Author: Spencer

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

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

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

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

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

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

On break. Nothing to report.

On break. Nothing to report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So be it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man, I feel nauseous…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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