Author: Spencer

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

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

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

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

I’ll start on the animations for it tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever, elegance is overrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.