Author: Spencer

Spent the morning cutting the trailer mix. Ended up using Patti Page’s rendition of “Raindrops” instead of the original: it feels more cinematic, and the female voice works better towards the consistency of the fiction. I’d like to post it but I’ll refrain from doing so until at least the final cut of the trailer is released. 

Sawyer and I went to see The Lighthouse tonight. It was excellent on a technical level and one of the best portrayals of the unsettling and often unintentionally funny and pathetic effects of prolonged isolation I’ve seen in film. I have little interest in watching it again but I’m glad I was able to see it in theatres. The sound design in particular gave me a lot to work with in terms of inspiration for my own work. It reminded me positively of Tarkovsky’s separation of audio and visual cues in Stalker, which, however little I think of Tarkovsky in general, is meant anyhow to be a high compliment. 

Didn’t actually end up working on the tent animations today, although I was able to implement an interesting new VFX configuration via the bktGlitch shader by blokatt. It’s a remarkably versatile and easy-to-implement solution that basically did exactly what I wanted with very little work or frustration. I’m really satisfied with the way it turned out and it’s definitely added a lot of texture almost immediately to the feeling of the game overall. 

I started working on a rough timeline for the trailer, which should give me a pretty clear idea of what things to focus on developing over the next month. Just sitting down to draft it has significantly boosted my sense of motivation in a palpably long-lasting manner. The next few days I have to attend to some personal matters – positive stuff, fortunately – so I won’t really get any opportunities to get too much done in ways of technical implementation but I plan on having the draft for the trailer done by the end of the weekend.

Back on schedule today, mostly. I spent the first half of the day fixing up some residual miscellaneous issues as I noticed them, and then I started working on the rework of the bivouac. I didn’t get much done in terms of actual in-engine work but I got a lot of conceptual planning figured out and I think tomorrow I’m gonna start work implementing the foundations starting with a rudimentary single-pole design. I’m hoping to end with at least a basic ridge tent but we’ll see. It shouldn’t be too different in terms of the animation, although I’ll probably have to get a little creative with the implementation because of the perspective.

For now I’m thinking that maybe the multitool will extend to serve as the major central pole external to the sleeping area, with three paracord guylines staked down, one as a major guide and the other two as tension points. Once the main pole is planted down, the major line is staked as far back as possible from the entrance, completing the tent. 

The other solution is to basically plant down the multitool beside a tree, tie a guyline between the two, and then suspend the tarp on the guyline and pin it down to create a low-profile lean-to structure with the excess tarp serving as a built-in groundsheet. 

Alternately, I could just have them both…

Either way, I think I’ll have to record a video of myself doing it tomorrow just to get a reference for the angle, because it’s kinda difficult to conceptualise for some reason. Well, hopefully I can get all the animations done tomorrow. I’d count that as good progress.

Stayed up all night last night and went to sleep at noon, ended up sleeping through the entire afternoon basically. Seeing that it’s already almost 0400 and I’m still not even close to sleeping, it seems yet another day passes in which I’ve failed to make even the slightest attempt to improve my sleep schedule…

In any case, it turns out I didn’t exactly fix the issue I thought I fixed yesterday, so I spent some more time actually fixing it for good today. It turns out that inputting a full script with arguments was not accepted by script_execute, so instead of “player_state_switch(light_fire)” I had to create an entire separate script just called “action_light_fire” containing the former script, and then input it into the script_execute. It took me far longer than it should have for me to figure out but at least it’s done. I also implemented the firestarter menu properly so that the player can now choose between different kinds of strikers when starting fires.

Neglected to make an entry last night yet – maybe because – I stayed up until almost sunrise playing video games. I don’t know why. Predictably, I woke pretty late today again. I thought I’d be able to start working on the bivouac but instead I got caught up with some issues regarding the inventory. I didn’t take into account for some reason when I was building it that using an item meant that the player would actually enter a new state so I had to

basically

restructure the entire thing. That took all afternoon but now the inventory should work as it’s supposed to moving forward. Hopefully tomorrow I can start work on the bivouac. I think I might have to redo the animation for that as well…

Every time I enter the date I find myself astonished by just how quickly time slips away. I guess it’s one of those things you just don’t notice until it’s already too late to do anything about it. The next time I look, maybe the year will already be over…

Anyways, there’s no use dwelling on it too much. 

I spent most of my working hours today preparing the #screenshotsaturday post, which involved mixing the audio for the lighter and addressing a whole lot of unexpected and annoying bugs that I didn’t foresee. There’s not much use going into it because frankly I don’t even remember what most of them were, just that they were incredibly frustrating to fix. The implementation as a whole is still really underwhelming, both for digging the fire pit and lighting the fire: the animations are unacceptably rough and the process overall just feels really clunky and doesn’t feel good. I’m gonna spend some time tomorrow touching up on the most obvious bugs – mainly related to inconsistent disengaging after the lighting animation as a result of shitty unorganised code on my part (what else is new) – but after that I’m just gonna leave it for the long list, and move on to something else. The other firestarting equipment, maybe, and then after that, food…

I’ve also decided to start writing some public posts about various mechanics and their implementations. My reasons for this are twofold: first, to give potential audiences a taste of the levels of technical complexity the game operates at, which is a good few steps above the vast majority of other games; and second, to start (hopefully) showcasing the more mechanical systems of the game (including aforementioned levels of technicality complexity) and how much it differs from traditional survival-type experiences. I also imagine it’ll help me stay focused through the duration between posts, which I’m planning, at least for now, to be roughly biweekly (or every two #screenshotsaturdays). We’ll see about that, though. The first post will be about firestarting, and I’m targeting a release for next Saturday…

Actually managed to implement the lighter today as I was supposed to do yesterday, and I recorded the audio for it as well although I didn’t clean up, let alone mix any of the tracks so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow (or more accurately later today, although hopefully not too much later). 

I also introduced some pretty significant reworks to the way the interface system: the action menu can now only be opened when the player is idle, sitting, or walking, and will automatically close upon the selection of any action. I mainly decided to rework it that way to address an otherwise annoying bug that allowed the player to essentially cancel out of any animation by opening the menu and switching to another state, as well as a lesser (but still annoying) UI delay where the list of available actions would only change once the player completed an action. Additionally, the player can now hold down the interact key to perform repetitive actions such as building fires or digging, instead of having to repeatedly press the interact key.

Spent some time with Haolun last night, and he stayed over. We tried out a new diner – the Majestic – which was pretty good and the waitress was nice and then we stayed up until almost dawn talking about girls like we were still in high school or something. Our voices drifted through the darkness across the length of the room and when we stopped speaking the sound of the wind whipping against the window frame cushioned the silence with a comfortable hum. It was pleasant in a way I haven’t experienced in some time. 

Despite the very basic and straightforward nature of my task as described yesterday – the implementation of the lighter framework into the main gameplay – I somehow failed completely at implementing it and accomplished basically nothing today. I just paced around in a state of elevated energy listening to the new Taylor Swift album and thinking about the pacing of the trailer. It’s gotten remarkably cold lately, and it’s always colder inside my house than it is outside. I didn’t even get an entry in for Inktober, either. Tomorrow, I’ll actually get something done.

Spent some time with Aurora this afternoon, and then worked on the mechanics for the lighter. It works very well, and is basically finished: now all I have to do is integrate it into the main workflow and it should be ready. That should take very little time and effort tomorrow. After that, I can start working on other firestarting gear, or on new biomechanics for digestion. Either way, I feel like I made good progress today.

No in-engine work today, but I got the animation done for sparking and igniting the disposable lighter. I think the spark and flame effects could use a bit more touch-up – the animation on them is a bit awkward right now in terms of the pacing – but otherwise I’m feeling pretty good about them. Implementing them into the game once they’re done shouldn’t be difficult at all: I’ll need to create a new UI element for it as well as a randomiser for the probability, but other than that, the actual fire pit assembly is basically already done. I hope it goes as smoothly as I’ve just written it…

Didn’t get much done of anything at all, although last night (technically this morning, since it was like 0400) I finally implemented the rope, which ended up looking a whole lot better than I originally planned. It does use verlet integration after all, although the solution is frankly rather inelegant. Oh, well. You can’t always get things working the exact way you want them. 

Tomorrow I should really get back to work proper, back to the regular schedule. I haven’t decided yet what to work on… maybe I should finally get the firestarting done. Or maybe eating / cooking…?

Continued work on the rappelling, including a new animation for planting the anchor point, and improved audio overall. I still haven’t figured out what I’m gonna do about the rope, it’s really been frustrating me. I looked into more dynamic verlet-based solutions but honestly I don’t feel great about them. Well, I guess I’ll give it a try after all…

Successfully submitted the past two weeks’ of work for #screenshotsaturday, and cleaned up the animation and sounds for rappelling a bit. The volume on the audio still needs to be mixed a bit better I think, and there’s obviously still no rope: but it turned out better than I expected and I’m honestly still a bit surprised that I was able to implement it with any success at all. I’ll probably spend some time tomorrow attempting the rope and cleaning up any residual jaggedness, but I’m looking forward to starting work on something new next week. 

I’ve started another watch-through of GTO with Kristina and Staoue! They’re working through the manga as well, and hopefully once we’re done we’ll be able to get the live-actions in as well.

Spent most of the day fiddling around with carabiners and compression straps trying to mix audio for the rappelling. I’ve got the clip-in and ascender motor sounds finished, although they still sound a bit rough to me; all that’s left in terms of sounds are the clip-out and landing, which shouldn’t be too bad. I think I can get those done in an hour or two, and then it’s a matter of animating a rope and fixing up as best I can the shadows (or lack thereof…) on the descent… that should get me through tomorrow. I haven’t posted anything public in some time, so hopefully this is able to serve as a decent segue into a recovery.

Martin and I finished watching GTO today. Aside from the spinoff prequel, which we’re going to watch tomorrow hopefully, we’ve now seen every iteration of it it – 1998, 2014 and now the anime, all specials included. It’s been quite an experience, to say the least. This is the second time I’ve watched through all of it now and my life has changed significantly since last I saw it, which was during my second year of withdrawal from the world in university. I feel considerably more motivated and purposeful now. Nonetheless though not only has GTO retained its power but I think I feel even more moved now than I did the first time watching it, being able to recognise in it things I couldn’t see before. The Yoshikawa-Anko arc in particular moved us both to tears. It makes me long for the days of my youth. I feel filled with a sense of profound optimism and confidence now in myself and my friends. I hope I’m able to channel it productively into my work and interactions with others in the days to come. I hope I don’t lose sight of it too soon.

Rappelling has now been implemented although the sprite positioning is pretty off currently, and I’ve yet to implement an actual rope. I suspect that’ll take up basically all of tomorrow, I still haven’t decided how I’m gonna handle the rope: either as a complex static sprite, or as a physics object – or as a combination of both. If it’s the latter I’ll have to look into verlet integration probably which is again something I’m very much not looking forward to working with. I’ll also have to record some audio for it… 

For some unfathomably stupid reason I tried testing out the rappelling method Avery uses today by doing a controlled descent from my roof. The technique involves only a rope, without a harness, and it was… painful, to say the least. It’d be much more painful for her as well since she’s got so much skin exposed where the rope would be making contact with her body. For the sake of her skin and my sanity when it comes to spriting, I’ve just elected to give her a mechanised rope ascender instead…

Skipped a post again yesterday. By the time I realised I’d missed it, it was already 3am; it would’ve been too late anyways. Well, today was more productive! I finally finished the rappelling animation, or rather, the most difficult part of it. I could feasibly implement it tonight but I don’t want to work on this anymore for right now. I can’t believe this shit has taken up almost two entire weeks of work at this point… once I’m done with it this weekend I’ll really have to start working in double-time to catch up. Hopefully it’ll be worth it, although I’m not feeling so sure about it anymore. Well, if nothing else comes of it, now I know how to rappel down a drop using only a rope in at least three different configurations.

Felt a bit worse today than the days before, although I suppose it’s been somewhat of a steady decline in mood over the entire weekend. I woke up late once again and had some difficulty getting out of bed, but ultimately I was able to begin working on the animations for rappelling as promised, although it turns out they’re even more difficult than I originally imagined. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit more productive, but I’ll take what I can get for now…

I haven’t opened GameMaker since Friday night. Not that I feel unmotivated or anything: it’s just that the thought of having to work on the rappelling animations is really off-putting currently. I know I said yesterday that I’d work on them today, but… I don’t think that’s gonna be happening any time soon. Tomorrow though, I’ll have to start working again, no matter what…

I failed to make a post yesterday both because I was too tired and because I actually accomplished nothing of worth yesterday. The same can be said of today, I suppose, although today Sawyer and I went to see Joker. I’ll keep my thoughts here brief (for now) but it was quite moving and overall I felt that the film was able to capture a very specific kind of very raw emotionality that few other films have really managed to touch. It definitely not only lived up to expectations, but exceeded them in many ways. It does a great job not only revisiting the origins of an often-incomprehensible character in a very believably tragic and even sympathetic context; but completely reframing the pivotal deaths of the Wayne family as well, which heretofore has always been seen as an unbelievably tragic incident but in Joker it comes off as almost deserved, if not outright justified. It’s definitely one of the best films I’ve seen that’s come out in recent years, if not the best.

Otherwise, though, I got absolutely no work done whatsoever. I didn’t accomplish most of my goals for this week – those being completing the functions of the multitool – nor did I successfully even begin to implement abseiling, as I got too caught up in the actual environmental work. I’m thinking that, instead of taking my day of rest tomorrow, I’ll work instead since I haven’t really worked on anything these past few days.

A pretty productive day. I woke up early – or, more accurately, at the time I usually should wake up, although lately I’ve been waking up (and going to sleep) much later for some reason – to an unexpectedly cold and rainy day. I spent the morning working on implementing the final water effects as described yesterday: splashes and ripples for walking and raindrops, as well as more balanced audio. I achieved all of those although I didn’t get an opportunity (or rather, I didn’t see the need to) implement the water depth; I thought about it for a bit and it’s a lot more involved than I care to deal with at the current moment. 

I have to restrict player actions at some point while they’re in the water so what I’m thinking is that maybe I’ll just create an entirely new sprite for when the player is in the water. That’ll consist of four variations (not including the pack variations): entering, wading, picking things up, and exiting. I don’t think I’ll allow the player to take the pack off while they’re in the water as that would be idiotic in reality, and the multitool is also not really functional in any meaningful sense. I think I’ll also have to implement drinking from the canteen and filling it up, but that should be very straightforward. So, all in all: six pairs of animations, to a total of twelve. I think I’ll get to that tomorrow. I also have to work on the rappelling stuff at some point too…

While working on my Inktober entry today (which was supposed to be of Twitch’s elite Maquis set) GameMaker encountered some kind of bug when I tabbed out of the window which overrode about an hour’s worth of progress. After several moments of impotent frustration I decided to just do a completely different subject instead of trying to salvage the old one. Honestly I like the final version – a portrait of Mercedes de Costa – better than what I’d initially had planned.

I’ve begun working on the cliffside scene proper now, and started by adding some tall trees, which feel more appropriate to the geography and come in two variations: a single shorter tree and a small cluster of taller, thinner ones. 

I also finally got around to fixing the issues with the water effect by individually drawing each object instead of the entire application surface to the reflection, which gives me a lot more control on top of eliminating the weird positioning that previously plagued the effect. Now all that’s really left to do re: the water is to add ripples for walking, as well as rain. I also need to turn down the gain on the footstep audio for walking through water, as it’s disproportionately loud, but that should be very easy and straightforward. Lastly, I’m thinking about adding an effect that simulates the depth of water, although I’m not really sure how I’ll begin doing that, or if it’s even worth the time. I think I’ll work on all of those water FX tomorrow, and hopefully if I’m able to finish, I’ll finally get to work on the animations for rappelling, which I hope to be able to show off this Saturday.

The first day of October has come and gone without incident. Probably for the best, I reckon. I worked a bit more on the cliffside although, judging by the most common reactions to it, I think that I’ll have to finish up the actual rappelling mechanics for the concept to really become legible. I’ll start working on the animations tomorrow and, if I can get them finished, I’ll run a mockup and see how it looks. Part of me feels I should be working on more critical mechanics and systems – there are so many things that aren’t built yet – but hopefully I can wrap this up sooner rather than later. I’ll commit to this until tomorrow: if I can’t get it looking right by the end of tomorrow I’m moving on to something more concrete and important (most likely firestarting). 

Speaking of which though, this month, as an extension of Inktober, as well as in the interest of preparing for the trailer, I plan on focusing more on visual-oriented stuff: new animations, new locations, etc. It’ll be good both for output and for maintaining a steady sense of tangible progress on a day-to-day basis, as I’m beginning to get real tired of seeing the same two or three rooms all the time (as I’m sure others are as well). By the end of this month I plan on getting at the very least the first ring of the world map finished in its entirety. It seems pretty daunting at the moment but I figure if I dedicate a weekend or something to producing a bunch of environmental assets, the rest of the work should fit fairly nicely into a span of four weeks so long as I’m able to maintain a steady pace and not get distracted. Speaking of distractions though, Breakpoint comes out in two days…

The month’s already over, and I barely registered its passage. I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing. It’s probably neither. Well, October’s here now, which means that Inktober’s starting up, and I decided to commit to it again this year (I did it last year as well, which feels so far away that I had to actually go back and check my Instagram account just to make sure that it was in fact last year and not 2017). I’m settling for fast, easy sketches this time around – so not at all that dissimilar to last year actually – although coming up with new things to draw each time is gonna be a pain the ass, I can already tell. Well, whatever.

I started working today on a new background for a cliffside. Originally I was planning on starting the animations for anchoring and rappelling but then I realised I needed an environmental context anyways and it’d be good to showcase so I decided to set that aside for after I’m done with this. The perspective is a bit tricky on this one and while normally I’d have been able to finish at least just the initial draft in an afternoon or so like I was expecting it ended up taking a whole lot longer and I still barely have the foreground figured out, let alone the background stuff (which needs to be rendered in parallax, but that’s a lesser concern at the moment). I’m gonna put in some real heavy hours tomorrow making up for today’s relative lack of progress.

No work today: day of rest, and all. I didn’t work much at all last week either although I don’t particularly mind too much, as I spent most of it in good company. That being said though, I have been considering taking a few days off either this week or the following to get some perspective… my only concern is that it’ll potentially disrupt the momentum, although I’d say this week already accomplished that to some extent yet I haven’t lost any motivation to work. Maybe as a compromise I’ll work at a reduced load? Four or five hours a day instead of the usual eight… that could probably work.

My objectives for the imminent future are to finish implementing all of the major functionalities for the multitool, including animations and sounds. Ideally I’d like to get at least one done a day, and set aside time at the end of the following day to clean up and revise the previous day’s work. It’s definitely feasible, I think, and it’ll be a good boost in morale once I’m done (on top of getting a necessary critical function finished). 

I was once again too tired to make a post yesterday, but Julia came over and we went to see Ad Astra, which I found quite remarkable in some ways. In the opening scene, a man plummets down from an orbital station to earth; the entire film looked pretty spectacular but that scene in particular was moving in a way that I can’t quite describe. It did an excellent job of portraying not only the vast loneliness and beauty of space, which are well-known at this point; but the banality of human efforts to understand it as well, with very believable depictions of commercial space travel (incl. the all-too-familiar overpriced amenities of the airlines, now also covering interplanetary travel – a hot towel for $125! – and even an Applebee’s on the landing terminal of the moon) and bureaucratic alienation. I found the film’s overall mood to be at once discomfiting in a sobering manner, yet also cautiously optimistic as well, and affirming of human interests and relationships. It reminded me in a positive way of how I felt after I watched Arrival.

Anyways, between yesterday and today, I worked on implementing the rudimentary foundation for actions involving the multitool, starting with the simplest function, which is digging. Well, when I say “simplest”, that’s what I thought at the time since it would involve no interaction with the environment other than choosing a spot clear of other objects: the actual animation turned out to be remarkably complex and involved, if not the most difficult one I’ve had to do so far outright. To be honest, I’m still not satisfied with the one I ended up with – something about the motion looks wrong, like the weight and angle is off somehow – and the sound design is really shit as well but I can’t tell yet if I want to work on it more and refine it now, or move onto the other functions and get those done before coming back and refining each of them post-scriptum. We’ll see how I’m feeling tomorrow, I suppose…

Finished the sprites and audio for equipping and unequipping the multitool (which is basically the e-tool, except it has a few more functions). I also performed some general touch-ups on pre-existing sprites which had some inconsistencies I only just now noticed, mostly with the idle animations and pack drop/pickup. Tomorrow I plan on finishing up the major multitool animations: clearing spots for fires, digging holes, cutting down shrubbery, etc. I haven’t gotten much work done this week so I gotta accelerate my efforts.

Staoue and Kristina came up today. We went to the mall and then to the parking deck of the IKEA, where we watched the sun set. It reminded me of bygone years.

Met up with Sawyer and Norah in the city. We walked by the water and then had dinner at a place that served both corn dogs and Lone Star(!) and it was very nice. The weather tonight was remarkably pleasant, possibly even more so than yesterday: the more hopeful strands of autumn. I hope it stays like this for a while.

Earlier today I worked on some technical stuff, separating stuff onto different texture pages and overall optimisations. Tomorrow I’m gonna start work on animating the various e-tool actions, as well as implementing the submenu for when the e-tool is equipped. Once that’s done I’ll be able to start properly working on firestarting, which really only comes down to designing and implementing the ignition mechanic.

My birthday. Went out to the reservation with Aurora, where we looked at a waterfall (well, more of a water trickle) and the dirt for some time and talked about things. She made me a cake! It was an ice cream cake, which at some point I must’ve told her was my favourite kind but I definitely didn’t expect her to remember that, let alone that she’d actually make me one. It was a really nice and unprecedented gesture, and the cake itself was really good as well. To be honest, it moved me quite a bit.

I didn’t get any work done today at all, but it’s okay. I feel okay.

Worked on the overall visuals of the PDA, adding un/lock and navigation sound effects, and an animation for switching between scroll modes. It feels much better to use now. I’ve also touched up the interaction prompts, making the font smaller, the outline on the prompt thinner, and the overall shape of the prompt itself rectangular (it still starts as a circle, but the corners rapidly flare out into proper edges once the text appears).

Autumn has arrived. I woke this morning around 0700 overwhelmed by an intense, looming sensation of impotence and anxiety. I had another dream about Alexandra – one more in a series of several increasingly disturbing ones involving her over the past several weeks – and it left me feeling immensely uncomfortable and filled with a vague sense of disgust yet also an unfamiliar and perverse longing. I wonder why I’m suddenly thinking about her again, unprovoked. I’ve been experiencing a lot of strange and unpredictable spikes of negative thought lately, although I don’t feel particularly bad and in fact I actually feel better, or at least more motivated than I normally am. At first it was just a general sense of exhaustion, which was unusual but I figured I could just deal with it; but now I’ve begun to start experiencing these weird thoughts and dreams all the time, like something’s moving just beneath the surface that I can’t make out but I’m feeling the ripples of its movements. I hope it’s just the weather, and nothing worse. I wish I had someone to talk to about these things. Someone who could help me understand it.

Forgot to make an entry yesterday – or more accurately, I noted that I had to do it, and just completely failed to do so. I’ve been feeling really restless lately yet also incredibly bored. Any time I’m doing anything except working I feel this vague, free-floating anxiety begin to build. It feels like I’m wasting time yet also I find it kinda difficult to do other things: for example, any time I play a game or something I don’t really feel like I’m enjoying it on its so much as I’m just playing it to get inspiration for my work, which makes me feel kinda bad since I’m not able to appreciate the work on its own terms.

Well, today was my day of rest, so to speak – I’ve decided that every week I’ll work until I have something to post for #screenshotsaturday, take Sunday off, and then get back to work Monday – and I spent most of it in a state of gentle unease trying to do things other than work. The day’s now over and I feel like I’ve completely wasted it. Well, at least tomorrow I’ll have things to do.

Got a good amount of work done, including a new interface for the inventory. It’s rather late now and I’m pretty tired so I’m not gonna say much more about it, other than the fact that, while it’s a shame the older design (ie the physical pack with selectable pouches) had to be discarded, the new one is far better and more interesting, as well as informative. Tomorrow I’m gonna get to work making the animations for it – should be pretty straightforward – as well as the audio for the various buttons and functions. Those are probably gonna be a bit more difficult since I really have to capture and create some distinctive sounds but that’s not too big of a deal for now. 

Spent some time with Haolun tonight. It was remarkably cold and dry. I woke up this morning at around 0900 and for the next four hours drifted uneasily between states of consciousness. It’s been harder to wake up these days, and I’ve been waking up later than usual. It’s not a mental thing: I can feel it in my body. Must be seasonal.

I managed to begin implementing a resting stage based on (ie, ripped directly from) the gameplay footage for Death Stranding. Avery can now take off her pack, sit down and rest for a bit, and engage in actions like massaging her shoulders, stretching her legs and taking a nap. Resting in general significantly slows down the rate at which energy is consumed and completely stops fatigue from building, and the various actions restore burnt stamina (alternately known as fatigue). 

In general, all of this has made me reconsider the design of the stamina/fatigue system in general. Originally, the way I planned it, all actions would consume stamina and every in-game hour a set percentage of stamina used would be “burnt” (represented by fatigue accumulated), with the biggest difference in rate of depletion being tied to whether Avery was carrying her pack or not. Obviously, I imagined, the biggest drain in stamina would be walking and traversal in general. However, I’ve come to realise that in reality, that’s simply not feasible: a highly-experienced and disciplined hiker of Avery’s level would be expected to be able to pretty effortlessly cover almost 50km a day even with a considerable load under harsh weather conditions (and at night as well!), but there’s no way I can properly represent that much square mileage in-game without turning it into an absolute slog to sit (or for her, I suppose, to walk) through. 

That being said, the expedition is also not a long-range exercise and the actual area of investigation is actually pretty small, around 25km^2 (still trying to work out the precise size and scaling, I’ll discuss that in greater detail once I start posting about the world map): so she wouldn’t be operating anywhere near her maximum abilities anyways when it comes to endurance. I’m not sure how I’m going to implement stamina/fatigue in a way that simultaneously represents the scale of the world accurately while also not diminishing her considerable physical clout. 

Well, whatever I decide, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow…

I woke today in a state of confusion and vague dread and didn’t even bother opening GameMaker. For some reason, I’ve been suddenly thinking a lot lately about the future – or rather, the lack of one – and it’s really been wearing me out.

Just now, entering the date, I’ve come to realise that September is halfway over, yet I barely perceived its passage… I’ve begun to feel rather sad these past few days although in a barely perceptible way. I’m almost certain it has to do with my body subconsciously registering the passage of time on a moment-to-moment basis, while my mind is forced to catch up in lurches and sudden shifts. Perhaps sadness is too strong; melancholy is probably more appropriate. The leaves have yet to amber but I can feel it in the air already. The coming autumn: it reminds me of the things I lack. I remember a quote from what seems like a really long time ago: “To a hikikomori, winter is painful because everything feels cold, frozen over, and lonely. To a hikikomori, spring is also painful because everyone is in a good mood and therefore enviable. Summer, of course, is especially painful…” And yet, autumn too… 

Anyways, I finally got around to fixing the UI: and which, by “fixing”, of course, I mean that I just decided to completely replace with a new one. Lateral thinking at its finest, I suppose. Actions no longer show up in the letterbox, but as dynamic bubbles above Avery when she draws close to an object that can be interacted with. I feel like the current implementation looks decent from a technical perspective but also it feels very out-of-place for how smooth the animation looks, as well as the rounded corners (which I’m honestly beginning to dislike the more I look at it). In fact, I’m really beginning to not feel it so much. Well, at least I got the backend done.

The waterfall now has parallax and proper animation, but more importantly: I’ve revamped the transitioner system between rooms. Previously, the character, upon reaching one end of a room, would be spawned on a random point along the width or height of the opposite end, with a check to make sure the player doesn’t spawn inside an object. The problem with this was that sometimes, especially in visually dense areas (ie, the woods), it would be difficult to orient Avery and required the player to actively search for her for far longer than comfortable. Now, each room has a predefined series of points – top, bottom, left and right – where they’ll be spawned in exactly. This gives me a lot more control over framing and instantly solves the issue of players losing track of Avery upon a transition.

I’ve been feeling unusually tired these past few days, I’m not sure why. I wake up and feel… anaemic, I guess, I don’t really know how else to say it. I think it might just be the weather. Either way, I can persist through it, I think. Hopefully it clears soon.

Spent basically the entire day animating the waterfall in rmBridge. Finished the waterfall – it looks pretty decent – so over the rest of the week I’ll have to draw and implement the rest of the background pieces, as well as the parallax for each of them. Maybe even water vapour clouds rising from the bottom of the screen… well, we’ll see about that last one, no guarantees.

It’s pretty late and I feel rather exhausted so I’m gonna keep this entry brief. I spent some time working on completely redoing the way the UI elements are drawn. The good news is that everything – with the exception of the rain, which I’ll have to figure out at a later date – now inherits the visual palette. The bad news is that I’ve completely fucked up the interact and status text and it’s gonna be a total pain in the ass to fix them. More work for another day.

Spent a good amount of the day working once again with the pond, I barely made any progress and got frustrated so I moved instead to general environmental assets. I got some large plants drawn as well as some bushes, although I think the bushes need to some more work, and specifically need to be made larger. I’ve also adjusted the player movement speed a bit and fixed the hand torch’s angle accordingly (it now uses the proper trigonometric formula), and re-enabled the ambient light around the player. It was not a remarkably progress-heavy day but at least I got some minor stuff done.

Spent most of the morning trying to get the water reflection shader working in the context of a pond… it was stupidly frustrated and in the end I didn’t even manage to get it working even remotely properly. I’m honestly thinking about just dropping the system altogether at this point in favour of a slightly less impressive, but far more straightforward solution that I’ll actually be able to understand. Of course, that being said, I still have yet to make said solution, and I’ve yet to find another option that’s free and accepts open-source, so…

I spent the afternoon with Aurora. We went to the diner and then sat by the lake for several hours. It was pretty nice. The sky today was bleak and I felt a pervasive sense of melancholy, although not particularly negative. When I returned home I found it rather difficult to concentrate although I gave the pond a few more attempts before giving up completely. Maybe I should give it a bit more time tomorrow… although I really do feel like I have to move on at this point. 

Started working on an effect for potable, lightly-moving water sources such as ponds and lakes. I was able to adapt a shader effect by GamingReverends to accommodate my needs perfectly; I still have to figure out some of the intricacies of it such as how to properly animate things such as ripples within it and how I’m gonna handle blending the water into the adjacent ground near the shores but otherwise it looks about as good as I can hope for.

I also implemented a culling system for optimising instances (and particularly grass and trees) via two scripts from lazyeye. They work by deactivating and reactivating some of the more taxing instances to reduce the instance load of things like collisions. It seems to work pretty well since the framerate has improved considerably but I’ll have to keep an eye out on it moving forward…

I kinda felt like shit today and kept on getting distracted for unclear reasons. At some point this afternoon I somehow fell into a deep sleep in which I experienced a very strange and alarmingly vivid dream in which I descended into an amorphous and constantly-shifting version of my high school filled with my old friends. None of them seemed to recognise me and we were all lost without any idea how we got there or what we were doing there. The rooms were simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic and while I initially could recognise each individual room for what it was – a certain classroom, the backrooms of the auditorium, a stairwell we used to hang out in, the gymnasium – when I examined them closer or tried to make sense of where I was all of a sudden the rooms seemed impossibly foreign and even ancient, every dimension and corner evading not only description but observation itself. I don’t know how else to describe it. It felt like we’d been wandering for centuries. 

I don’t how I got out; but it was as equally abrupt and inexplicable as the rest of what happened. For nearly an hour after waking I felt discombobulated and completely disoriented, not exactly sure if I was really awake or if I’d just ascended (descended?) to another depth of the dream. I was only asleep for an hour but it felt like far, far longer.

I recorded all of this down immediately upon waking but every time I tried to recall some specific detail I could feel the presence of this… it felt like there was something burned into the inside of my skull, that I would be able to see if only I could somehow look behind my eyes. I’m not really sure how else to describe it. Thankfully the feelings have by and large subsided, and only a trace of an unpleasant memory remains…

Didn’t accomplish much of anything today in terms of work; I sat waiting for the mailman to arrive with the new hard drive, which I’ve now installed (and works perfectly). I couldn’t work for most of the morning anyways because Windows was updating, which took far longer than it has any real right to take. Consequently my sense of routine was disrupted and I spent most of the day feeling rather restless, simultaneously wanting to work on something yet too distracted to be able to even identify something to work on, let alone concentrate on it.

This evening for some reason I was suddenly seized with an urge to write something again and in a paroxysm of compulsion I started writing the next chapter to I. Doing so has left me feeling rather drained however (which is how writing has made me feel for years now, to be honest) but it’s revived within me a curiosity that I haven’t felt in a few months – and with that, the inevitable and concomitant frustration of feeling such a strong desire to say something while feeling completely impotent in my ability to actually say it. I guess that’s just how it’s always been though. Maybe some day it’ll change. But probably not.

Implemented waves that don’t really work exactly as they should for some reason. I originally designed the system in GMS1.4 (slightly faster workflow for smaller projects, better sprite editor, you know how it is) and it works perfectly fine there, with the waves rolling in and then gradually receding upon the shore as intended. However, when I port it over to GMS2 – with the exact same code down to the spacing – it fucks up and doesn’t draw the rollback. Something’s up with the way the surface is drawn, I know that much; unfortunately I can’t figure it out beyond that. Well, in any case, it doesn’t look bad as is (although it certainly doesn’t look too great either). I might honestly just completely revamp it anyways down the line; we’ll see.

Also added footprints. Right now they’re applied in every room for testing but eventually I’ll just remove them and have them appear only when it’s either muddy after raining, or the player is walking on some unstable surface (like sand, by the water). I spent an unnecessarily long time messing around with the code for them, and I’ve realised now that not only is the timing of the footsteps off, but the speed at which the animation plays and the character walks is completely off as well, as well as the timing of the footfall audio… basically everything about the player movement is just very slightly (or maybe a bit more depending on how you look at it) fucked up but I’ve already spent way too long today messing around with it to very little avail so I’ll worry about it some other day, if at all. Well, at least the footprints fade pretty well.

+ Implemented footprints with fading steps and duration
+ New audio for footsteps on sand, and in shallow water
+ Created room (rmShore) with new wave effects
? The tree occlusion now works exactly as intended – no more clipped masks!
? The game now runs at full-screen instead of windowed
? The game can be exited by pressing ESC

Spent a few hours trying to figure out why the rain audio wasn’t fading properly only to stumble across the rather obscure realisation that asset_get_index does not in fact take string() when working with sound ids, and instead you have to use audio_get_name() instead. That alone took me far more time than I’d care to admit; then I had to deal with audio_sound_gain not working in an intuitive manner(turns out you have to first play the sound via an id of its and THEN feed the id as the index, instead of just being able to plug in the sound directly)… it was all rather frustrating and tiring process but I guess that’s just how it is.

I also implemented a new rain system which uses particles instead of individual rain drop objects. It looks and works a lot better and the overall performance has predictably improved; there are still some minor issues – for example, the rain falls beneath the roof for some as of yet inexplicable reason, and I haven’t implemented rain splashes yet – but otherwise it’s a good start in a good direction.

+ New particle-based rain system
+ New audio for all rain sounds, wind audio in rmGorge
+ Implemented basic 8-directional hand torch, along with toggle in menu
? Trees no longer are drawn twice and now look much better when moving in the wind
? Wind is much more frequent
? Lightning effect has been improved and now illuminates the entire area briefly

Sawyer came over, we went to a diner as usual and then viewed a thoroughly unpleasant and disturbing film. We then discussed the details of how I envisioned the trailer, as well as my projected timeline for work goalposts and target releases, which goes something as follows:

Next week, I’m going to start shifting focus over to implementing environmental stuff which means new rooms / world cells, as well as all the associated spritework. My goal is to have by the beginning of October enough visually diverse and interesting content to be able to begin production on the trailer. Although I don’t imagine it’ll take too long at all, since I’m targeting a winter release date for the first public trailer, I’ll be working these last two quarters at an accelerated rate with the intent of solidifying the foundational mechanical frameworks while simultaneously developing a wide variety of content for the trailer. 

Four months should be more than enough, although I have to be careful given the way I work not to burn myself out or even let that become a remote risk. So long as I maintain my current pace and expectations however I believe I’ve achieved a stable momentum that’s highly productive without becoming conducive to unnecessary stress.

We also discussed a bit about my commercial projections and hopes for this title. I’m not gonna discuss them here because I think those are the kinds of things that – at least during the process of development – are best left private but I will say for certain that I’m broadly optimistic for a number of reasons which I feel are well-substantiated in reality. Here’s hoping my optimism pays off… although first, of course, I have to actually finish the work before all else.

Spent some time this morning sitting outside recording… urination sounds. It’s been unusually cold lately – I suspect it’s the hurricane – but I got the sounds I needed and they work well. I spent most of the day revamping the audio and specifically adding different varieties of footsteps based on the terrain and wetness (which is another mechanic I’ve implemented, or at least begun to implement). 

For some reason I still have yet to commit, let alone push a single changelog these past few days: I don’t know why, I have more than enough changes by now to warrant it. I should push my progress now that I’m thinking about it…

+ Implemented biomechanics for urination, including bladder, stomach and colon volumes
+ New audio for urination
+ New footstep audio based on weight, terrain and environmental wetness
+ Added player status UI
? New audio for picking up / dropping the bag

It’s been pretty difficult keeping up to date with posts. Any time I sit down to write I just feel suddenly overcome by immense exhaustion. Even now I just feel totally wiped and it’s difficult for me to formulate complete thoughts. In any case…

Haolun visited last night and we talked as usual. It was nice seeing him, helped me reground myself. I woke early this morning and spent the morning playing through the Breakpoint beta. It’s seen marginal, although significant improvements from the OTT and I’m looking forward to the full thing next month. I’m running out of money though pretty quickly, and I’ve lost all sources of income… I haven’t really had any significant expenses in a few months but even still, my overall worth is so low that the few things I do spend money on somewhat regularly still manage to feel significant. Well, I can’t think too much about it now. I’ve gotta focus on work.

Speaking of which, I’ve finally managed to implement the backbone for the urination biomechanics, as well as the necessary spritework. The system itself works well and is very flexible; it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the exact values. Honestly the most difficult part wasn’t even implementing the system but figuring out how to design it in the first place; it turns out processes like urination and water intake/output and defecation are much more complicated than I imagined them to be and are contingent upon a whole host of factors that make things like universal predictions and averages very difficult to arrive at. Consequently a lot of might just be completely inconsistent with reality – I have no idea how many mL of water are filtered into urine from the colon per minute, for example – but at this point, so long as it feels real, the technicalities can be damned for all I care. I spent a few more hours than I’d care to admit this afternoon watching my character piss and tracking the change in volume of water within her bladder over a day in a spreadsheet… I think I’m past the point of caring.

Finally back home today. After an eight-hour flight… well, I felt way too drained to work on anything. I’ve been feeling some rather complex, overwhelmingly negative emotions as of late that I feel are impending my ability to work. I hope that returning home will be able to alleviate these feelings in due time – hopefully sooner rather than later. I would like to return to a normal, stable routine of living as soon as possible. 

In Geneva. Stayed in the room once again the entire day. This room felt nicer than the other ones and the scenery seemed nicer than all the rest – but maybe my perception of it has just been skewed by the fact that it’s the last day of the trip. Hopefully by around noon or so tomorrow I’ll be back home. 

I haven’t worked on anything too substantial the past several days, since yesterday was spent commuting and today I was too tired to really do anything. I’ve been having some trouble designing the biomechanics for urination – mostly regarding volume and rate of filtration between drinking and, well, the act of urinating, the entire process of which I’ve discovered is far more unpredictable than I’d initially imagined – and consequently I spent the entire morning reading (or attempting to read, anyways) medical papers of varying degrees of technical obscurity. I spent the rest of the day lying in bed or looking out the window. 

I feel completely drained by this trip, and I’m still not entirely sure what the net effect of it has been. It’s definitely taken a toll on me in more ways than one and while I don’t necessarily regret having seen all of these places (well, nominally, anyways…) I recognise now with absolute certainty that recreational travel is not for me and that cities in particular tend to exact a devastating toll on my general state. I’ll be returning home in a more psychically precarious and fragile state than when I left, with a far greater appreciation for my isolation. 

And yet, with all that being said… for some reason I still feel a little bit wistful. It feels like the time has passed too quickly, that the trip was far shorter than it actually was (even if the moment to moment waiting seemed interminable at the time). Summer is already over; even two weeks ago seems not so long ago yet it feels so much longer ago than it has any right to seem. I have a feeling though that these things have less to do with the actual trip itself and much more with my general sentimentality these days. I’m not sure though, and that too fills me with a muted sense of… something. In any case, whatever it is, there’s this real empty, almost sad kinda feeling beneath it all that I can’t seem to shake. I just hope it doesn’t persist too long.

Sitting on the floor of a hotel room in Paris drinking a Heineken and eating canned ham out of the tin. Haven’t made any updates in the last couple of days, not even out of inconvenience but mostly just because I’ve been too tired to write anything. The most significant things I’ve accomplished in the past several days were writing a proper README for the repository (which in reality was just a direct translation of the press kit DOCX), and drawing the cover image. The latter in particular I think turned out pretty well: it exceeded my expectations in terms of how I imagined it would look (although to be honest, I actually went in with no idea how it would look) and it does a decent job of effectively capturing most of the major iconography and moods of the game.

Fleshed out the canteen UI a bit, it now displays next to the character menu, and animates properly with respect to drinking. I think it’s a bit too big but scaling it is gonna be a pain in the ass. I also think that the character menu itself is a bit off in a way that I can’t really articulate.

+ Better(?) UI for the canteen, see above for details.
? Remapped controls for interact and character menu to accommodate a greater variety of common bindings.
? Character menu can now be closed with the same key used to open it (instead of just ESC).

Cleaned up UI for character menu, added a white background + black text when highlighting items in the character menu, also changed up the options a bit to reflect streamlining of gameplay. Also implemented canteen mechanics: the player can now drink from the canteen, with responsive water capacity (mL). I’m thinking about adding an animation for when the canteen is empty.

Changing the process of accessing the pack a bit: created a new animation for opening it, and changed the access behaviour so that when Avery’s standing in front of the bag, she picks it up, and when she’s standing behind it, she opens it. The animation itself could use some work and is a bit off in terms of the alignment, but that’s something I can work on later down the line. I’m also testing a dynamic zoom function for certain actions, starting with the pack; hopefully I can get the zoom actually working properly and not looking like shit…

I’m also thinking about moving the game to revolve around a single action button instead of having multiple. What this looks like in practice is having WASD (and maybe the arrow keys, although probably not) to move, and then a single key – for now, F, but I’ll probably add more / change it later on – is used for virtually all player interactions within the environment. What that means is that actions will either be analogue (via the interaction key) or through a menu, which uses the movement (WASD) keys + the interaction key. I probably articulated all of this in a very unnecessarily complicated and drawn-out manner but it makes a lot more sense in execution. We’ll see.

+ New animation for opening pack
? Pack access behaviour changed relative to player’s position
? Added sound effects for picking up and dropping the pack
? Removed all button prompts (ie, “[F]”) in interaction text for cleaner experience
? Removed B as pack key, switched picking up / dropping the pack to the character menu instead

Sitting in a hotel room in Rome. In the past several days I’ve traveled through four countries and yet I feel nothing but profound exasperation and an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. All of the progress I felt I was making in the weeks prior to this trip is being rapidly undone the longer I stay out here – and I still have another ten days left. Well, at least the next few days will see slower movement. Hopefully I’ll have time to work more.

Lacking a proper connection as well as a consistent power source, it’s been a total pain in the ass working on anything these past few days especially. I decided to get started on the press kit, which turned out alright. No images or videos so far, obviously, but it’s a good enough foundation to build off in the future. Gotta keep busy somehow.

Onboard a train en route to Stansted. It’s been rather difficult to maintain a stable signal the past several days, let alone one that’s consistent enough to attend to all of my work: I’ve spent the past several days in a state of continuous disorientation due to all the transit and I haven’t really found the time to get work done, although I think for what little time I’ve had so far I’ve made decent progress.

I’m not sure how I’m gonna handle entries for the duration of this trip – whether I’ll update them as the opportunity arises – but for now I think what I’ll do is log per diem and then once I return home I’ll do a more comprehensive cumulative write-up in a single dedicated entry, focusing on points of note. 

Anyways…

The door now has a proper caster, as well as a dedicated animation (for both the player and the door itself) for opening and closing it. There are also sound effects as well, although at this stage they’re more just for prototyping than anything else.

+ Implemented proper shadow caster for door

+ New animation for door (door and player)

+ New sounds for opening and closing doors, and attempting to open locked doors (not used so far)

+ New sounds for footsteps on grassy, hard and muddy surfaces

+ Created new script “sound_play_pitch” for repeating sounds with on-the-fly pitch changes (ie, footsteps)

+ Created new script “sound_lowpass” to shift between regular and low-pass audio.

? Renamed “sound_play” to “sound_play_3d” for more precise description

? Stones, sticks and tall grass are now automatically deleted if in contact with interiors to prevent clipping

? Changed the shadow mask on the cabin to more accurately reflect visibility via a window in the front

? Being in an interior now also displays a cutout of the front wall, specifically highlighting the location of doors and windows

Gonna be spending the bulk of tomorrow in transit to London, which means I had to pack up all my stuff. I worked almost entirely on audio today and specifically on implementing a low-pass filter on rain when the player is indoors. I set up a pretty flexible crossfade system that works very effectively and I’ve also begun using it for the overall forest soundscape as well, moving between day/night ambience. Speaking of, I changed those sound effects to quieter, less wind-heavy tracks, and converted all the ambient audio files over to OGG to further reduce size on disk and memory footprint. I’m feeling pretty good about the audio right now; when I return (on 3 September…) I’ll have to make sure to get new recordings for moving through brush and maybe even footprints, although that might require better equipment to which I don’t currently have access anymore. Well, I’ll figure it out then.

Staoue came over today and we spent some time by the lake and then we went to the high school, where we passed the time lying down and watching the sky as the storm moved in. It looked like a massive, dark wave surging towards us and it made me feel uncomfortable but having a friend by me made it a worthwhile experience. We talked about high school – it seems like that’s all I ever talk about these days when I meet my friends, but we do talk about other stuff – and girls. I’ve been feeling real nostalgic lately. It’s not that I want to be back in high school: things were just much more straightforward back then. Everyone was just put there all together, and you never had to really reach out and find people: they were just there and all you had to do was find some common ground and all of a sudden you were great friends and you felt something in common with them. There was a clear and palpable understanding of the future and even if it looked totally empty, the sense of a schedule gave the days a kind of structure and intertia towards which we constantly stumbled and occasionally hurtled. 

It’s much harder now though. 

Everybody’s either gone away or they’ve all got their own goals now and I can’t relate to so many of them. Going out to see them or to meet new people costs money that I don’t have and can’t make. Even if I were able to meet them, I don’t know if we’d have much to talk about anymore: in the lack of common interests, there are no more shitty assignments to bemoan, no more teachers to mess around with, no more rumours to piss away the time. All that’s left to us to share is this creeping sense of uncertainty about ourselves, our futures, where we’re headed as individuals and as a nation and as a species. I know that sounds really dramatic, but really, it’s actually quite banal. And that’s the saddest part. We think we’re becoming mature, you know, we’re becoming adults or whatever and learning how to deal with “the real world” – but actually, we’re just growing more cynical, more indifferent towards and even accepting of the casual cruelty of the world. That makes me really sad. I don’t want to get used to being swept away. I don’t want to see my friends get used to being swept away either. But I’m afraid we already have.

Didn’t do any work today but I met up with an old friend from high school and we got some ice cream and sat in the park and then we went back to her place where we (mostly I) drank so much that I threw up in her basement bathroom twice and then we talked for a long time about those bygone years. It was nice seeing her again after all this time. I missed her more than I realised.

Finally got around to implementing the grouped prefabs I mentioned in yesterday’s post for the grass. It works very well and although the dispersion pattern could be significantly improved and the wind pattern tweaked a bit the tall grass now works as intended. Other than the aforementioned tweaks, the only things I can really think to add are mild particle effects for various leaves and such blowing off when the player passes through into the wind. I think tomorrow I’ll work on that as well as particle effects in general. 

+ Tall grass, with randomised dispersion and player/wind-based motion.

+ Added ambient soundscapes for the forest during both night and day.

? Slightly sped up the speed at which rain accumulates during transitions. 

? Significantly increased (5s to 20s) the time it takes for ambient soundscapes to fade in during transitions.

? Doors now have proper shadowcasters blocking and opening FOV when respectively closed and open. They also have slightly more legible sprites.

Hung out with Sawyer today and watched both Blair Witch films (that is to say, the original and the 2016 remake). They were both much better than I remembered, and I had pretty good memories of both of them. Watching them definitely helped me get a much better idea of how to handle certain elements of My Work Is Not Yet Done.

Speaking of which, I finally managed to implement the rest of the door, however half-assedly, which still needs a proper shadowcaster and animation (maybe a good sound effect would suffice in place of the animation) but is otherwise working as intended; and I started work on denser grasses featuring wind animation which proved to a much bigger pain in the ass than I expected. 

That being said though I think I’ve finally solved the main issue – smaller grasses were animating way too fast – although tomorrow I think I’m gonna try a new solution where I’ll separate each individual blade of grass into an object, create a bunch of what are essentially prefabs of grass clumps with those blades clustred together in various configurations, and then spawn the prefab objects rather than the sprites themselves. It’ll be pretty annoying to set up at the start but I think it’ll have a very positive impact on the appearance of the grasses overall. Hopefully though it won’t dig in to the performance too much, which is something that I’m already beginning to worry about: I noticed today that in some areas the framerate dips down to around 16 or so, which is completely unacceptable for a game that already runs at 24fps to begin with. I’ll definitely have to take a deeper look into optimisation. Maybe I’ll work on that next week on the plane…

I didn’t do much today either but at least I got the door done. It’s real primitive right now – interacting with it basically just toggles the visibility of it at the moment – but hopefully I can improve it in the coming days. The ideal goal is to be able to gradually open it on the hinge so that the player can peek out of the door slightly if necessary; however, I’m not sure if the lighting solution I’m using currently supports casting at an angle (or any kind of dynamic caster manipulation, at that) but if it doesn’t, I suppose this will have to do… it’s not all that bad to be honest, just lacking compared to what I originally envisioned it could be. But then again, if we were to start judging things by what they could be…

I woke up thinking I was gonna get stuff done today but in fact I just sat at my computer and did nothing. I don’t even know if I had any plan for today – I probably didn’t – but tomorrow, I’m gonna work on the door + shadow masking for it, and maybe start on some furniture. 

Nic’s article about Midnight Animal came out today, you can read it here. I still have yet to read it – an odd mixture of feelings – but from what I’ve heard he did a very good job with it and the overall reception has been overwhelmingly positive, so I’m glad that it turned out well for both of us. I’ll probably read it at some point tonight…

Spent all day messing around with various lighting systems across all different kinds of implementations – shaders, surfaces, straight-up line traces – before finally arriving at a solution I’d already been using for over a month now (albeit for different purposes). I’m using a slightly modified version of this lighting system now to simulate FoV in interiors, and it works really well for my purposes because it’s pretty lightweight and slots in really effortlessly without too many changes to any other things.

The one thing I did have to change though was the grass, which I was planning on changing eventually anyways because before I was using a paid extension off of the GM Marketplace. Since both the lighting and the grass rely on vertex buffers, which I know literally nothing about, they broke one another’s functionality so I decided to remove the less critical one. I’m now generating all of the grass as objects, with a single draw pass in the master draw event. It looks basically identical to before although I’ve lost the slight animation for the wind effect; I’ll mess around with some shaders or even hand-animated sprites maybe at some point, I’m not too worried about it. 

I haven’t noticed any major performance dips which is what I was originally concerned about, but also, I have noticed pretty significant dips (down from the fixed 24 to around 18 or so) although I haven’t been able to identify the exact cause. I was also recording footage though when I noticed the dips and I think the game’s been running on the integrated chip this whole time, so if that turns out to be the issue, it’s not too much of a concern. I’ll still take a look at optimising everything later on down the line, but as they said, never pre-emptively optimise if you can help it…

Spent the entire day (up until now, which is 0330, actually) working on implementing a prototype interior space – a cabin, yes, my imagination runs short – and for all intents and purposes, it basically works right now. Basically, all interior spaces can now be rendered in the world space rather than in their own simulated internal cells. What this means in practicality is that I can now have full real-time events happen seamlessly in the world without loading in between different rooms (ie, entering / exiting interiors); the player will also be able to see through windows and doors into the actual external environment, which vastly opens up my opportunities.

There are still some minor collision overlaps that I have to fix and there’s as of yet no furniture (I’m sure that’ll be a separate issue all on its own, which I’m not at all looking forward to dealing with tomorrow), but in terms of all the basic functionality it works as intended, however annoying it was to assemble and subsequently disassemble everything onto different layers and depths. Honestly, if I had known from the start just how much of a pain in the ass all of this actually would take to implement, I probably would’ve never even considered it to begin with. Now that I’m here though, there’s really no turning back…

+ Created modular layers for building (cabin)

+ Created new room (rmCabin) for testing modular interior

+ Added four additional parent classes specific to buildings: BUILDING, FURNITURE, ROOF, INTERIOR

? Created parent object for items named ITEM, containing the children STICK and STONE (no actual event behaviour, just a holder object)

? Created script draw_self_visible as a replacement for draw_self; because pretty much everything is being drawn in DEPTH_SORTER’s master draw event, the “visible” property is ignored; draw_self_visible is basically just a draw_self that takes “visible” into account

Here are some things I still need to add, as well as things I’d like to implement:

– Functional door

– Interactive furniture

– Dynamic field of vision to black out the exterior space and make windows and doors functional (ie, the player can see outside of doors and windows but not walls)

– Global shadow mask for entire house 

– Hide rain overlay in interiors

Started working on animations for firestarting this morning but then for whatever reason I felt that I no longer wanted to do that today so instead I just started worked on implementing interiors. I mostly just worked on visuals today – nothing to push to the server – because I’m still undecided as to whether I want each interior to be contained within the world space in a continuous manner, or to exist as its own discrete room separate from the world within its own space. 

The latter definitely presents me with a lot more flexibility when it comes to certain things – namely, I wouldn’t have to use a surface to occlude the exterior when the player is in the interior space – but it also means that I would have to move the player to an entirely new room while saving the exact state of the previous one, which is kinda annoying since I haven’t built a save system yet to save and track the state of each room (something else I have to do…), so I’d have to do the latter before the former. 

I think I’ll start tomorrow by trying out the former option – continuous interior spaces – with layered floor, furniture and ceiling indices that are de/activated upon contact with the player. Hopefully it goes smoothly and without any major difficulties; but you know how it is with these things…

Didn’t work on anything today; but to be honest, I didn’t even really try. I hung out with Haolun last night until 0400 or so and then I fell asleep, woke up for a few hours and hung out on Jacob’s stream, then I fell back asleep again and experienced a really strange and disturbing dream until I woke up once again at 1600. After that I realised that I’d basically get no work done even if I tried so instead I spent some time reviewing the week’s activities and figuring out what to do next week. Basically, I need to finalise my decisions on how the firestarting minigames will work, and then I need to actually build them (or at least merge them into the main build). 

Once I finish that, I should work on redesigning the backpack and inventory UI; I’m not that satisfied with the ALICE diagram anymore and I’m thinking about moving towards something like an SSO/SPOSN Attack 2 or even a Veshmeshok instead. I like the look and idea of the external frame and all the pouches but… something about it just doesn’t feel quite right at the moment. I’d also like to add a diegetic animation for opening and closing the bag.

Spent the day sitting outside recording audio of wind and leaves. It was a very nice day outside today and although I think it’s gonna rain very soon I’ve gotten a wide range of audio samples that should cover most of my ambient environmental needs. I’m gonna spend some time mixing them a bit more tomorrow but I was able to build in the backend for the audio system today. It works exactly as intended and was pretty straightforward to set up.

+ Added audio files for heavy rain, light rain and the fire.
+ Implemented flexible backend for positional 3D audio, as well as seamless blending for sounds.
? Fixed an issue with the light rain state where no rain was actually falling during the entire state.

Today was pretty productive, despite having finally gotten out of bed at 1600(!) following a long and vaguely uneasy rest. I was able to add both the sticks and the stones as I planned (well, two days ago…) via a pretty flexible and efficient spawner, and all the code for interacting with them and picking them up is modular enough to be easily adapted to any other object down the line. The firestarting is almost done – the last of the work is UI stuff, which is admittedly pretty involved but I’ll cross that bridge once I get there (which I guess is now) – so hopefully I’ll be able to have some new stuff to share come Saturday.

+ Added sticks and stones as interactive objects in the environment
+ Modular spawner (spawn_item) that spawns a certain number of an object without overlap in a room
? Implemented shorthand version of player_pack_add script that takes only the object name as a string for the argument
– Removed fire hole (a bit redundant, and the sprite looked like shit anyways)

Just since starting this project alone, I feel like I’ve become a much more competent programmer these past few months. In fact, I would even admit that I developed more as a programmer in the last four months than I have in the last four years: although of course, hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and learning tends to function on a curve, so maybe I’m just going too hard on myself (the circumstances were much different back then as well).

In other news, I came across this thread on Twitter which perfectly encapsulates the exact kind of mentality I wish I could embody. I think sometimes I’m genuinely able to feel this to some degree, like I’m right on the cusp of realisation; but always, something or someone comes up that causes me to slip. I suppose that’s the entire point: that a person must never lose sight of the good in both others and himself, especially when under pressure. Anyone can feel good when the times are good, after all. But these are especially testing times. For all my platitudes and supposed convictions, I don’t think I have the strength to be a better person, let alone a good one. But I have to try. That’s the least I can do for both others and myself.

Sawyer and I went to see Hobbs & Shaw today and I think it was exactly what I needed in my life right now: a fun, hopelessly positive and feel-good film about the value of friendship and forgiveness and family. Afterwards we got some ice cream and sat at the station and it was a remarkably pleasant evening, and looking up at the clouds I felt an immeasurable sense of optimism and good faith swelling within me, and it made me feel deeply at peace for some time. That all probably sounds horribly cliched and I’ll straight-up admit that it definitely is; but it doesn’t matter, because it felt profound in the moment and besides, nothing’s a cliche when it’s happening to you.

I didn’t get much work done today, and I don’t know if I necessarily feel more motivated, but that’s okay. I feel much better equipped to handle my work tomorrow. 

Didn’t actually end up adding the sticks and stones today, but I did implement a sort function for the inventory, which allows the player to sort between the name, type and quantity of the items. Nothing significant, just a nice QoL feature.

Got some work done today, although nothing substantial enough to push as a full change. Still working on the campfire: I adjusted the collision detection for interaction on both the campfire and the backpack as to be a little bit smaller and more natural (ie, for the campfire, the player has to be standing above it, and the for the backpack, the player has to be standing below it). Tomorrow I’ll work on adding in gathering for the sticks and stones. It should be pretty straightforward and basic and I don’t imagine I’ll run into any complications but… you never know.

The fire pit now must be assembled manually, in three parts:

1. Foundation: laying stones around the base of the fire to contain it.
2. Firebed: laying tinder and fuel within the pit.
3. Ignition: igniting the fire using a starter.

Not implemented, but planned: the first stage requires the player to gather and place a dozen stones by hand from the environment. The second stage requires the player to gather and place about four pieces of tinder (+accelerant) from the pack. The third stage requires the player to ignite the fire using a starter from the pack. There will be a chance that the fire will fail to catch, in which case the player is given another try with one unit of the starter consumed.

+ New state and animations for picking up / placing objects
+ sprFirePit has many new indices
+ The fire pit is now a placeable object rather than fixed.

I didn’t actually work on any of the games today but instead I stayed up until about 0600 last night (alternately, this morning) redesigning and finetuning this site. I feel like it’s now a lot more professional and presentable without compromising my overall tone. I think I’m gonna start listing this as my primary site with a redirect to the GitHub page as a portfolio. 

Of course, that means I actually have to expand the design of the GitHub page accordingly… It shouldn’t be too much of an issue but I don’t have much content on it currently. I’m thinking I’ll store some of my more long-term pieces there though for posterity’s and portfolio’s sake, and focus on developing more as a comprehensive showcase for my work than as a portal, which is what it basically is right now. 

(I have to admit though, at this point I can’t help but wonder if deep down inside that I’m building all these new sites for myself just so I can experiment with new builds and designs…)

I can’t believe it’s already August. I stepped outside just now to look at the sunset only to realise (too late) that the mosquitoes have come out in full force. Thankfully though at least both the heat and the humidity have subsided significantly. 

Speaking of which, I missed yesterday’s post because it was just too hot and humid and top of that I didn’t even get any work done because I was too preoccupied with adjusting the positioning of my fan. I mostly just worked on some item descriptions – the firestarter kit, ironically – although I didn’t make too much progress overall.

Today was a much more productive day though and I got a respectable amount of actual content done, as well as planning for the next several days.  I completely redesigned the layout and structure of the areas, which started with significantly reducing the size of the rooms, from 2048×2048 (grass: 50k) to 480×480 (grass: 5k). Before, the idea was to have a bunch of larger rooms chained together, but now I think it’s a far better idea (both design-wise and technically, since the pixel jittering on horizontal camera movement is too much of a pain in the ass to work through) for the game to feature a bunch of smaller rooms, some containing locations of interest, chained together instead. Each room has a designated “level” (right now, there are five of such levels) that dictates the chance of them appearing upon a room transition. 

I’m not gonna talk too much about the specifics of how this functions right now because a) I’d like it to be somewhat of a surprise and b) I haven’t figured out the exact details of its structure yet but I do believe that it’ll significantly improve the gameplay overall. In a broad sense, I believe that it allows for much more variety at a more respectable pace (instead of forcing the player to wander around a massive area) and creates a greater sense of disorientation for the player, which is in this case a good thing.

Finally got some work done again. Imported over the VFX stuff from But For Now, We Are Young – chromatic profiles and the night filter – and got room transitions working properly. Also, I made some general improvements to the appearance of the campfire, including dynamic smoke (it blows in the wind!) and animations for the flame being ignited and extinguished. The latter two are far from realistic, and I’m thinking about adding a considerable amount of detail to the process overall – small minigame type things for the starters, choosing accelerants and tinder, dedicated UI animations, etc – and I think I’m gonna end up committing to it. I’m satisfied with my progress today. Tomorrow I’ll start working on the minigame for the ferro rod. Maybe I’ll even get to the magnifying glass as well…

Back at this. I said I’d take a break over the weekend, so I did. Did it work as I hoped it would? Maybe. I spent some time after I woke reviewing what I was doing before and going over my notes. I feel like I’m ready to get back to work now. After that I spent some time with Taylor and we talked about the stuff we usually do. It was nice seeing her again. Maybe we’ll be able to meet again later this week. I didn’t get any concrete progress done today but I feel that tomorrow will see my patience come to fruition. I hope so, at least.

I was unable to work today as well, although I feel a bit better overall. I think I’m gonna take a break and do something else instead of just sitting here all day trying to unsuccessfully force myself to get something done. I’ll draft up a new plan on Sunday and work towards that throughout the week. I think I’ll be able to accomplish it this time, so long as nothing unexpected hits me again. 

The motivation I felt yesterday – and which has in some form or another persisted to today – unfortunately panned out into nothing. I found my thoughts lingering on something unpleasant and was too distracted all throughout the day to accomplish anything meaningful. At least I opened GameMaker though; it may not seem like much of anything to anyone else but it’s a step towards getting back into it and that, while it may not be enough, is still something.

And something’s better than nothing, right?

Severe thunderstorms all day. I still haven’t found it within me to work on anything but I feel like I’m on the verge of another breakthrough in motivation. I’m beginning to think it was a mistake to restrict myself to working exclusively on We Are Young for the entirety of this month; it certainly helped reinvigorate my interest in the project and led to some work getting done but over time I feel like it’s just begun to stultify my progress to a degree by de-incentivising me from thinking about other kinds of work. After all, the whole point of me starting My Work Is Not Yet Done was to work on something a little more mechanical and systemic in approach to design when I got burned out on writing. I’ll just have to remind myself periodically to check in with both projects so neither falls behind too much.

The state of living fills me with profound revulsion.

For the entirety of the past week or so I’ve done pretty much nothing except sit at my desk playing video games. It’s been exceedingly hot and humid so I rarely go outside anymore. I haven’t done my exercises since the beginning of this month. At this point I’ll have to reset again.

I just realised looking at the date that the month is almost over. This realisation has left me feeling profoundly ill at ease – as it always does. I can feel my life cycling through repetitions. Even my awareness of this is a kind of repetition: I’m sure that if I were to go through my notebooks and look at my entries, I would find dozens of iterations of this exact pattern of thought repeated verbatim over the years. Sometimes even in the span of days. 

It’s harder to remember things now, because it’s harder to keep track of time. I’ve become untethered from a fixed and linear understanding of time. Things have begun to repeat themselves; I’ve begun to repeat myself. Sometimes I’m aware of it; but most of the time, I don’t think I am. 

Last night I met up with a friend and got locked out of my house so I sat on the front porch for the rest of the night until dawn chainsmoking. I’ve been feeling like shit lately. An overwhelming sense of slowness and decay. I can’t seem to work anymore. The thoughts come too slowly to make sense of: I find myself getting lost in the spaces between them. I’m always too tired to do anything yet too restless to stay still. I’ve been finding myself dwelling upon thoughts of extraordinary violence lately. Maybe it’s just the heat. The wretched humidity.

I haven’t done any work whatsoever this entire week.

The IGDA meeting was completely unproductive. We arrived over an hour late – mostly due to circumstances beyond our control – and spent the next two or so hours sitting there basically just staring at the sky and the cranes in the distance. Not to say that that in itself was bad – in fact, it was very calming and pleasant,  and the evening was very nice – but I basically accomplished nothing the event itself was actually intended to provide. 

Of course, that was all my fault: it’s not that I don’t know how to network, but rather, because of my social ineptitude, I find myself completely unable to meet new people at all, let alone network. I find it extraordinarily difficult to approach people and only react when I’m approached. In short, it’s the exact kind of thing you’re not supposed to do or be in this world. 

Well, next month I won’t be able to attend it because I’ll be in Europe. Maybe by September I’ll finally find it within me to actually reach out and do something. 

But probably not.

Didn’t get any work done today, but Sawyer came over and we watched some films. Tomorrow, we’re attending an IGDA event in Brooklyn – the same one we attended last month – and I find it astonishing that a month has already passed and I’ve barely registered it. The night has cooled significantly.

Drafted initial visuals for CH09. Looks like a bit of persistence paid off after all. I’m wondering if maybe I should commit to producing the visuals for each chapter every week? That would certainly help maintain a steady sense of momentum… of course, that’s entirely contingent upon me having actually having come up with the idea for the visuals in the first place, which, especially as I produce more and more of these, is not so certain…

Well, I suppose it’s worth a try anyways.

I was able to recover a bit from my malaise today: I got some work done on the graphic assets for CH09, and so long as I can maintain this pace of progress I believe I’m in a position where I’ll be able to release something tomorrow. We’ll see if this persists, though.

(I doubt it.)

I’ve been troubled by dark thoughts again lately. I’m not quite sure what the impetus is for their return: maybe I’ve been spending too much time alone. Maybe it’s because all my income has once again dried up and I can feel my worth receding rapidly by the day. I don’t know. But every morning, I wake up with hatred and disgust in my heart. I can feel my thoughts growing more erratic, and on more than one occasion I have felt seized by bouts of paranoia regarding the presence of observers where realistically I understand there shouldn’t be any. My dreams have become haunted once again by strange and malevolent notions.

Thankfully, I’m an incredibly lazy and unmotivated human being and therefore I’m pretty confident these things won’t unravel into any larger plots or actions. The one undeniably positive side effect of all this is that I feel much more in tune with my work now.

And yet another day passes with no meaningful progress whatsoever. I didn’t even try today: I woke up in a wretched mood just around noon and stared out at the sky for a bit. Then I turned on my PS4 and that was pretty much it. It began to rain some time later – a real downpour – and it hasn’t stopped since. The temperature has fallen considerably but it’s become very humid. I just feel tired.

I have however come up with an idea for another chapter’s implementation. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get the visuals done by the end of Saturday but hopefully now that I have a good idea about what I’d like it to look like the actual work will come more easily. I’m gonna try to get to bed earlier tonight so that I can work longer tomorrow.

No work today either. I don’t think I even opened GameMaker at all today, now that I think about it.

Today was yet another unproductive day. I cleaned and reassembled my keyboard but other than that I accomplished virtually nothing of worth. I’ve listened to “Goodbye Horses” eighty-seven times in the past two days. 

Finally ported over to Studio 2! It was only a matter of time, I suppose. After having spent an entire month working in Studio 2, I’ve gotten too used to its (generally superior) workflow compared to 1.4. Everything was imported smoothly, much to my surprise, and the bulk of the remaining work was just a matter of fixing up 2’s fucking illegible default compatibility conversions with my personal naming conventions. As for the old GMX, well, 1.4’s image editor is still far superior to Studio 2’s, so I’ll continue using 1.4 for creating and editing graphics. I’ve completely purged it of everything else though. I doubt that after this, I’ll ever return to Studio for anything beyond editing graphics again.

I didn’t get anything else in terms of content done today, but this conversion has helped me recover a bit of much-needed momentum and has boosted my morale a bit. Hopefully I’ll be able to get more done this week now that I’m feeling a little better.

Ended up not working on much of anything today. I woke up late into the afternoon feeling completely hungover due to the humidity. I sat down, stared at the screen for several moments, completely disoriented; and then turned on my PS4 and completely ignored my responsibilities for the rest of the day.

I’ve only just recently begun to take note of just how much time I spend not just in front of a screen, but sitting in front of a screen in basically the exact same position for nearly 90% of my waking hours (and probably more, to be completely honest). At first when I think about it it seems okay and justified given the amount of work I have, but then it really begins to dawn on me just how abnormal and unacceptable – not to mention unhealthy – that likely is: and then I begin to think about how many years I’ve been living like this, day in and day out, rarely moving, rarely getting out to see the sun and breathe in fresh air…

Like I said, pretty unacceptable, to say the least.