent most of today working on additional post-processing effects, which included implementing a slight bloom effect into the Gaussian blur shader, tweaking the values on the noise levels, adding a lens dirt/smudged filter, and adjusting a number of the chromatic palettes. Made a lot of progress overall on visuals, although I’ll have to check tomorrow to see how much I actually like any of them. I also would like to build in at some point a proper menu to toggle all these elements. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow…

I started working on an additional visual effect for when the player enters inspection mode, resembling some kind of composite between a digital video camera and a satellite image: it features a number of stats (things like current resolution, zoom level, FPS, etc) as well as a locator similar to the face tracking sensor on a phone camera or something, which starts in the centre upon being opened and tracks to the position of the player (thus counteracting visibility concerns somewhat). I’ll finish up the effect fully tomorrow and improve the range and visuals of the stats, but I’m glad to report the idea came out a good deal nicer than I thought it would.

Had a difficult time working today for some reason, and ended up getting virtually nothing accomplished whatsoever (although to be honest, I didn’t really even try). Woke up at 1540 to a bleak and overcast sky whose colour reminded me of the lividity of bruising. The rest of the day just proceeded at a uselessly slow pace, during which I wasted a lot of time looking up shit on the internet that I can’t even remember anymore. I hope tomorrow’s more productive. Perhaps I should start by at least making an attempt to get something done…

Finally got around to implementing 6-directional movement sprites. I think I’ll just use it for normal walking (w + w/o pack) and with the multitool out; all the other variations such as carrying the tarp for the bivouac for example would be too time-consuming to draw and more importantly would be too difficult to coordinate with all the other animations.

More minor progress today: worked on implementing unique doors for the entrance sequence, and completely redid the shadows in the interior of the outpost, removing the dynamic lighting. I wasn’t able to make a #screenshotsaturday post this week… but there’ll definitely be one next week.

Minor progress today, probably no net outcome: implemented directional sprites for movement along the vertical axis but it ended up looking pretty inconsistent so I’m probably just gonna end up cutting it, or saving it for a much later consideration. I also made some minor adjustments to the behaviour for the event triggers (well, the one existing one anyways) and cleaned up some of the inconsistencies on the decontamination sequence (mostly dealing with the doors being able to be retriggered or eventually reopened etc). Nothing really to show but hopefully tomorrow I can put in some decent work and get something out for #screenshotsaturday. 

Woke up late around 1300 and spent the entire day basically working on the new update (which you can read here). The new portraits turned out pretty well and I’m satisfied with them, although I’m vaguely bothered by the fact that I fucked up Avery’s VSC on the earlier version – which also extremely unfortunately happens to be the one used in the trailer – as well as a very minor typo in the 417s… hopefully nobody notices because I sure as hell can’t fix either of those things at this point. Whatever… accept the things I cannot change…

Tomorrow I’d like to get back to work on the stuff I was working on yesterday and hopefully get the shower sequence started, or alternately finish up the initial decontamination sequence. (I’ll probably end up working on the latter, but just in case…) I really need to start getting more content out again soon, it’s been a while – hell, the entire month basically – since I’ve produced anything of worth in terms of the actual gameplay. I’m thinking the outpost will be a really substantial update both for the game and publicly, but it’s gonna quite a bit… my next major milestone is reaching the initial production build for GDC so I’m gonna have to really start committing to a hard schedule these next two months (really, 1.5 months seeing how I’ve wasted most of this one away) if I want to stay on schedule. I think I’ll be able to do it. I have to be able to do it.

Didn’t get too much work done in the game as I’d hoped today but I did make a lot of progress on the IDs of the other members of Avery’s team: basically finished their designs completely including the 417s and VSCs so I’m thinking I’ll include them in the write-up tomorrow (which I suspect will take most of the day). Tomorrow’s update will probably focus more on lore and introducing the characters than mechanics…

Finally managed to get back to work today. Nothing major, but definitely progress: managed to implement the inner door seal in the outpost, including the addition of an event trigger for the decontamination process, as well as rudimentary effects for it. I also implemented mild film grain to the game overall, although I have to remember to add a toggle for it eventually. 

Last day of the break. Went over to Sawyer’s place to record American Idiot, picked up a new monitor on the way back. I didn’t play as well as I hoped – I haven’t really played much in a a while, almost over a year now probably, excluding the brief compositions I made for Work – but what’s done is done, I suppose it has to be good enough because I haven’t got much other choice. I also spent some time talking to some publishers who expressed some interest in my work; I’m not too interested honestly at this point in what they have to offer as I probably wouldn’t benefit too greatly from it, but I am certainly interested in what they can offer in general, if only just for curiosity’s sake. 

In any case, tomorrow it’s time to get back to work proper, and this time I’m actually gonna try real hard to commit to that. I honestly can’t remember what the last thing I worked on was, or even when; yeah, it’s pretty bad, but hopefully I’m able to at least begin to recover momentum. Wednesday I’ve gotta post the third update for the Kickstarter… which means I actually have to write it, so I have to allocate some time for that as well. I think I’ll work on the game all throughout the day and switch over to the update in the evening. I’ve been wasting too much time lately. Gotta get back on track, re-establish the order of things.

On break. Nothing to report.

On break. Nothing to report.

Woke up this morning to discover that the Kickstarter had cleared its goal by almost a thousand dollars. Of course, I have a lot of thoughts about all this, which at some point I’ll have to get around to processing in full… but for now I’m just tired. I think I’m gonna take the entire weekend off.

The Kickstarter experienced a rather extreme upwards spike in activity today of which I’m still trying to make sense; but needless to say I have basically no concerns anymore that it’ll hit its funding goal. Accounting for this aberration for the postmortem is gonna be… challenging, to say the least, and honestly leaves me feeling a bit conflicted; but I’ll try my best.

To be honest though, as elated and kinda blown away as I am by the sheer increase in volume of attention I’ve received today, some part of me also can’t help but feel a bit wary of it – to put it lightly – and it’s come with a spike of pretty intense, although subdued anxiety. Before, the vast majority of my backers were people to whom I had some personal connection, or for whom someone I trust could vouch regarding character and intentions. But the volume of backers now has just increased so significantly and suddenly that I can no longer keep track, nor do I feel like I have the energy to even to attempt to keep track anymore; I’ve completely lost sight, not to even mention control, of the scope and scale of my campaign and that fills me with a kind of tremendous unease.

I’m not gonna lie, a lot of this feeling probably comes out of residual paranoia about what happened with MA: the fear and intense suspicion of sudden exposure, the reactive shunning of the general public as a defence mechanism… well, at the very least, I now know that no matter what happens, I feel confident that I’m much better equipped to handle it than before, in virtually every possible way. If nothing else, this campaign has proved to me just how many people out there – both the ones I already knew, and the ones who surprised me – care about my success in some way and will have my back when I need help. I only hope that one day I’ll be able to do the same for them.

Published the second progress update for the Kickstarter campaign, marking the halfway point. Surprisingly the uptick in activity and interest has yet to abate, and seems to even be growing; every time I refresh the page there’s at least one or two new backers. I’ve yet to take a look at the list; embarrassingly enough out of a slight fear that I’ll be too moved upon seeing the actual names, and maybe even recognising some of them. Well, in any case, best not to get too sentimental right now: just gotta focus on getting back to work, and keep on keeping on with it.

There’s probably a few more things I could say but I’ve been writing for almost the entire afternoon into the evening and I’m tired of writing at this point, so I’ll leave it at that.

Made some decent progress today on the campaign through social media: looks like my efforts paid off after all, much to my surprise. I’m gonna continue exploring new avenues for promotion in the days to come but I’m keeping my expectations in check just in case.

Tomorrow I’m gonna release the mid-interim update for the Kickstarter that I’ve been working on the past few days. I didn’t get to work on it nearly as much today as I hoped – a bunch of random distractions, many of them arising directly out of my own fault – so I’m gonna have to pull double-time a bit tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be able to get it out by evening. I hope I’ll be able to have at least one or two images ready by then to break up the text but if it comes down to it, I suppose I can do without…

Started working on the midway interim update for the Kickstarter today. Didn’t attempt any in-engine work but the update’s coming along nicely, might continue working on it a bit more tonight before signing off. If I can finish off the text content today then tomorrow I can start working on graphical assets for it so it’s not just one massive wall of text. I doubt this update is gonna bring in too many people, if any, so I’m mainly just writing it for my own sake at this point. 

I also think it’s time to start marketing more aggressively from here on out, especially since I’ve basically done nothing heretofore beyond my comfortable channels. I’m gonna start committing now to at least one post a day until the campaign ends, one in the evening which I’ll recycle the next morning. That should be sixteen posts exactly, some of which can be reused assets, meaning I’ll probably have to make maybe ten new assets altogether. Not too bad, hopefully it’ll get me back into working on the game proper…

My mood today improved overall although I’m still feeling pretty imbalanced. I’m gonna try my best to get back to work on schedule tomorrow: I’m feeling optimistic about it although I’m keeping my expectations in check just in case.

I woke this morning to a dream – or perhaps it was a kind of nightmare in its own way – that filled me with a sense of debilitating impotence and envy. I’m writing this now in acknowledgement of the distinct possibility that these repercussions will continue to cascade as the day progresses and that I’ll be left feeling completely drained by the end of the day. I feel seized by violent thoughts which seem to only grow crueler the more I struggle against them…

Of course, none of this is anything new or even unexpected. But with the recent lapse in my ability to work as well as the physical fatigue of the cold I’ve felt the effects of this particularly acutely.

EDIT [17:55]: Some friends were supposed to come meet me at the station at around 3 so, thinking I’d only wait about an hour or so, I decided to play some games to ease my mind. Well, it turns out they’ve dragged and now, three hours later, they’re still stuck trying to figure out the logistics behind their trip and the soonest they’ll arrive is at around 7. 

It was a very pleasant day outside today – bright, unusually warm – and I hoped that being able to do something with my friends would help bring me back and calm me but it turns out instead that yet another day has just wasted away the same as every other day, spent on stupidly and senselessly grinding through games just to pass the time, waiting for something that always comes too late or not at all. The Kickstarter also hasn’t progressed in the slightest since I woke up this morning and I’m pretty certain these past two days have seen the worst performance during the entire campaign. Honestly at this point I think I have to just give up hope on it. I have almost no money left and my mind’s become completely clouded with dark and volatile thoughts.

Another mostly unproductive day although slowly, it’s getting better I believe. I spent about an hour or two tonight working on some initial planning for the food printer, which will most likely be the next major feature I work on, whenever I can get back to work proper. I think I’ll take the next three days or so on relaxed schedule since I probably won’t be able to commit to standard anyways, and work on more logistical stuff like figuring out and maybe even balancing the material component requirements for each food item. I’ll have some more details most likely tomorrow but I’m feeling pretty tired right now so I’ll just end this here for now.

Did nothing again today. Sat around and played through Dead or Alive 5 again a few times: finally figured out Kokoro’s moveset after all these years. I like her a lot now, even a bit more than Momiji (although Christie still remains firmly at top): although her moveset isn’t that diverse it feels very powerful and, at least against CPU, can absolutely hammer through defences and holds. To my mild chagrin I’ve discovered I’m no longer too great with Helena – I barely managed to get through her Arcade on Legend after an entire hour – largely I imagine because I don’t really remember anymore how to effectively capitalise well upon her tech, which is where I reckon she shines the most.

Well, in any case, tomorrow I have to get back to work, I’ve spent too long away wasting time on random shit. Gotta regain momentum…

Woke up feeling like shit again, and didn’t do anything related to the game today – didn’t even bother checking the Kickstarter campaign, although I’m sure it hasn’t progressed too much. Put up some porn on the projector and tried to read something – From Hell, I think – for a few hours but felt too listless to concentrate for some reason. I think – I hope – it’s just the sickness taking its toll and not a sign of something on a psychic level. 

Woke up with a sore throat from all the mucus that accumulated overnight, and felt like absolute shit for the rest of the day. Didn’t wake up properly until around 1300 and by that point I felt exhausted just attempting to get up in the first place. Man, I’m really not cut out for this life…

As I was too tired to work on anything directly in-engine, I decided to spend my time instead writing up a case study of the trailer, which ended up taking me the entire day for whatever godforsaken reason. I’ll post a link to it shortly after I finish writing this, but it turned out considerably longer than I expected. I’m too tired to actually read it so I can’t guarantee its quality in the slightest… but at least it looks sound, I suppose. Hopefully I don’t feel as shitty tomorrow, but realistically, I’m not too optimistic…

EDIT: Completely forgot to post the link to the article after writing this post but here it is.

Finally finished the exterior door for the outpost. Asides from the audio and player animations, the mechanics and animation are now completely finished, including the shadow mask. I don’t know how this shit took me nearly two days to figure out but I’m glad it’s finally over with.

I think I’ve contracted a mild cold, undoubtedly from my time in the city. So far it’s tolerable, but it’s very noticeable and I’ve noticed that these past two days I’ve been feeling unusually lethargic. Granted, it could be due to any number of other factors, but I definitely suspect this recent affliction has been slowly sapping my strength. I didn’t spend much time today doing anything for the campaign so tomorrow I’ll have to start putting in some work. It’d probably be best to start by actually reading and responding to some of the messages that have begun to accumulate in my inbox…

Saw Ip Man 4 today in the AMC Empire with Sawyer, Nick, and Ash. It was superlatively good in a certain manner I can’t quite describe. I suppose a good amount of my appreciation for it was built on the foundation of having watched the last three films in rapid succession over the past few days; but the fourth film, especially with the past three driving it, is really quite astounding and an incredibly moving and effective finale for the series.

Launched the Steam page today! It happened a bit later than I wanted and the initial Twitter post is not doing as well as I’d hoped (although I suppose that was pretty predictable as the image I made for it was substandard), but I’m glad to have finally gotten it out of the way. The first results come out tomorrow around noon, I think… well, I’ll know for certain then how well it did.

Got some more work done on the structure of the outpost and more or less completed the basic foundations and layering for the walls. Doors are still a bit of an issue currently due to the incredibly stupid and rigid way I set them up earlier, but once I’m finished writing this log I’ll go back and give them another shot. While I was laying out the foundations I was able to revisit and improve a number of other seemingly minor (but actually pretty significant) issues, the biggest being 

• + the visibility of particle effects while indoors: previously they’d show over the entire scene because the depth sorting was, well, completely nonexistent, but now all particle effects cut off appropriately when indoors but are still visible from windows and doorways
• + how being indoors is checked: previously, I used collision with the roof overlay as the primary means of checking whether the player was indoors but now it’s switched to a much more flexible tile-based solution which grants me a lot more specificity 
• + doors now come in two varieties, interior ones and exterior ones, which differ in shadowcasting behaviour 

The Steam store page also finally got approved tonight so I’ll be launching it tomorrow with #screenshotsaturday. Hopefully that’ll drive a bit more traffic to the Kickstarter, which has really slowed down today…

First post of the new decade! A lot of things have happened over the past two days, some pretty bad, but mostly very good. I launched the trailer and Kickstarter campaign on midnight of New Year’s Eve under a spell of anxiety so intense I felt like vomiting and had to lie down on the floor afterwards. It’s been doing very well so far, I think, although I feel as if the momentum is subsiding a bit. That’s natural, of course, although I’m a bit concerned since it also feels like I’m beginning to run dry on my connections. Well, there are still 28 days remaining as of today, so who knows what can happen. I’m still waiting on Steam to stop fucking around and approve the store page but once they do, that’ll be the first major update I’ll write for the Kickstarter campaign. I think that’ll give me a better understanding of the commercial feasibility of the game through wishlists, although I don’t feel that confident about it for a number of reasons, some more substantiated than others. In any case, we’ll see how it goes from here. It’s been going well so far and as long as I maintain optimism and a healthy sense of commitment, I think it’ll continue doing okay.

This morning I awoke to news of a minor personal tragedy in my family which initially appeared to be a lot worse than it eventually (at least for now) turned out to be. I spent the morning in a rather grim and contemplative mood but thankfully it lifted and I was able to get a decent amount of work done on new assets for the outpost, which I want to focus my attention on for the next couple of weeks. Tomorrow I’m gonna brush up on miscellaneous assets – stuff like floor tiling and decals, etc – and then start separating the layers into individual objects. Once the foundation and walls are set and I’m able to layer them properly I’ll start working on individual animations and functionality for all the furniture objects. A lot of work ahead, but at least it’s steady…

I originally wanted to write something much longer and more detailed for the occasion, but now that the time’s almost come, I feel like it’s more appropriate – in regards to both my overall feelings about last year, and my hopes for the one soon to come – to keep my thoughts relatively brief. 

This year’s been a rather strange one: it feels like it passed far more quickly than any before it, and despite the amount of progress I achieved both as a person and through my work, it barely feels like I moved much at all. For whatever reason, about halfway through this year, I finally had some kind of change of heart and realised with full force just how unacceptably I’d been living before: how petty, how angry, how needlessly callous I was towards those around me, and myself. It feels like one day something just lifted and all of a sudden I could see everything more clearly, the way it was meant to be seen. Although I realise it’ll still take me a long time to get there, for the first time in a long time I finally remembered who I could’ve, should’ve been.

It’s my goal for next year to continue acting upon that. I wish to continue striving to be a better person – kinder, calmer, more forgiving – for the sake of both myself and those around me; and just as importantly, learn to forgive myself in the moments where I feel myself slipping. I don’t want to hold onto all this anger anymore and I don’t want to hate so many people; I don’t want to hate myself. I want to be able to maintain a better relationship with women in general and I’m going to try my best to learn to let go of my hatred and distrust of them as well. I’ll continue trying to help my friends and peers where I can and I hope to be able to find success with my game, which I hope will enable me to reach a better position from which I’ll be able to pull up those around me. I hope that if I do find success, it won’t get the best of me and that I’ll be able to resist its temptations and snares so I can maintain my sense of commitment and dedication to my friends. 

I understand that I probably won’t be able to maintain all of these things every day or even most days but I hope that the good I am able to accomplish will be enough to keep us all going, and that in time and through reflection I’ll be able to forgive myself the bad days. I hope that I’ll continue to find the serenity to recognise and accept the things I cannot change, and the courage to change the things I can. Most of all, above all else, I hope I can continue being a good friend to those who consider me as such and a better one to those who have found me lacking. 

Well, it’s a bit early, but I’ve got things to do, so I’ll end it here. I dunno who’s been reading this or where you are or who you are or what you desire, but I hope that we can all find the strength and clarity to strive towards becoming better people regardless, and that we can be forgiven when we can’t. God’s grace and good tidings be with you.

So be it.

Checking out early tonight. I spent some time today proofreading and polishing the various public pages and uploaded the trailer everywhere it needs to be seen, but that was pretty light work all things considered and I was effectively done by noon. My work for the year is done and I’m taking the next few days off until launch. I’ll be in the city until probably the first or second, meaning my posts here will most likely be sporadic although I will try to make one for New Year’s Eve reflecting on my progress this year, and my thoughts moving into next. 

On a slightly tangential note, ever since my PlayStation Plus subscription expired a week or two ago my overall interest in playing games has noticeably receded even further and now that I’ve finished my work, the amount of downtime has become physically palpable. I decided today to attempt to start reading again – I haven’t read a book in over a year, I’ve now come to realise – and made some progress with Book 6 of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His work overall is really quite moving and reminds me in many ways of what I enjoy most about Joyce’s stuff. I’m a much slower and less attentive reader now than I was even just a year ago, I’ve come to realise with some ambivalence, but honestly maybe that’s better in some sense – or at the very least, indicative of some kind of positive internal change. Well, at least I hope that much. In all likelihood though it’s probably a sign of nothing more or less than the fact that I just haven’t read anything of considerable weight in over a year since rather dramatically renouncing any and all interest in theory or literature and in doing so probably sacrificing the one thing which has afforded me some clout over others all these years. In any case, I now know it wasn’t worth it. 

Finally finished the trailer today. It’s about as good as it’ll ever get for now under my control, anyways. Currently uploading it to all the relevant places: it feels good to be done with it. I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety about the release, honestly, but it really peaked tonight after a remarkably petty coincidence (or maybe not so much of a coincidence, but more truthfully, a consciously escalated series of ill-advised choices). I’m feeling okay now, I think, but it really hit me and caught me off-guard.

I spent some time with Aurora this evening. We talked a lot about sentimentality and sentimental things, which I suppose is apropos to the time of year – and to the fact that in two days (well, less now, actually) she’s leaving for another city, first for a few months in a sublet and then maybe for good. Her residency’s in the spring, which means next I’ll see her will be, at earliest, some time around May or so, more likely in the summer… Well, whatever happens, I hope she’ll be okay, and that she’ll find what she’s looking for out there – and that it’ll be good for her when she does.

Made the mistake of rewatching a Makoto Shinkai film tonight – The Garden of Words, in this particular case – and man, was it a mistake… it’s been a while since I’ve last seen a romance film (not that Garden is a traditional romance story in particular, or even a film about romance at all; I just can’t think of a better term in the moment) and I remember now why I stopped watching them. 

There’s just something really painful about how beautiful it all is: Shinkai excels more than basically anyone else I’m aware of at taking the most mundane and unremarkable artefacts of daily life and elevating them into something beyond cinema or even art in general, where the world seems to become positively imbued with this kind of unbearable, untouchable beauty whose most remarkable and lasting effect is the horrible wrenching sensation that washes over you the moment the illusion breaks. It almost feels like taking some kind of incredibly potent opiate: the sense of euphoria is powerful enough to tear you away from reality for just a moment, long enough to feel the slightest glimpse of some other possible life, before rapidly receding, leaving you painfully, acutely aware of how dull and petty your own life seems in comparison. 

Do I hate it? I don’t know – no, I don’t think I do. In fact, I think I love it: being able to not just see but feel that other possibility, even if for just a moment. But man, does it hurt… it tears me to pieces every time. The only way to sustain the feeling is by reaching further and further into this ever-receding warmth, this impossible light, which will not and cannot sustain itself. The deeper you get into all of it the darker the real world seems in comparison. Sooner or later you’ll have to face it anyways.

Man, I feel nauseous…

Spent the day working on post-processing effects again for the trailer. Nothing specific to talk about although in general I do feel as if I’m getting better at editing – or at least getting a better sense of what does and doesn’t to work – and occasionally I even start to think that I’ve begun enjoying it. I suppose though that’s a dangerous kind of thing to think in its own right…

I think I’ve been feeling more easily aggravated lately, especially by people online. I have a difficult time telling if the things I’m reading are getting progressively stupider or if I’m just growing more impatient but a whole lot of stuff I’ve been seeing lately has really started to get on my nerves. It’s not that I lack the ability to understand where these people are coming from, or even recognise on some abstract level the validity of their grievances: it’s that I just don’t care about how they feel anymore precisely because they’ve been feeling it so long and so acutely and as a consequence I feel as if I’ve become utterly inured to the banality of their suffering.

I thought I was becoming a nicer person, but I don’t know where all of this is coming from: the anger and intolerance, the sheer disgust of it all. I think that’s what I’ve been feeling now more than anything else, the one feeling that’s caught me offguard the most: disgust. I feel like I look out at the world these days and more and more I find myself gazing upon it in absolute contempt, a kind of overwhelming disgust that I can’t explain or understand or even articulate myself. I don’t want to feel this way, I keep on telling myself. But clearly some part of me does. 

Started working on post-processing on the trailer. It was an incredibly taxing process just to get everything set up as not only did I have to familiarise myself with the basics of Premiere but I had to acquire a copy of it in the first place, which turned out to be an entire ordeal on its own as I needed the most recent version which was frustratingly difficult to obtain for fairly obvious reasons. Well, in any case, I was able to finally get everything set up. After working on it for a few hours it’s become increasingly apparent that my hardware is just not up to task to handle tasks like video editing in any respectably efficient manner: rendering performance is pretty horrendous across the board and things like overlay effects – the bulk of my work heretofore – are almost prohibitively taxing. Nevertheless, as Sawyer’s fallen sick somehow and isn’t available to work anyways, I’ve gotta take over…

Missed last night’s entry because I was too tired by the end of the day but Sawyer and I finished up the bulk of the trailer and were able to cut a final draft just in time for the holidays. There’s a few more relatively minor edits to make before I feel it’s fully ready for publishing, which we’ll work on when we meet in a few days for the new year, but all in all, it came out looking really good, almost better than my expectations, and I’m quite proud of it. I think it’s our best work yet, and I’m looking forward to being able to publish it.

Went to a Christmas party tonight where I met with some old childhood friends. I was surprised how nice it felt to see all of them again – that even if we don’t really talk to or interact with one another at all outside of these gatherings (let alone regularly), somehow every time we meet every other year there’s always this feeling of real… kinship, I suppose, although a better way to frame it is probably as this unique sense of shared history, a kind of enduring memory of the passage of time. It’s such a fundamentally banal yet strange thing: that we all grew up together as children and now, almost a decade and a half later, we’re all more or less adults. In some sense I reckon we’re almost witnesses to each other’s lives in a certain and very particular kind of way that most people aren’t so fortunate to have, and there’s something oddly moving about that. I dunno, maybe I’m just too sentimental, and the spirit of the holidays – however little of that there is left, anyways – has started to get to my head. In any case though, seeing them has made me feel better about the future and the past alike: being able to have faith in the stability their lives have offered, and will hopefully continue to offer as a parallax to my own. And in turn, I hope I’ll be able to offer the same to all my friends in the days to come.

Implemented a new effect for the camera zoom, designed to somewhat emulate both in visuals and audio a quasi-focus shift effect in digital photography. It was pretty straightforward to implement in terms of the basic steps: I already had different zoom levels mapped so all I really did was increase the speed of the zoom factor, and added a mild chromatic shift + Gaussian blur effect after every zoom. For whatever reason it took me a while to figure out how to actually implement the effects – I spent an hour or two stupidly trying to combine the shaders themselves – but eventually I just ended up with a standard surface stack. 

Basically, how it works is that there’s three layers at work (only two of which are relevant for this): 

1. SURF_CHROMA (the irrelevant one), which stores the application surface after the chromatic palette is drawn
2. SURF_GLITCH, which applies a glitched-out filter over the chromatically-shifted SURF_CHROMA
3. SURF_BLUR, which applies a basic Gaussian blur to the visually distorted SURF_GLITCH

Each one uses its own shader and draws the previous surface using the respective shader. It’s almost definitely incredibly inefficient and prone to performance issues so I’m monitoring it closely, but so far I’ve been able to address all the issues that’ve arisen heretofore.

All in all, I think the effect looks pretty good, if I could say so myself.

Spent the first half of the day trying to come up with things to work on, before deciding that I’d work on environments. Well, I gave it an earnest attempt I think but it turns out that no matter how much I would try otherwise, today was just not meant to be my day. 

Ended up inadvertently taking the day off. Felt a vague sense of unrest throughout the day; no identifiable source. Nothing else to report.

Finished the medical treatment UI for now, and compiled three more clips for the trailer. It turns out I have about a minute’s worth of footage left to record, and roughly twenty (nineteen, to be exact) potential cuts to account for. I’m thinking about creating a few more cinematics as well – maybe four or five – which reduces that number a bit. There’s a lot of miscellaneous actions that I can showcase which can fill a good bulk of the required volume but the main issue is that I’ve yet to figure out a way to showcase them in an interesting manner, as I’m not confident zooming in for the footage which means that at least for now I have to have diverse environments for each individual action, which is a total pain in the ass. It’ll no doubt be worth it in the long run, though. I suppose what I work on will ultimately depend heavily on how I’m feeling over the next few days. I’ll try to work on some new environments tomorrow.

Started working on the medical treatment UI today since I realised I needed to get it done anyways as part of the trailer. Managed to get the general graphics laid out – placement, size, basic interactivity – so tomorrow I’m gonna work on text. I think for the trailer I’ll just use a sketch of the final version as the internal framework is gonna take far longer than I’m willing to dedicate right now for what’s probably gonna end up to be a five second shot at best. 

Freezing rain. The branches and needles and leaves were all covered in this thin  and brittle encasing of ice but at the right angle in the right light it looked rather beautiful, in a strange and inexplicable kind of way. Today was the first time I’ve been outside for a significant period of time during the day time in a while. The air felt cold and clean and the sky was a real dismal, lonely swirl of grey.

Made good progress on the trailer today with Sawyer: finished up the initial draft, meaning the entire intro and most of the major structural elements have been successfully coordinated and executed. Now it’s up to me again to start working on additional content to fill the remaining space – just over a minute of fairly rapid cuts, which is honestly much better than I expected – over the next two weeks or so. Most of it is already in some stage of development so it’ll just be a matter of implementation. Luckily, a lot of it is also very UI-based stuff meaning I can get away with repeating some environments since most of the screen will be obscured significantly, if not entirely anyways. In any case, having gotten this much work done today at once has substantially improved my optimism moving forward for the next few weeks and I feel freshly motivated. If this feeling endures, it’ll be an excellent way to start off the new year.

Small but significant update this morning: implemented Steam integration (the game now shows up in the Steam library, although there’s no store page info as I’ve obviously yet to publish that), and created a new icon and splash screen for the game. I also sent in the Kickstarter for review – a process that apparently usually takes around two to three days, but which, much to my surprise, was cleared almost immediately after submission. I don’t know if I just got lucky or if their approval process has changed and the information page just hasn’t been updated accordingly, but whatever the case, I’m glad that I encountered virtually no friction here. 

On a semi-related note, I’ve decided to push back the release date of the campaign and Steam page to early next month. Not only does it give me more time to work on assets for the trailer, but it also works better from a strategic point of view. Releasing around the holiday season as it turns out would have been a pretty risky maneouvre. 

Failed to make an entry yesterday as the internet was shut off for the entirety of the day. I’ve mostly just been working on more cinematics, and have managed as of today to more or less complete the intro sequence. I’ve also edited the music for the trailer a bit to feel better aligned with the more stark and minimalist pacing of the visuals. It’s been over a week now since I’ve worked on anything in the game itself and it feels strange. Now that the most major work is done though (well, hopefully, at least), I can get back to working on new environments again. In two days I’ll have reached the original deadline for having finished production on the trailer. 

I’ve been feeling pretty disturbed lately lately, and the one day without internet really crystallised that feeling for me into a tangible reality. Today I fell asleep at 1300 and slept for almost twelve hours with few interruptions, experiencing a number of incredibly strange and vivid dreams whose physical toll I could feel in my body after I awoke. I had an argument today with my mother – the usual things, what else – that further exacerbated my general unease into an overwhelming cloud of palpable dread and anger. I thought I was getting better this entire time, that I was improving and becoming a better person… calmer, kinder, more forgiving. In reality though, maybe it was just because I went unchallenged for too long, that I developed a false sense of progress. That this whole time I’ve just been under some kind of delusion of self-improvement. Well, it’s as they say. It doesn’t matter how many things you do right, as long as you manage to do one thing wrong at just the wrong time. 

Haolun came over again late last night, the first time we’ve met since Thanksgiving. We went to the diner as usual and then drove around until 0300 or so. I felt pretty exhausted throughout the day but still managed to get one cinematic cel completely done as I hoped yesterday, and started on two others which are structurally finished but need to be tweaked and cleaned up a bit. I’m hoping tonight I’ll be able to correct my sleep cycle so I can once again return to a normal schedule of work.

Managed to recover some momentum today: worked at a steady pace throughout the morning on a new cinematic, and arranged the framing/pacing of the previous ones. Although my rate of production was technically under expectations I don’t feel too bad about it as it’s still an improvement over yesterday.

Looking at the amount of work I have left for the trailer, I’ve realised that it will probably be worthwhile both for the sake of its quality and my sanity to extend the deadline for it a bit, maybe a week or two. With the holiday coming up, it’ll be difficult to coordinate meetings which means that for at least an entire week I’ll basically be unable to implement anything anyways, which works to my advantage at the end of the day as it buys me more time to develop more interesting assets. 

Completely lost momentum for some reason. I woke up early, stepped outside and looked at the sky, and immediately realised right at that exact moment that I would get nothing done today. I don’t know why. It snowed last night but most of it didn’t last past noon. I spent the day in a restless, listless mood, pacing around my room in circles and staring at spots in the ceiling that appeared for a moment to be patterns. I’m too tired to do anything else tonight, let alone work. I hope tomorrow is better.

Another productive day. Once again was able to not just meet but in fact exceed my target goal by evening, and also managed to draft out what I believe will be, with minor tweaks, the final layout for cinematics. I haven’t opened the project in several days now; I hope the rest of the week goes according to plan and I’ll be able to return by next week to working on stuff in-engine. 

My sleep schedule has become compromised as of late, although I’ve yet to feel any noticeable negative consequences. I have a feeling I’m wasting away my nights, but it’s also hard to work during the day too. I feel more easily distracted than usual… so far it hasn’t presented any serious logistical problems but it’s something I should definitely seek to address moving forward.

Got two more cinematics done today, which means I’ve started off the week on schedule. I’ve been encountering a lot more difficulty than I initially expected getting Avery’s facial features consistent across multiple angles – it turns out I overestimated my ability to maintain facial consistency across multiple angles entirely without references – but to be honest I actually quite enjoy the challenge since I can feel myself improving on a moment-to-moment basis as I gain a better understanding of her features and angles. I have a strong feeling that a good part of my disorientation stems from the fact that her facial structure and body type are both ones I’m pretty unaccustomed to drawing, which makes it harder for me to visualise what she looks like from different perspectives. Either way though I got it figured out for today and I feel satisfied with my progress.

Started working today on some cinematics for the trailer. I spent the entire first half of the day trying to figure out how exactly they’d look, which is almost always the longest and most difficult part of the process: but once I got the first one sketched out everything else fell into place almost immediately afterwards. I’m gonna continue working on them for the rest of the week: hopefully I can average around two or three a day, to a total of a dozen or so. Since I’m working at a smaller resolution, hopefully it’ll be a bit easier. All the images are gonna have to be drawn and assembled at 4:3 (or 1.33:1) aspect ratio which is gonna be a little bit of an annoyance because it’s not a resolution I’m really used to working at but I reckon I’ll get used to it pretty quickly in due time. I’m looking forward to this week’s work.

At some point this afternoon I fell asleep in such an odd position that upon waking I found the entire left side of my upper body uncomfortably stiff, unable to turn my head left without feeling considerable pain in the neck muscles. Although it’s subsided a bit the pain and stiffness are still both very much present hours later…

I worked today on mixing two new tracks which I recorded yesterday. Although I was initially hesitant on having any kind of music at all I realised that the slightly distorted nature of the recording (which I did via my phone) actually suited a diegetic score very appropriately, leading me to reconsider my earlier reluctance. I’m thinking that each outpost will have its own theme that plays automatically the first time upon entering, and can then be replayed via a console. Listening to music will help improve Avery’s mood, as well as improve the quality of her sleep. 

Speaking of sleep though, maybe it’s time I should get to sleep…

Skipped yesterday’s entry for no reason whatsoever beyond sheer lack of will. Sawyer came over, we discussed the details of the trailer and then we set up the Steam product page. I worked on that a bit more throughout today, and everything now except the trailer is basically complete. Everything about it is a fucking trial to work through, to say the least… I remember it being pretty goddamn bad but it’s somehow even worse than I expected.

My goal for next week is to finish all of the scenes for the trailer. I’m considering the possibility of making some brief cinematics shots throughout: I’ll start on those over the weekend.

Decided to take today off. Nothing to report.

A cold bright day. Nearly all the snow has melted away. I spent the entire day working on assets for the Kickstarter page and made a substantial amount of progress. I’ve managed to finish nearly all of the key visual assets, meaning the only things left to do are the trailer, and some miscellaneous headers/interface elements. I imagine it should only take about another week or two at this pace, which puts me far ahead of schedule: if all else goes well maybe I’ll be able to finally get back to working on stuff I’m actively interested in again sooner than I expected.

Moderate snowfall all throughout the day. The sight of it made me feel rather listless and disconnected from myself and the outside world. There’s this curious sensation often associated with fresh snowfall called anosmia: a near total lack of smell. The snow blankets the environment, trapping and burying beneath it the usually dense cloud of natural odours and scents lingering in the air, which our minds on a regular basis barely register on a conscious level as anything above ambient noise. The whiteness of the snow, combined with the general lack of sound, combined with the near total lack of scent – there’s something terribly eerie about it all, an almost praeternatural kind of stillness to the world for just a few moments. For just a moment you become intimately aware of just how much stuff is actually going on at any given moment which you’ve just filtered out into the fringes of your attention; and only in its absence are you able to finally recognise, if not distinguish its presence. There’s a real loneliness to it. It makes me feel both calm, and slightly uneasy.

I’ve spent the past day or two writing up the content for the Kickstarter campaign. All of the text is mostly done, although I have to go over it a few more times over the next week or two to edit for consistency across sources. Tomorrow, I’d like to start compiling images for the page (which I’ll most likely recycle as assets for the store pages as well).

The first snowfall of the year, and with it, the arrival of December. For some reason, lying in my bed just looking up at the ceiling, I was overcome with a sudden vision of spring which both seemed like so long ago yet not so far away at the same time. The past few months have been permeated with a particular creeping sense of melancholy whose origins I can’t quite place, and which itself remains teleologically elusive. I can’t tell if something’s just a little bit off in my life, or if it’s something beyond my control… it’s frustrating, to say the least, especially since it seems to be affecting my overall productivity pretty significantly, in ways I have difficulty articulating, let alone defining.

Another month gone. I want to say I’ve made significant progress because I feel as if on some level I have, but also, I’m not really sure. I do know for certain though that I wasn’t able to complete all the intended objectives for the trailer in time. I’ve realised that actually the consequences for that aren’t as dire as I wanted to believe: I have most of December to continue brushing up on pre-existing assets, as well as creating new ones, on top of writing all the copy for the Kickstarter and Steam pages (most of which is already written to some degree). That should be more than enough time – if I don’t get complacent like I have been most days these past few months, that is. Just gotta keep on keeping on, as they say.

Spent the first part of the day improving environmental assets, then decided to cut a new track for the trailer after realising how difficult it’d actually be to actually pace the footage to the old one. Everyone who’s now heard the new track says that it’s a significant improvement over the old one both in quality and tone, and I’d tend to agree: it feels more unique I think and does a better job setting the mood. Best of all it heavily samples a track by a buddy of mine, whose work I’ve wanted to feature for a while since I met him back when I was working on MA. He hasn’t worked on music in a long time I think but hopefully this will be able to turn him some new followers, for whatever it’s worth.

Didn’t end up seeing my high school friends after all: some logistical fuck-up as per usual when it comes to these kinds of things. Well, we always have next month, during the winter holiday – or so it goes. Thankfully it meant I had more time today to work on things, which is always good. Tomorrow I’m gonna clean up the track and add some finishing touches, and start working on a new environment. Two more days till December…

Started the day off in a rather dark and dare I say frangible mood, which thankfully resided over the course of the day into a more stable kind of melancholy. I was able to get a bit of work done today, mostly focusing on lighting effects for the interiors, but I’m still dragging at an unacceptable rate in terms of overall assets. Tomorrow, I might be visiting some old friends, meaning my schedule is once again uncertain, and Sunday, Sawyer’s coming over to begin work on the trailer, meaning the only day I have left to actually devote fully is Saturday. Well, I suppose I only have myself to blame for this rising wave of nausea building within me.

Woke up after sunset feeling like absolute shit. Nevertheless, perhaps spurred by the dismal state of my affairs, I immediately set about work and was able to maintain a reasonably steady pace for the rest of the night. I’m almost done with the environment I’ve been working on the past few days – probably the most difficult one actually, since it’s an indoor location and requires the implementation of fairly advanced lighting paths (which I finished up today) – so it’s just a matter of persisting and not getting distracted. Just a few more weeks and all of this will come to fruition…

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.

Woke up before dawn and worked without pause for the entire morning, which allowed me to accomplish a good variety of unexpected tasks including revamping the general ambient audio, implementing a pointer-based hand torch, and adding furniture and paneling to the interior of the cabin. 

For all the things I managed to get done though I still somehow feel it wasn’t enough. I was supposed to work on a new environment today but for some reason, once again, I just did something completely off the schedule. It really frustrates me in a way that I feel is actively burning me out. I have to keep on persisting though. It’s a shame that this period had to coincide with the holidays, when all my friends are coming home. Maybe I can take a few days out. Either way, just a handful of weeks left before I can get back to feeling more normal…

Aurora and I went out to the reservation today and looked at the water.

I enjoy spending time with her. We’ve known each other long enough that our conversations are imbued with a certain kind of history and understanding that only longevity can grant, even when it exists beyond our articulation. 

It was the first time I’ve seen her this month, as well as the first time I’ve been outside proper in several weeks. It was a warmer day – relatively speaking, anyways – and the air felt clean and bright. For a moment I felt properly invigorated, my mind and spirit eased of the fog of my work, and I felt I could finally look clearly at myself and the world around me. I became aware of the sensation of what I can only really describe as a kind of brightness emerging within me… which lingered for just a moment before giving into this wave of immense sadness, or perhaps more accurately weariness: the sudden realisation of the fact that my work is not as profound as I sometimes believe it to be, and that my actions will most likely have no great weight or bearing upon the lives of others in any foreseeable manner. But before I could confront it with any proper sincerity or reflection, the feeling vanished and was replaced instead by this kind of dim, melancholic ebb that lent to the rest of the day a kind of somber and wistful quality. I fell asleep some time around evening and woke with the acute sensation that I’d just drifted through vast stretches of time with no consequence.

I guess all of this is to say that maybe I really just need to start getting out more. 

Spent the first half – well, over half technically – of today asleep, and didn’t wake until 1600. It was already beginning to darken outside by the time I finally came around, and recognising that, on top of the fact that I’d basically wasted the entire day, filled me with a sense of profound disappointment. 

I immediately set about working when I finally got up, and managed to significantly increase the density of several pre-existing areas, which now look suitably forest-like. I also worked on several new generic environmental assets, and cleaned up some old ones. It turns out that at some point through some adjustment or other I’d disabled shadows on all the trees without realising it, so I fixed that as well, and added a bit of directional randomisation to all flora instances to further increase the complexity of their appearance in-game.

Next week I plan on working exclusively on environments for the trailer, and I’m very seriously committing to getting one done per day. At that rate, if I’m able to maintain, I’ll be able to get all of the new environments I needed done on schedule. Once Sawyer returns from Thanksgiving holiday we’ll get to work on the trailer. I’ll spend about a week planning the layout with him and brushing up assets, and then commit the rest of the month to producing promotional materials and documentation for the Kickstarter.

Didn’t end up visiting Norah after all: turns out she was too hungover apparently from whatever she was doing last night and felt too tired to meet. Well, no surprises there, I suppose. This happens nearly every time: we’ll schedule some time to meet and everything will seem fine right up until several hours before the agreed time, when she’ll tell me that for whatever unpredictable reason she no longer wishes to meet. She’ll then offer to schedule it to some other day but both of us know that it’s just a displacement of responsibility for the moment. I guess in some sense her ability to disappoint never quite fails to disappoint.

As they say though, fool me once…

Anyways, that ended up completely throwing me off so despite starting off the day in a productive mindset, I ended up losing control and slipped back into a state of vague uselessness. I just sat around all day and played video games in a state of mind so disconnected from the tasks at hand that I can’t even recall in any detail what I actually played today. I’ll have to make up the lost work tomorrow.

I have to stop placing so much emphasis on the presence of others when it comes to planning. People always end up coming up with some bullshit excuses and honestly, I can’t really blame them, because I do it too, and I’m even doing it right now, probably to a more harmful degree, pushing the responsibility for my frustration and the resulting ineptitude onto the (in)action of a convenient other. But who wants to confront their own shortcomings willingly? At the end of the day I suppose it really is just best after all to place one’s faith and sense of balance in work above all else. At least that way the only person I can blame for letting me down is myself.

Another early sign-off. Trying to improve my sleeping schedule so I can spend more time working in the daylight. Today was productive: I woke up around 8 and worked throughout the day creating and improving assets, including some new animations, and further refining the pointer system. It now consistently tracks real-time mouse movement instead of simulated (meaning the pointer speed is much more predictable now), and checks for overlap between the cursor and the entire sprite of the target rather than just the bounding box (which has to be smaller to accommodate the depth stacking system). The pointer now actually feels good to use. I’ll leave it be for now. 

Tomorrow, I’m visiting Norah so I’ll be gone for most of the day but when I return I plan on working on more environmental assets. There’s just over a week left in the month and a bunch of stuff I’ve yet to finish but I’m confident I can get it all done on schedule.

Checking out early tonight, I feel incredibly drained for some reason. Another day with decent but irrelevant progress: I implemented a pointer-based text interaction system that allows me to implement a dynamic and semi-randomised array of item descriptions (ie, flavour text) upon hovering the mouse over the object. I’m also considering switching the direction of the hand torch from being dependent upon Avery’s current walking vector – which makes for a rather awkward and imprecise control scheme – to being tied instead to the mouse, which allows finer and more intuitive control over the light. I’m considering tying Avery’s direction as well to the mouse, at least when she’s standing still: if the mouse’s x-position is to her left, she’ll face to her left, and vice versa. In order to do that, I have to figure out what the hell is going on with the mouse cursor in the first place.

All of that sounds good and all, but truth be told, it’s completely not what I should be prioritising at the moment. Why do I keep dragging on this shit? I know exactly what needs to be done, yet for some reason I just never actually commit to doing it, and instead end up doing some totally non-urgent task that’s just enough to convince me that I’ve accomplished something for the day even though – and this is the most frustrating part of it all – no one’s actually being fooled otherwise, myself in particular. What a monumental waste of time. I have to get started on actual work tomorrow. This time for real.

Just another day. Spent a good while this afternoon writing log entries for Avery, which turned out better than expected. It’s not exactly a total waste of time seeing as I did get a good amount of content done, but it’s also not what I should be prioritising now, which is stuff for the trailer.

I really hate this feeling – of feeling guilty for doing the wrong thing, just because there’s something else that needs to be done first. I mean, of course, there are priorities and deadlines, that’s the nature of work; but it just feels like it wasn’t so long ago (although I suppose it really wasn’t, not even a full half-year since I’ve started) that I could just do whatever I felt like doing and enjoy it in the moment. Well, no use complaining about it, it’s just the price I pay, and one I’ve chosen to pay.

A decently productive day. I decided to stream again, during which I was able to successfully finish two fairly involved animations. Although admittedly I don’t particularly enjoy streaming, it definitely helps keep me focused for sustained periods of time, which is probably the area I struggle with most. The awareness of persistent surveillance and external scrutiny ensures that I’m actually working instead and not getting sidetracked by random pitfalls. 

The month is almost over, in less than two weeks. The plan was to have all of the content assembled for the trailer by the end of the month so that I could work full-force come December towards getting the trailer and campaign out in a coordinated manner. While I’m still confident I can make the upcoming deadline, I have to admit I’m cutting it a bit too close for comfort, and as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, my rate of progress but more importantly my mood these past few months has been concerning. My pace is practically glacial at this point and the only thing that really keeps me going consistently is the sense of structure I’ve enforced upon myself. I hope there are no issues regarding the trailer; if it comes down to it, I might have to end up cutting it myself after all, which is a contingency I have to be prepared for.  

There are some days, I have to be honest, where I don’t feel as if I’m working at all. Or as if I don’t even feel like I really exist anymore. It’s when I see what other people are doing – my old friends – with their lives, earning money, moving away to distant corners of the country, even just grinding away at the jobs they hate, day in and day out. There’s a certain kind of envy I feel. Not for their work itself, which I’d hate to do, but for the sense of externalised purpose and meaning. Their work is not solitary like mine is. It’s grounded in something beyond themselves. However petty that ulterior purpose is, they’re part of something – and for now, at least, I’m not. My friends and I, we’ve got each other’s backs and we’ve got others in whom we can entrust parts of ourselves… but at the end of the day, our work is solitary and it’s unbearably lonely, even to one another, and there’s no solace from that, not even release. We’re here I suppose because of that: because we couldn’t fit in with others, because we couldn’t tolerate the stupidity, the redundancy, the sheer repetition of the world. But I’ve discovered now that in all of that, there’s something else too, which we don’t have: the reassurance of one’s place and purpose. I wish I could say the same for myself; but honestly, some days, I just feel lost.

It seems as if my weekend of malaise has, completely unsurprisingly, spilled over into the work week. I sat at my computer for the better part of the day just staring at the screen basically. Eventually I did get some work done drafting out the food system. I still need to get some of the details figured out – exact quantities and weights mostly – but I think by and large the system’s now fully planned out.

1. Basically, raw food materials must first be found and/or collected in the world. Avery can hold up to 1.5kg at once in her pack.

2. Raw food materials must then be brought back to the outpost and loaded into the Food Processing Unit, where over the period of one in-game hour, they’ll be processed into a cartridge of usable materials.

3. These cartridges must then be loaded into the food printer, and a ration schematic must be selected. Different schematics have different requirements, and produce rations with different properties and advantage. The rations will then be printed (each one takes about ten minutes of in-game time to print).

I’ll start on the animations for it tomorrow.

I woke this morning feeling in a strangely unmotivated mood but I set myself to work anyways and managed to achieve some minor successes, the most major one being the conversion of the bulk of my notes to Trello, where they’re now organised in vaguely coherent outlines. I must admit, for a moment while transcribing some of the projected plans, I felt struck by a sudden sense of anxiety as I realised just how much work still lies ahead. 

I reorganised my desk today, and as a result, I think I feel marginally less distracted, although it’s probably just a placebo at work.

No work today, just posted my #screenshotsaturday – which admittedly was kinda half-assed and didn’t look anywhere near as good as I intended – and then did nothing for the rest of the day. I felt unusually choleric today for no discernible reason, although lately as a whole I feel as if I’ve grown more prone to spikes of unexpected anger. I don’t know what’s causing it, but sometimes, it almost feels pleasant in a way, at least in the moment…

I’m glad to report another productive day. I got a lot of work done on environmental assets, including furniture for the outpost as well as a denser wooded variation. I think I’ll present the latter tomorrow for #screenshotsaturday after a few touchups, and then I’m gonna spend the rest of the weekend implementing the furniture. Next week, I’ll start working on animations for the outpost assets. 

I realised with a start just now that the month is already halfway over. Although I’ve making good progress so far and for all intents and purposes I’m still well on schedule, I felt a sudden spike of anxiety or perhaps more accurately this creeping sense of unease that somehow I’m not gonna be able to finish on time. I don’t expect that to actually happen, of course – in fact, I not only will do but am currently doing everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t happen – but it’s still there. No doubt I reckon it’s just the usual fare for any kind of major deadline… 

Although overall these past few months have, all things considered, actually been pretty good, that sense of foreboding has really begun to mount lately, in tandem with the aforementioned anxiety about the launch. The days seem to be passing by faster and faster and I feel like I’m losing track of time, as if the parallax has disappeared from my life: all of my old friends have either moved on and slipped away or they’re still here but they’ve become similarly dislodged from time like me. 

I don’t necessarily mean that in a particularly negative sense, but I can’t help but feel at times like it is something negative, in the quite literal definition of the word: like there’s something missing, an absence of sorts where previously something else had filled it and given it form and shape. Well, I suppose that’s actually exactly what’s happened: I’ve lost external structure and the world outside has by and large, at least on a day to day, moment to moment context, ceased to matter. A good friend of mine says it’s because of repetition: you do the same thing every single day and after a while you stop noticing the passage of time because your body and mind become accustomed to the flow and rhythm. I trust him on that.

In some ways it feels nice, because I no longer feel burdened with all the stupid responsibilities and bullshit expectations that used to just constantly crush me. But on the other hand, lacking those, I’ve come to realise that actually my interior is rather quite empty – and more than that, it’s empty in a way that’s neither profound nor interesting, but rather actually quite horribly mundane. I suppose that’s just how it is for most people though, hell, maybe everyone. I suppose a large part of growing up is learning to come to terms with that.

Anyways, in more grounded terms, I’m running out of money, so I really do have to prioritise the success of the Kickstarter campaign now. In a fit of mild frustration earlier today I caved and bought a pizza and although it wasn’t that expensive – $13, which is actually a pretty decent price – it forced me to realise with sobering clarity that my bank account is running precipitously low and has been, over the past several months, leaking continuously, a trickle of what I at least thought at the time to be negligible purchases having culminated over time into something grotesquely unwieldy. As much as I hate the thought of it, I do have to start pulling in some income pretty fucking soon, or I’m gonna start facing some real issues, to put it lightly.

Didn’t get anything done today in terms of in-engine stuff, felt a bit distracted and unfocused for whatever reason. Every time I sat down to attempt to get something done I’d just feel this weird urge to get up and start pacing or something. I instead just decided to work on graphical assets, starting with the splash screen. 

Eventually I ended up revisiting Avery’s portrait, which I believe I mentioned previously I was displeased with, and I spent the entire afternoon basically redrawing her portrait because the angle on the arm/hand was inarticulately awkward. The new one I finished today looks a bit better, I still feel the posing is somewhat awkward although anatomically it’s now correct and all the lighting seems consistent now as well. I also painted her an alternate portrait as well, with her coat on. Tomorrow I plan on streaming some environmental work.

I have a difficult time believing the week is already over – and yet somehow it is. Today was a really productive day. Haolun stayed over again last night and after we woke we went over to the creek and hung around for a bit, although it was uncomfortably cold (somehow it’s dropped down to 22F, wind chill included, over the span of about a week). 

After he left I got to work and successfully managed to port over the system UI from But For Now We Are Young over the next few hours. Aside from needing to update the text on the various information screens, everything else is completely functional, and I even added an additional pop-up window for when volume is changed, which was intended for but not implemented into Young around the time I suspended it. Tomorrow (or later today) I’ll finish up the final touches on the system UI but otherwise it’s working really well and I’m really surprised I managed to implement it so quickly and with so few hiccups. I also managed to create a really cool ASCII version of Avery’s portrait, which looks far better I feel than the original. I wasn’t really considering planning on having a major nondiegetic introductory screen, but now that I’ve seen just how good it looks…

Staoue came over tonight and we drove around for a while, and looked at architecture manuals at the bookstore. Shortly after he arrived we had a pretty hilarious encounter with a police officer who, while turning into the train station where we had parked, apparently saw me gesticulating wildly through the passenger window and pulled over to check in on us. We quickly cleared up the misunderstanding and in the meantime piqued his curiosity about what we’d been talking about so animatedly (we were real up in laughter). Well, I’m not gonna tell you what we were talking about because I don’t want to record it in what’s supposed to be a semi-serious log but needless to say after we told him what we were discussing he too joined in on it briefly and we all had a pretty good laugh about it. He looked pretty young, just a bit older than us maybe. He seemed to have genuinely enjoyed the conversation, and I hope that he had a good time and that the experience had a positive effect on his night. 

For some reason that interaction had a very positive effect on my day, which was already going pretty well (and continued to go well afterwards). I dunno; I guess it was because it was the first genuinely positive encounter I’ve had with someone who wasn’t already an established friend in a real long time. It really surprised me – in a positive sense – and made me feel more, well… optimistic, I guess. 

Ended up finishing a region of the world map today, at least in terms of the structure. Created a few new varieties of underbrush although I’d still like to improve a bit more on it: add some fallen / bent tree variations, vegetation clusters, etc. Density is improving now, which is a good thing; however I have a feeling that performance is gonna start being an issue real soon, if not already.

I’ve made the decision to scale down some of the rooms – ones with smaller focal points, mostly – from the standard 480×480 to 480×256. That gives me the opportunity to make more visually interesting and diverse rooms without having to worry about leaving half of it empty or filled with repeating underbrush (however realistic that may be). No important content is really being cut by the reduction and in fact the smaller size means I can dedicate the space in a more focused manner. The smaller room size also means improved performance in a number of regions due to trimmed-down instance count.

If I can average one new room every day or two for the next two weeks, that would be an ideal pace for the trailer… then I can get back to working on mechanics. 

Didn’t end up working on environments after all today, although I did get a good amount of work done on conceptual planning: broad overview stuff like narrative structure and various topographical connections, etc. I woke up early today, around 0800, and although at several points throughout the day I was very tempted to go back to sleep, for some reason each time something arose at the last moment to convince me to stay awake. I spent the entire day too tired to really focus on anything substantial yet motivated just enough to feel guilty going back to sleep. It reflects in the quality – or lack thereof, I suppose – of my work today: Avery’s portrait really kinda sucks to the point where I’m strongly considering just redoing it altogether, I fucked up the anatomy real bad because I wasn’t thinking straight (not to mention the lighting angles, or inconsistent shading, or hell, even the proportions in some parts are questionable, etc). 

Well, it was just for fun, anyways. No need to get too worked up about it.

Spent a few hours this afternoon working on world-building stuff, just establishing various organisations and schools mostly, as well as some geography. Coming up with authentic-sounding and linguistically-consistent (well, internally consistent, that is) names is remarkably difficult. Anyways, it’s not really anything I can talk about, both for obvious spoiler-related reasons but also just because there’s not much to actually talk about in terms of the process. It mostly just involves a lot of reading and double-checking references. Time to get back to work tomorrow…

Last night it dropped down to 22F, and the cans of beer I left in my bathroom were perfectly chilled when I examined them in the morning. It’s strange: it already feels like winter yet I barely noticed the passage of autumn. One day the trees were just on the cusp of reddening – hell, there were plenty of green leaves left, even – and then by the next, quite literally following a particularly severe overnight storm, all the leaves were swept away and since then the trees have just stood completely bare. The temperatures have routinely started dropping below freezing overnight. I haven’t actually gone outside for any meaningful period of time in a week.

Today was a generally productive day. I started integrating a new room – ftaires! – into the main game for the trailer and was able to get a #screenshotsaturday post up showcasing the new room as well as the full animation for setting up and entering the tent. I also started work on some new posters for characters. Next week I think I’ll start working on new locations for the trailer. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, from here on out I’m no longer be posting publicly about story-related content such as new locations etc. It’ll still be logged in Github for later viewing, though.

Finally, a productive day for once. I woke up pretty early – well, “early”, that is, relative to my waking schedule the past several weeks – and, upon sitting down, felt an immediate sense of motivation. Or rather, perhaps more accurately, what I felt instead was the conspicuous lack of that dim, cloying fog that usually seeps away at my energy, robbing me of the ability to focus on my work for any meaningful period of time. 

I spent several hours today in a state of focused work and was able to complete a rather complex and lengthy animation for the player entering (and exiting too, as surprisingly, it ended up being pretty reversible) the bivouac. It turned out a lot better than I’d initially envisioned and in the process of making it I was able to gain a better understanding of multiple angles which I’d previously considered but hadn’t really bothered with because I thought they’d be too complex to visualise. Well, they were, to be fair; it just turns out I’d overestimated just how difficult they’d be to actually implement.

At night, I played several hours of Siege while drinking with a bunch of friends. It was a great time, and I had a lot of fun. In a kinda curious way, it reminded me a bit of how I used to feel back in high school: that sense of open, careless enjoyment of the physicality of the moment, imbued with the warm haze of alcohol and raucous laughter. It felt pretty good. I hope I can share more moments like these with my friends in the days to come.

Another completely unproductive day. Woke up around 1600 from a strange dream. I was in school still – it looked like my middle school, but I was much older – and there were two girls with me, who were also around my age. I recognised one of them, but the other… she seemed like a friend I knew, but I’ve never seen her before in waking. The sky was bleak and the clouds seemed to move at unnatural speeds. We drove back from the school through an incoherent town that felt like the place where I grew up but wasn’t, to a field that felt like my home except it wasn’t. There was a massive tree in the yard before my house and when we arrived it was engulfed in flames. The sight of it filled me with a feeling of profound sadness and awe. 

When I was younger there were many trees around my house but in time they were all removed. I distinctly remember that there was a beautiful tree with fragile pink leaves right in front of the main door. One night I got angry – over what, I have no idea – and I started ripping away at it with an axe. It bled to death slowly over the next year and a half, becoming black and withered. A thick amber fluid leaked from the gashes I’d opened up in its side. Looking at it filled me with a sense of immense shame and regret. My father cut down all the other trees around the house over the next several years. Tore them all up by their roots so that no trace of them remained except in photographs and other artefacts of memory.

Anyways, when I awoke, it was already late into the afternoon yet the sky outside was dark and filled with rain. I sat around for a while staring at the blank canvas of the sprite editor, copied and pasted a few frames, but got virtually nothing actually accomplished. These past few animation cycles have been unbearably difficult to get through for some reason, both on a technical and a personal level. On top of that I feel like there’s been this hazy fog encroaching upon me these past few months, that’s draining me of my ability to work effectively. I can’t tell though if it’s because of work, or in spite of it. I’ll give it another try tomorrow…

Didn’t work at all today on the game, although I did spend some time cleaning up some of the public pages. I also wrote the release for But For Now We Are Young, which goes over, amongst other things, the general state of the project currently and what I plan on doing with it in the future. I’m pretty satisfied with the way the write-up went and I feel I successfully managed to achieve what I set out to communicate with it. In writing it, I feel like I’ve achieved a certain kind of peace with the project for now. I’m glad I took out the day to finally get it done. On the plus side, I also now have one more entry to add to my portfolio, for whatever that’s worth.

I’ll get to the animation for entering the tent tomorrow…

Yet another day of slow progress. Implemented, amongst other things, the animation for setting up the tent, so now the player is able to unpack the tent tarp from the pack (the unpacking animation still needs to be fixed because the backpack is open when the player goes to retrieve it, but closed when the tarp is detached), carry it to a location, unroll it, plant the stakes, and set up the interior framework. Tomorrow I’ll work on an animation for entering the tent. 

I have great difficulty getting anything done during the daytime, and it’s only really these last few hours at the end of the night, between midnight and 0300, that I find myself really able to focus on what needs to be done and, more importantly, actually get it done. My mind wanders far too much during the daytime, over the slightest divergences and distractions: even now, though, every other word I type, I find myself standing up and pacing around for a few moments before being able to move onto the next sentence. This has always been a problem throughout my life but some days it gets more severe than others and I feel like lately it’s been getting worse, despite the fact that overall I feel a clearer sense of purpose than the last several years combined. I don’t know what it is or how to fix it, or if there even is anything I can actually do about it. Like always though, I suppose the only thing I really can feasibly do is just continue working on schedule and hope it goes away on its own.

I saw this interesting quote today on Twitter from Brian Eno (excerpted from a 1995 book of essays called A Year With Swollen Appendices), which I’ve since clipped for posterity:

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

I was able to finish up the animation for erecting the framework of the bivouac today, although I think I’ll remove the guylines from it for the sake of convenience and efficiency. The animation took a rather long time although I’m glad it’s finally finished. Tomorrow I’ll implement it in gameplay, and if I have more time after that, I’ll also start working on the teardown as well. 

The next thing to be done in terms of visuals is the animation for entering and exiting the bivouac, which, depending on how I’m feeling when I wake up, will either be very straightforward, or unnecessarily involved. Hopefully it’s the former. I’m actually kinda looking forward to getting it done because once I do, not only will the bivouac be functionally complete (only missing audio), but I’ll be able to start properly working on the sleep system, which is something I’m very interested in. 

Didn’t actually end up working at all today, although I really should’ve. Well, the work week resumes in proper tomorrow. I’ll have to go back and clean up a bunch of old stuff: audio for kicking out fires, implementing the other lighter types, animations for erecting the tent framework and pinning the lines, audio for the entire tent process, taking down the tent… 

In short, there’s a lot of stuff that, in my desire to meet each weekly deadline (a deadline that I must remind myself doesn’t even actually exist in any meaningful external sense), I’ve been neglecting to take care of properly and it’s really beginning to show its effects, both in the numbers and my overall satisfaction (or lack thereof) with my work these past few weeks. It’s important to produce things in a timely fashion but it’s even more important to ensure a consistently high level of quality and if I had to sacrifice one for the other ti’d be the former without hesitation – yet somehow I seem to have forgotten that. 

Haolun came over last night and stayed over. It’s funny how in the intimacy of darkness the anchors underlying all our pretences and acts in the light finally surface: at the end of the day all there really is and ever was, the dim parallax of our existences, are girls. He compared the act of speaking into the darkness to a phone call: trusting the other to your voice and to your feelings, all the while never knowing whether the other was still there, still listening, or if they’d fallen asleep, or the connection had been dropped. For a moment I felt a sharp pang of… I don’t really know what it was, let alone how to describe it, but what he said reminded me of Lacey, and that filled me with a kind of brief, immense sadness. 

Later, Sawyer came over and we prepared dinner: cuts of lamb steak with potato and rice stew. It turned out very well. I showed him how to make a White Russian – well, my version of it, at least – which he liked very much. It was a very pleasant evening and the air was crisp and bright, and the sky filled with a hazy vanilla light. We watched the first two episodes of Watchmen afterwards. 

I was able to successfully complete the bulk of the work I had set out to accomplish for today’s #screenshotsaturday post by mid-afternoon, and get it live shortly thereafter. I was also able to publish the entry for firestarting that I’d said I’d eventually post two weeks ago: so today was a productive day, all things considered. My next post will most likely be about either hunger, or sleep. I think I’ll do a bit of work tomorrow as well: I’m gonna start recording and compiling some stuff for the trailer and put it up in a folder. The sooner it starts to take form, however rudimentary that form may be, the better I’ll be able to visualise it, and the more I’ll have to work with.

November has come, as they say, and with it a considerable drop in temperature, down to freezing. The storms cleared overnight but left in their wake an entire forest of bare trees. It feels like winter’s already come.

I got a decent amount of work done today on animations, although the latter half – erecting the framework, tying down the guylines, and then the entire disassembly (although I’ll worry about that part later) – are still yet to be finished. I have to implement the stakes tomorrow morning (or whenever I get around to it, just some time tomorrow), although the spacing on them will be complicated: I’m thinking about spawning with the foundation for the tent four invisible objects at each corner – hard-mapped, of course – and setting each of those as an interactive binary trigger which in turn will, upon player input, switch the player state. That’s probably the simplest solution, although maybe not the most elegant. 

Whatever, elegance is overrated.

Well, here we are, at the end of October, and with it, the end of Inktober. It’s been raining the entire day, from the moment I woke till now. It’s apropos to my overall mood, I guess: I’ve been feeling a kind of creeping melancholy set in these past few weeks but I felt it especially acutely today. I hope it’s not the onset of something serious. If I can make it to the new year I’ll be okay. 

I’ve been thinking about getting back into reading. It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything outside of work. I can’t really remember the last time I read anything out of strictly personal interest, to be honest. It seems like a really long time ago: even all the way back in high school, I can’t remember reading much for personal fulfillment. A full-length book, I mean. The thing is though, I just don’t feel like I have the time right now…

Work continues at a painfully glacial pace, but it’s getting there. Tomorrow I’ll make one final push to get the tent implemented in full before Saturday. Today I finished the unrolling animation completely and implemented it in-engine, so the player can now unpack the tarp from the pack through the menu, carry it over to a spot (with the placeable icon), and then unroll it into place. It’s pretty unrealistic admittedly, since in reality you’d usually unroll a ground sheet first and then, over that, the main tarp, and finally the bedroll… but that shit is way too complicated for me to animate currently and it’ll really cut into my progress and consequently morale if I get too caught up in it. I just need to get this shit done as soon as I can, upload it, and then start working on some new content for the trailer. Starting from now, I’ve got 1.5 months – six weeks, to be exact – to get the trailer done, which means that I have just about a month to finish the content for it to a point where it’s presentable. 

No time to waste… yet all it feels like I’m doing most of the time is wasting time.

Another slow day, although I suppose slow work is better than no work. Finished up the unrolling animations for both the tarp and the character. I think I’ll just end up using the original animation after all, just with more manual input. The week is already halfway over, and I’ve got way too little done. Every day I note my inefficiency yet I never actually seem to be able to do anything about it. This weekend, once I finish my submission for #screenshotsaturday, I’ll start recording and compiling footage for the trailer.

Worked on animations for the bivouac today. It took me all day to finish up the unrolling animation alone… at this rate I doubt I’ll be able to get anything else done this week (assuming, that is, I’m even able to get this done). I think a large reason behind my inefficiency was due to not being able to properly visualise how the action actually worked in reality, which obviously made it difficult to translate into an animation. I was focusing too much on verisimilitude that I realised it doesn’t actually matter (and unlike some of the other processes and animations, I don’t think anyone really cares how the tarp is unrolled since it’s such a mechanically trivial task in reality, with little bearing on the overall experience). Tomorrow, I’d like to finish up the animation if possible, which includes driving in the stakes, and pitching the tent. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to accomplish that, but no work is wasted, as it goes…

I also made some significant visual changes to the itch.io page. I’m not gonna talk too much about that for now because it’s still in a very preliminary draft state but it is worth noting. 

I woke up around 0700 after a strange and vaguely unsettling dream in which I found myself being followed by a woman with no face. She wore a white button-up collared shirt and had dark brown hair. The closer she got to me, the slower time seemed to move. I could feel the space in between seconds growing further and further. She had no eyes so far as I could tell but I could feel her looking rigiht through me. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, though: I’m not really sure how to describe it, but I didn’t sense any malice on her part. She followed me into a barren, muddy field. The sky was overcast but the clouds seemed to move way too fast. I don’t really remember much after that. 

Anyways, I was able to successfully complete the treatment for the trailer today. It only took me an hour or so actually, which really begs the question why I struggled with it so much over the weekend. Whatever. In any case, it’s done: now it’s time for me to start producing the actual content. Going over the list of contents as well as last week’s entries, I realise I never actually worked on implementing the bivouac, so I guess I’ll start with that tomorrow. 

Haolun came and stayed over last night, which is why I didn’t make an entry yesterday. We watched Her, and then talked a lot about Maria. Or really, I just talked a lot about her. I find it pretty pathetic honestly that I still think about her so often and with such acute emotion as well. Nobody should think about anything – especially another person – so long with such little sense of commitment to decision, let alone action. Well, I suppose I made my choice a a while ago. 

I didn’t get nearly enough progress done this weekend on the treatment for the trailer. I guess that’s the first thing I have to work on starting tomorrow (or later today when I wake up). In terms of visuals, I think I’ll start working on heating up and eating rations. If I can get the entire process for preparing and consuming one full ration done by the end of the week, and finish up the trailer treatment, I’ll consider this week a success.