Category: Entries

Jim died last night. It came as quite a shock to me to hear the news… He was rather sick for a while, so I suppose it wasn’t really a surprise, but even still. They buried him in a tiny coffin in the backyard. It feels in a way as if a small vacuum has opened up in a part of my heart where he used to rest. You’d think that after enough times you start getting used to the feeling but somehow, it’s different every time. The same pain, just applied elsewhere.

I spent the rest of the day trying to work on this month’s update. It’s basically done, but I’m just not feeling it at all. Maybe a sense of guilt about how little I’ve accomplished this month. It should be good to go tomorrow. 

Took the day off. Sawyer came over for the first time this year I believe to record some audio for a project. We then ate some fried chicken at the station and talked for a while. The doctor also got back to me this afternoon. We’ve scheduled a consultation for Tuesday. I feel a bit better today than before. I feel like I’m very suddenly learning about a new kind of honesty.

Spent a good part of the day completely wigging out, but by around 1500 or so I gained just enough control over my mental faculties so that I was able to make some progress. I got the entire PDA app for the BCU monitor set up and functional, and started working on a new wound UI. 

The BCU monitor, which displays digestion biostatistics and caloric balance, has now been consolidated and merged into its own independent application accessible at any time through the PDA. Included with it as well is the wound monitor, which, when activated, opens up into a separate window specifically dedicated to treating locational afflictions. I’m gonna have to significantly modify the appearance though moving forward I think, as it’s gonna be difficult to accommodate the number and variety of medical tools and medications available.

I spent some time tonight with Haolun, and it really helped to ease some of my earlier anxieties during the day. I hope this sense of relief persists and that I can carry it forward into my actions and decisions in the foreseeable future.

Ah, it was just as I figured. How foolish of me. How pathetic. What a mistake. What a mistake.

No progress whatsoever these past two days. Wednesday, I guess I was just distracted or something… the weather was exceedingly pleasant today and I hadn’t gotten any work done by noon anyways, so I made the conscious decision to just take the day off again and spend the rest of it sitting outside looking at the sky.

I’ve experienced over the past day and a half a series of personal developments that may or may not be good. It’s too early to tell so I won’t say much more about it in case it most likely ends up being nothing. I’ll probably give it a week before concluding anything for sure. But I must admit in the meantime that regardless of how it turns out, right now, in this moment, I feel something that’s almost like a kind of intense clarity of perspective. As if someone took a lantern and shined it directly within the recesses of my spirit, uncovering those parts of me I tried to hide away from myself because I was afraid. I wish I didn’t feel this way, especially over something so insignificant. I would rather feel nothing at all. But I have no choice. I brought this upon myself. Best to just get it over with as quickly as possible.

Spent the day making minor progress on the PDA. The biggest changes are a “completed” home screen (it still looks very bare, but it’s fully functional and could pass for being “finished” if necessary), and the introduction of a status bar, with functioning – theoretically, at least – battery and network status indicators.

I felt unreasonably wiped today. Progress has just been way too slow and uneventful… every day I make some progress but it’s just so glacial and the last thing I can afford right now is to be dragging like this.

Spent the first half of the day designing the layout and icons for the PDA. Honestly, the biggest bulk of time was just trying to figure out how to design a button-oriented layout, as opposed to the touch-based ones I’ve grown so used to. Once I settled upon a good-enough solution (which still looks way too sparse for my liking, and lacks a few necessary icons), I merged all of the various PDA sub-objects into the single parent object, which makes switching between “modes” (which is to say, the diegetic “apps”) much easier, and gets rid of the annoying visual resets that would happen with the object-based submenus.

I think I’ll be able to finish all the current apps tomorrow, and I hope to be able to redesign the home page better to my liking. The middle of the month is rapidly approaching, and I’ve yet to even start in any meaningful sense upon the work I wanted to finish this month…

Got nothing done today. The awful feelings from last night persisted into today and left me psychically debilitated. On top of that – and most likely, as a direct result of it too – I woke up around 0300 despite going to bed quite early last night, and wasn’t able to go back to sleep afterwards, leaving me physically exhausted all throughout the day.

There’s just this dark, rotting abscess in the centre of my soul, and it’s filled with this swarming mass of wretched thoughts and impulses simmering just beneath the surface of my self-control. It’s been there as long as I can remember, just growing slowly and silently… These past few years in particular, I feel like it’s just gotten worse and worse, even though the surface above appears to have healed over. It feels like every day now I get stuck on something and it just eats away at me until there’s nothing left in me but utter malice, and an absolute disregard for the lives of others. When it hits, it feels like I’m being drowned in the heat of my own blood, boiling within me. 

It gets especially bad when I have to go back out into the world. The sight of pretty strangers makes me sick, and the only way I can get through the rising sickness within me is by focusing on this image in my head of what they would look like separated into pieces, rendered into meat. But that recognition of my own nature too twists me into a different state, of immense disgust and self-hatred, which only makes it worse. I start thinking about the person I used to be, who I could’ve been if only, and then I remember that as long as I can remember, it’s always been like this, I’ve always been like this. 

My friends don’t get it. I can’t talk to them about what I really feel, because what they will tell me will only confirm the things I already know, and that’ll just make me feel even worse. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this kind of thing anymore.

No one really gets it, because when you try to tell them about it, they just look at you with that same tired mix of disgust and shameful pity that they ever knew you, and they tell you, always, to “get help”. That’s probably the worst part about it. Everyone’s always too busy dealing with their own stupid shit and no one’s got time or energy left to care. Everyone’s always too busy telling you to get help, but no one’s ever able to really help anyone, especially themselves.

Man, I hope the game sells well enough that I can start seeing a doctor or something…

Took the day off, spent the afternoon playing one of the top-down Tomb Raider games with Martin, and then hung out with Julia and Vikram in the evening. I was having quite a good day actually, up until right at the end. I don’t really want to discuss what happened – nothing at all remarkable or noteworthy on its own right, just a minor slip – but it sent me spiralling into a dark, wretched hole of anger and resentment for the rest of the night. 

Most of the worst thoughts have receded by now, but it’s left me with a sick feeling deep inside my chest. I always think about just finally reaching out to a therapist in moments but like this, but that too always sends me careening even further into the recesses of my malevolence. I wish I didn’t have to live with these moments; or even if they were just less frequent. It’s this kind of shit which always hits my productivity the hardest, and leaves me psychically debilitated for hours, even entire days on end. 

I’d originally intended to spend the day adding a few new pages to the PDA, but I was struggling to get started until I stumbled upon a very cool extension that allows one to quickly and seamlessly embed a fully-functional Chromium browser into GameMaker projects. It was very straightforward to set up and get working with the in-game computer, and because it draws the browser render to a GM surface, it was also easy to apply my dithering shader over it, rendering it more in line with the game’s visuals overall. I’m really surprised at just how high-quality this asset was for something I just came across completely accidentally, and it’s immediately expanded the range of potential activities (as well as implementations for older ones) I can feature for the in-game computer.

I think moving forward I’ll spend some time building a couple of locally-stored HTML pages to form a small repository of documents – some linked, others which must be accessed by finding addresses out in the wild – which will provide some further worldbuilding not directly related to the main plot. Because it’s Chromium, it may even natively support PDF displays, which would be really useful as I could then load the reference and instruction manuals directly in-game without forcing the player to switch to a different window on their machine.

At some point I’d like to explore the possibility of creating a special visual effect when accessing non-local files (basically, anything addresses on the real internet) to suggest extensive data corruption. I also have to implement a feature to prevent the player from “connecting” (in other words, just being able to access) to the browser when the in-game network is down. It should be pretty straightforward: I think I can build it into the splash screen that I have to make for it anyways, and simply have it destroy the instance and display a special error message if outside of the range of hours in which the network is active.

Lastly, while I was getting ready to go to bed at the end of the night, an idea for Estelle’s section came to with sudden and startling clarity. I was almost immediately certain that it was the best implementation of the idea yet, in terms of both thematic fit, and efficiency of design. I’m looking forward to getting started on working on it now.

All in all, pretty unexpected progress on multiple fronts today, although certainly encouraging.

Woke up late again… decided to take a break from working on in-engine stuff and shifted focus to writing. I spent the evening working on the log entries, and have started rewriting them sequentially. Don’t have much more to say about that. I baked some banana bread last night and it turned out quite well, much better than I was actually expecting. Next time though I’m gonna put some raisins in it I think.

Stayed up until noon for no good reason, fell asleep until 1700. I spent a few hours going over notes from playtesters and fixing a variety of bugs, but truthfully accomplished little of worth. I have a feeling that maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself to transition too quickly, and that I probably need a bit more time and space to reflect upon my progress so far and figure out what exactly I need to do moving forward instead of feeling so pressured to get it done immediately. I hope I’ll be able to figure that out by the time the weekend comes around…

Spent the day “researching” options for designing this next section, which means that in reality I basically did nothing all day except sit at my desk watching random gameplay videos and frankly learning very little of worth. Hopefully I’ll be able to get properly started tomorrow on something…

Uploaded a build to get some feedback on the map overall, spent the afternoon working through it with my playtesters and watching them navigate the environment. I’m pretty satisfied with the overall response, and it’s helped me develop a decent amount of insight into areas that need to be both fixed in a technical sense, and also improved design-wise. 

I spent the evening planning out my work for the next week or two, focusing on the first sequence. I have a pretty solid idea now of how it’ll work, although I still need a bit of time to figure out the precise logistics in terms of appearance (and especially that age-old question of how to handle verticality).

Last day of the month, last major day of work on the map. I finished plotting and setting out the trail system today. It doesn’t really look as good as I wished – although to be honest, I don’t really know what exactly it was I actually imagined it would look like to begin with – but hopefully it’s functional enough to help players develop a sense of direction over the course of this section, especially at the beginning. I’m beginning to realise now that there’s also probably a lack of landmarks (and particularly notable interiors…) which hopefully I’ll be able to address when I revisit this in a month or two… but tomorrow (or later today, I guess) a new section of work starts! I’m looking forward to it. I hope by the end of this month I’ll be able to fully finish both sequences, but we’ll see…

Recorded a short showcase for the new environments, and then took the rest of the day off. I feel ready to get back to work tomorrow.

I finished up the last few rooms in the forest today, which means that, in terms of the exterior world space, the forest is now completely finished! I still have two days left in the month to go over and renovate existing spaces. I think my first priority tomorrow will be to improve the trail system, so that the world feels a bit more immediately cohesive to navigate.

I’m very close to finishing the map now: just one more day of work to finish off a handful of miscellaneous transition cells, and laying down trails, and that’s basically it! Of course, there are still a number of free-standing tasks remaining – further beautification of existing areas, interior cells, placement of events and containers – but for now, once this month is over, I think I’m gonna take a week or two off to focus on building the foundation for the next stage of this project. Probably the most interested I’ve felt in it in a while…

Just continued working on environments today. I improved the forest generation algorithm to dynamically adapt the types of flora to the position of the cell within the map grid. I think I might be able to finish the map tomorrow… although I do want to put in a few more structures overall, which will take some time to build. I think tomorrow I’m gonna try to finish at least another fifteen rooms, and get the camper trailers built and implemented into the world (the interiors can wait a bit, although I should make a note to myself to not forget about them entirely). I wasn’t able to find time to work on the PDA home screen today, but I have a pretty good idea of what it’ll look like, and the functionality itself shouldn’t be difficult at all to implement. I should be able to get the PDA completely done by the end of this weekend if all goes well…

Spent the day rebuilding the backend of the PDA system away from the strictly inventory-based framework it was built upon earlier, towards a more flexible free-form approach. The PDA can now be accessed at nearly any time anywhere, regardless of whether Avery has her pack or not; and its intended functionalities have been significantly expanded beyond just serving as a glorified inventory management system. Today, I more or less completely finished building the map application, of which I’m quite satisfied. I’d like to get a home/landing page built tomorrow and finish up at least fifteen rooms. Only four days left in the month to get everything done…

Set up the backend today for working with dynamic world progression, along with the requisite daily rooms. I have just under 50 left before I’m completely done with the map…

Essentially, how the world event system works is that each room is assigned a “tier” based on the global world tier (dictated by the player’s progress through the story). Certain rooms have alternate versions that can be dynamically swapped out with the default ones depending on the world tier and player progress (which can be advanced either through completing certain objectives, or naturally with enough time). Today I built in the system that allows for that process of detection and room switching to function dynamically, without any (hopefully) hard-coded solutions. I also built in the world tier to the save/load system, which is something that for whatever reason I never got around to before.

All that’s left now to do in this regards is figure out how to semi-randomly generate event locations. I’m thinking that maybe there’ll be a function that runs at game launch, which chooses one location from a list of possible spawn points for each defined event and then clears the other rooms from the list. I’m not exactly sure how this is gonna work to be honest…

Another possible alternative may be accomplished with the “room_assign” or “room_duplicate”; the base room would have a special name (ie rmHouse), and then be either duplicated or assigned into one of several potential special cells. In this scenario, the special cells will always default to generic layouts, which prevents them from being messed with if not assigned properly. I think this is actually the best option, but we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see…

Got basically no actual work done today, but I did still end up making the bare minimum on the room count, for what it’s worth. I also spent some time this evening (or whatever 4am counts as) gathering resources for the camper trailers, which I hope to get processed and implemented in the game tomorrow. I’m hoping that by the end of the week I can get interiors done for all of them as well… either that, or finish off the exterior of the map completely. Less than a week left in the month now…

Didn’t manage to get any work done today, I stayed up way too late last night and ended up slipping into a series of waking dreams which kept me in bed until 1630 this afternoon. I dreamt I was at a water park in Mexico with a few old friends (or, well, they weren’t really my friends at all in reality, just people I happened to know back then). The entire thing had a strange sheen to it, the colour and tone of that somewhat-decayed vintage filter you see in old homemade videos shot on the family 8mm. I felt at once exhilaratingly free, yet also hopelessly trapped. 

Got a new interior done, the audio could be a bit better but for now I’m not gonna worry about it too much as I feel like it’s gonna be too much of an uphill battle trying to get some form of reverb working without resorting to some stupid bullshit like with the interior audio track for rain. In the mean time I continued building out the environment to the bottom-right, which is almost finished.

I also fixed some minor issues which slipped my attention earlier, mostly dealing with the way collision messages were detected (or in this case, not). All special collision areas should now properly display their appropriate collision messages. I may have potentially messed something up in one very specific room in terms of z-depth sorting but that should be easier to fix through brute-force than to try to build the entire system around accommodating for that one irregularity.

Woke up really late, decided to just take the day off and record some videos. I have a good feeling about this weekend. I think I’ll be able to get a lot done – maybe even finish the map, now that I’m taking a good look at it actually. Best to keep my hopes measured for now, though, and just commit to the work ahead. Almost there…

Yet another day of environmental work. Made steady progress into the right border, where I was having some troubles before. I’m very confident now that I can get the map done by the end of this month. Tomorrow I’m gonna investigate the potential of setting up some more interesting looping structures for the borders, and try to finish building the western trail.

Wasn’t able to get anything done today. I was just in a weird mood… not really sure how to describe it. It wasn’t necessarily bad by any means, just uneasy. The end’s now within sight, although in such a way that feels almost discouraging: like realising just how much further you have left to go when you feel like you’ve already gone far enough.

Just some more environmental work, nothing of note. I wanted to get a couple more structures built today but it turns out I just didn’t have enough energy for that, so I touched up a few earlier areas I wasn’t satisfied with and built a few more filling out a bunch of blank spots I’d overlooked previously. The sense of progress is steady, but somehow unfulfilling at the same time…

Normal work. Spent the first hour or two finishing up this month’s update, and then the rest of the time building a bunch of new rooms. I also fixed an issue with the inventory backend for the firekit: it should now properly sort and display only the materials within the kit itself. I built a small framework for it which should be pretty easily applied to the other container inventories down the line.

Spent the day just working on room templates and mapping stuff out, didn’t end up getting much in-engine work done unfortunately. On a positive note, I think I’ve settled on the final concept for the map, meaning that all progress from this point forward is tied solely to my ability to produce the necessary assets in an efficient and timely manner. Once I finish writing the monthly update tomorrow, I’ll begin working on those. I’m fairly confident now that I’ll be able to finish the map by the end of this month.