Ended up taking another day off, although that’s not really what I’d intended. I got distracted by some fairly meaningless tasks and by the time I was finished it was already late evening and I no longer felt like doing anything. I think I’ll be able to make up the lost work though tomorrow. I have a good feeling about it.
Decided to take the day off in preparation for a long haul this weekend. I’m gonna try to get the lower-right corner completely finished. If so, I think I might be able to actually finish the entire map by the end of this month – meaning I would actually be back on schedule again. There are a lot of days left, but also not as many as it seems. Here’s hoping I can maintain the composition to hold steady these next few weeks…
Not much work done today, I don’t really know why and I can’t at all recount what I actually did with the day. I suppose that means I didn’t do much of anything… although I did start writing a new song, actually. One of my goals for this year was to become a better singer and as part of that I’ve been making an active effort to write at least one new song every week, and record all the stuff I play so I have a record of my improvement (or lack thereof). I don’t think so far that my vocal abilities have improved much at all, to be honest… although lately I do feel as if I’ve gained a better understanding of the kinds of songs my voice is naturally suited for, as well as the kinds of songs it’s not. And as a part of that I guess I’m also in a sense learning to appreciate my abilities for what they are, rather than what I wish they could be just because I heard someone else sing something one way. It’s too early to say anything I think. I probably won’t become a better singer in any meaningful way. But at the very least I hope I’ll learn how to be more content with the things I am capable of. I hope one day I’ll feel that way about everything I do.
Got a bunch of miscellaneous rooms done (as well as a new visual variant for the standard birch), setting up a foundation for work on the right-hand side of the map. I would like to explore the possibility of altering the flora spawning script to reflect gradual changes in the vegetation over the region. I don’t think it would be too difficult necessarily, it’s just a matter of figuring out what goes where (as well as probably continuing to expand the variations of potential flora overall).
Well, we’ll see how it goes. At worst I’ll just have to manually edit things. Which reminds me that I also found out today that child rooms can actually be manually edited while retaining inheritance from the parent room… that would’ve been useful to know a few months ago. In any case, it’ll make working on the trails much easier moving forward.
Got nothing done today. I started working around noon but I ended up just looking at the ceiling most of the day. Better luck tomorrow…
Another heavy snowstorm today. Helped to stabilise my mood a bit. I made steady progress all throughout the day, finishing up older rooms and building a bunch of new ones as well. I also managed to finally identify and fix a long-persisting bug that duplicated containers at the origin. It was, like most of these kinds of things end up being, the result of a single typo on my part.
Decided to take the day off, although I did feel marginally better compared to yesterday. I was just tired, mostly. Tomorrow, though, I’ll get back on track.
Not much progress today. I tried working a bit more on some environmental stuff but I just felt awful and I wasted nearly the entire working day in a state of heightened malevolence, debilitated by thoughts of violence and vicious, petty paranoia. Maybe it’s just that time of the month for me. It’s been like this for a while now actually. As long as I can remember. At least one week out of every month… well, actually, it just comes and it goes. Fairly senselessly, without apparent reason or cause.
Anyways, I ended up playing some Siege with Jordan tonight and we had a good time, enough to hold my attention and convince me that tomorrow I might have a better chance of getting through a proper work day. Well, we’ll see when I wake up, I suppose.
Back to work on the usual environment grind. Got a few more rooms done today, mostly above the sinkhole. Accounting for the topographical difference turned out to be slightly easier than I’d initially envisioned, which was nice. I hope I’ll be able to finish the sinkhole completely tomorrow, it shouldn’t be too much more work I think, just a matter of filling in the spaces. I’ve been making good progress this past week or so, it’s slowly restoring my morale.
Split the day between revisiting a few older rooms to add a bit more variety around the border – the most conspicuous ones are the addition of a small pond and waterfall, and a revision of the old cabin, whose exterior has been redone to fit more seamlessly with the updated visuals – and setting up a system that generates a “liminal” border once the player reaches the ends of the map. It inherits the same properties as the generic forest cells, except when the player moves further in the direction of the border (for example, moving left when the player has reached a left-border liminal cell, or up or down), it will loop them back to another version of that cell.
As long as they continue moving in any direction but the one directly opposite of the border (so, to use the previous example, any direction but right, which is back towards the main world region), they will continuously be looped into theoretically endless stretches of procedural forest. Only by turning back in the correct direction will the player be placed back into the normal world area, where they will be spawned in at a randomised location along the border, respective to the axis of movement.
It’s a neat concept that I think works well conceptually, although I’ll have to experiment with it a bit more in the future to see if it holds up in terms of consistency, both technically and visually. I’ve been facing a few performance issues lately with the rain splash particles (which I attempted unsuccessfully today to convert over to the built-in particle system) which has tuned me in to thinking about performance at large. So far, up until this point, it’s been a non-issue but just in case, I should make an effort to be more vigilant moving forward, especially when it concerns less visible kinds of performance decay such as slowdown caused by memory leaks.
Not too much to write right now because I mostly just worked on graphics today (and also because it’s both cold and late). I implemented the feature I discussed yesterday, which gradually blurs the screen and occludes the player’s visibility over time during rainfall. Pressing the interact key at any time (I still have to develop a better check for collisions with other interactive objects) will put Avery into a special state in which she wipes the rain out of her face, temporarily clearing visibility. The effect itself features a base Gaussian blur applied evenly over the entire screen, and a sprite-based vignette which slowly fades in depending on the level of the blur. I’d like to experiment with making the vignette darker but in the meantime I think it works well, and also sets up a good precedent for further vignette use later on.
Heavy snowfall all day: the deepest it’s been in a real long while. Supposedly it’s gonna continue coming down tomorrow, maybe even into the next day. I hope it continues for a while, although it probably won’t. I like it when it snows. It’s one of the few times when I feel alone, yet at peace. There’s this strange kind of thrumming melancholic hum that settles in over everything, blankets out all the other usual anxieties and palpitations, leaving only a sense of coldness: detachment without alienation. The utter absence of sensation, good or bad. It’s like a sadness devoid of pain.
Anyways, I finished up the camera FX for the sinkhole and spent the rest of the day touching up the rain. I started by revisiting the audio, which turned out to be much quieter than I remember. I went back to some recordings I made over the summer and layered into the original second, denser rain track. I think it sounds a lot better now: there’s a greater sense of impact upon vegetation especially, which was pretty lacking before in retrospect.
I also re-implemented the splash decals on the ground surface, and significantly increased the amount to “realistic” quantities, depending on the number of droplets currently active in the room. As part of this process, I revisited all of the existing cells and mapped out no-rain-splash regions in all of the relevant ones. I had to turn down the effect pretty substantially for certain rooms – currently, the outpost and the generic forest areas are most impacted – so hopefully I can figure out a more elegant solution than just spawning in hundreds of objects every step. Either way though, even if I can’t find a better solution, it probably won’t matter that much: it looks okay as is.
Lastly, I added a new VFX overlay for rain, which features a pseudo-dynamic lens effect that simulates water droplets accumulating on the screen. It ended up looking a lot better than I expected. I’m currently
investigating the possibility of implementing some kind of basic system that reduces visibility over time when it’s raining, forcing the player to manually direct Avery to wipe away rain in her eyes every few moments. I think that would significantly deter players from spending too much time out in the rain directly (on top of the existing dirtiness accumulation), but I have to figure out how to implement in a way that makes sense visually first. Hopefully I can get that in by tomorrow…
Got the zoom working more or less as intended – although that’s just about all I was able to do today. The animation, especially when coming out of it, is still rather jerky but at this point there’s little I imagine I can do to remedy it given how poor the camera implementation is in general. In the process I did revamp the zoom code slightly: the zoom is much smoother now and allows finer control instead of just jumping between preset levels.
I felt like absolute shit today. What a waste of a month.
More work on the sinkhole. I’m investigating an idea that I think may have a somewhat interesting effect, of zooming out the camera in certain locations to showcase a much larger sense of relative scale. I’ve implemented the “framework” (if something so rudimentary could even be addressed as such) in the room with the larger sinkhole, which I think I’ll tie to a user-specified trigger: maybe as simple as a manual interaction prompt, although I’m gonna try tomorrow as well to have it trigger automatically when the player steps over it. My only concern is that that would be mildly disorienting… although I think that has just as much to do with how haphazard the current camera zoom implementation is.
Continued work on the sinkhole, focusing on the smaller indentation. I decided to develop into a pond-like structure, filled with leaves and other natural debris. The general area around it is now more or less complete, tomorrow’s work will start with cleaning it up a bit before moving onto the larger hole. I still haven’t fully made up my mind as to the extent to which the player will be able to access this latter area – or honestly, whether they’ll even be able to see it in full at all – although I suppose that’s best left for tomorrow to figure out.
I feel completely drained right now for some reason, and suffered from minor nervous shakes and palpitation all throughout the day. One part of it was no doubt the cold – it snowed a few days ago and everything froze over, it’s the coldest it’s been this year so far I think – but there’s a distinct probability that I’m still suffering from the effects of the caffeine I most likely overdosed on yesterday morning.
Didn’t get any work done today at all. This morning I drank a bunch of coffee too quickly and all throughout the day I suffered from a continuous aftershock of anxiety and vague nausea. I was simultaneously exhausted yet also completely unhinged. My hands and feet felt unnaturally cold, and my body febrile. It was like the worst parts of being high: my senses rapidly dilating and contracting, lurching from one moment to the next, unable to make sense of any of it. I felt like absolute shit; and yet another day without any progress just made it feel even worse. I’ve gotta collect myself tomorrow and set things straight.
Didn’t quite finish the sinkhole like I’d hoped I’d be able to, but I did successfully map out all the collisions, and am about halfway through placing down vegetation. Originally I wanted the area to remain relatively treeless, something like an open campground; but I’ve come to realise that barrenness is probably not the best choice with these kinds of visuals, the starkness rarely comes across feeling like little more than unintentional lack of meticulousness. Best to just stick with what works…
No in-engine work today, decided to take a break and instead focused on gathering and sketching new locations. I finished up a bunch of tents today along with a few other miscellaneous structures/objects to place around the sinkhole, which should be ready to be put in tomorrow. I hope to be able to finish up the sinkhole tomorrow completely and start working on getting it integrated seamlessly into the existing geography.
Got a good amount of work done today finally. I produced nearly twenty new rooms, most of which are occupied by a massive sinkhole. The sinkhole itself has been incorporated into the map along with basic grass placement, although I still have to get the collisions sorted out completely tomorrow. I also have to figure out how I’m going to handle the upper and lower bounds of it in terms of how they relate to the rest of the environment geographically… but overall, I’m feeling optimistic about it, I think (hope) it’ll end up being interesting in its final implementation.
No work today.
Implemented full animations and audio for using the lantern, with the exception of the lighting and extinguishing animations, which I would like to get to tomorrow. At some point I’d also like to record some audio for the lantern moving around slightly while walking – light mechanical squeaking, a little bit of rattling every once in a while. I think it’ll really help improve the mood, especially at night.
I also created a dynamic shadow system that’s visible when lights are active in the world. Objects such as trees and various mid-sized flora will spawn in casters automatically, while casters must be manually placed for buildings and large structures. The visibility of the shadows is tied to the time of day, and will gradually fade to full transparency. I’m not that confident with the effect yet and honestly I think it kinda looks like shit right now, but I’ll keep it in just in case somewhere down the line I come up with something better.
Got virtually nothing done either today or yesterday. I can’t even remember really what happened yesterday, or if in fact yesterday was really the day before, or… I’ve just been feeling extremely tired all the time, even though I’m getting enough sleep all things considered. I just wish I didn’t feel so bad all the time…
Recovered a bit of progress today. I got the idle and walk animations done for the lamp with no pack equipped; now I just have to make animations for equipping it and unequipping it, and duplicate the entire set for when the pack is equipped. Not a huge step or anything, but good enough for now. I also implemented fifteen generic cells, filling out the bottom-left corner of the map completely. I’ll probably go back at some point and change the spawn algorithms on those rooms a bit – I want the forests to grow consistently heavier and more difficult to navigate the closer she gets to the game’s “border” – but for now I’m actually surprisingly okay with the results as is. Now, to see if I can match my pace again tomorrow…
Spent the day researching options for the medical kit and outpost storage UI. And by that, I basically mean I accomplished nothing of worth. I have a few leads, but ultimately I wasn’t able to act on any of them, and instead just spent the day Googling images trying to convince myself I was getting something done. I did spend about twenty minutes spamming a bunch of generic rooms in-game but I don’t feel like that was worth much of anything at all, considering I’ll probably regret their placement later this week. Man, I gotta get it together, I haven’t done anything meaningful in days…
Another slow day. Continued planning out the item weights and volumes, put them in a spreadsheet this afternoon and started figuring out how I want to distribute stuff. It was a lot of tedious, morale-sapping work that’s definitely taken a toll on my motivation… Next week – well, tomorrow – I’m gonna get back to working on environments full-time and relegate what’s left of the inventory back to secondary priority.
Finished and published the update for this month. I decided to take the rest of the day’s work off my computer and instead spent the afternoon working on conceptual stuff – mostly setting up the weights and volumes of all the items, as well as sketching the descriptions. A part of wishes I had just done it on the computer to begin with, but I think stepping away for a bit was a good call. I feel like I have a better sense of perspective now on my work recently, even if just by a little bit.
Unproductive day. I was able to get barely any work done, I just felt distracted the entire day by… honestly, nothing, just a kind of free-floating sense of disruption. I spent an hour or so cleaning up the audio sequence on the container interactions, which now (more or less) have full audio. One more thing I’d like to add is container-specific audio cues that change depending on the nature of the container (ie a metal toolbox will sound different from a wood cabinet which’ll sound different from a plastic bin, etc).
I’m also investigating the possibility of developing a kind of “tag” system that’ll allow each item to have a different icon next to its name in the container UI, with an associated sound effect that plays when that item is transferred. Those small sounds would also play when picking up the item for the first time (either through foraging or from a container). It shouldn’t be too difficult, I think; but it will be incredibly boring, mind-numbing work. I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing I should be attempting right now…
I also started working on the Kickstarter update for this month, which I originally intended to get done and published today; but I’m just not satisfied at all with the way the inventory UI looks, and I don’t really want to publish it. Really though, I should’ve just written it yesterday and had it ready. Now that I wasn’t able to complete it today, I have to finish and publish it tomorrow within a reasonable timeframe. I kinda squeezed myself into a corner here, but what else is new…
Another somewhat slow day. I wanted to finish up the inventory today completely – which was really just the audio – but I once again just felt incredibly tired so I didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped. Nonetheless, I was able to (mostly) accomplish the baseline for the rest of the audio work today, including finishing up all the mixing, and setting up the enter/exit audio for opening and closing the inventory. I also made a set of new animations for using containers, although I’ll definitely have to re-mix new audio tracks for them (shouldn’t be too bad, that kind of stuff is really just busywork). The animations and audio could probably also be reused for just checking the inventory out in the world in general, which is useful.
Lastly, I made a very minor adjustment that prevents the player from foraging and accessing container inventories if the pack isn’t equipped. It saves me a lot of trouble moving forward as I won’t have to segregate items stored in Avery’s harness “inventory” (which is really just a few fixed items) and the items stored in her pack based on carry weight and capacity. It also has the added benefit of incentivising the player to constantly keep track of their pack and bring it with them instead of just running around without it on. I think in turn, somewhere down the line, I’ll also try to come up with a few actions that can only be performed with the pack off. Right now, resting is one of them; I think having tool-based actions restricted to unencumbered movement might also be worth looking into. Hopefully these will result in interesting dynamics and tradeoffs rather than frustration…
Ended up basically just taking the day off. I felt oddly drained all throughout the day. I woke around noon and wasted a few hours supposedly working on audio for the inventory UI, but truthfully I just got distracted and played Fallout 4 for nearly the entire afternoon instead. I’m gonna have to double-time tomorrow and work Sunday to make up the lost work.
I think one of the biggest issues I’m facing now really in regards to the map is a total absence of sense for how to populate the lower-right corner of the map. Obviously I need it to be filled in some way, but just spamming forest grids feels cheap and ineffective, like I’m deliberately just bloating the sense of space with effectively “empty” stretches.
I think I need to just take a step back one of these days to plot out points of interest before I can proceed much further. I still have just under 200 rooms to get done, at least 80 of which I’d like to be unique; That’s at least a month’s worth of work, being generous; and I’m already halfway through January, meaning that unless I really accelerate my progress, I’m not gonna make this month’s goal….
Managed to fully finish the backend for the inventory system, including transferring objects, and saving both the player inventory and any containers within the world based on room. It took a bit longer than I had initially hoped – the latter required me to completely redo the save/load system for player data, which was a bit of work – but it seems to work solidly now, which is all I suppose I can really ask for at the end of the day.
Storage weight and capacity also now adapt properly on the fly. This too involved a bit of work as I had to redo the grid structures storing the player inventory, which is now no longer segregated by type, but is instead stored in one single universal list (this has inevitably caused some problems with the firestarter kit, which I have to fix soon: maybe tomorrow). I’m concerned a bit about potential performance degradation over time as there are still a few necessary free-floating data structures which aren’t cleared until the program itself terminates; but I guess it’s best not to worry about those now and deal with them later if necessary.
There’s still a bit of work to get done on it before I feel it’s good enough to show – mainly the item description/properties window, and improved UI VFX and audio, although I’m still also considering adding the item stack feature I talked about yesterday – but I’m confident I can get it done tomorrow in time for this month’s update.