Spent half of the day in a state of extreme agitation, and the other working steadily on the inventory system. Today I managed to successfully implement item weight and volume for all currently available resources. The hardest part, without question, was figuring out how to manipulate the ds_grids to properly store calculated values. I’ve effectively ended up with the equivalent of a(n extremely basic) spreadsheet… So far, it seems to be working as intended, although I have yet to test it outside of the confines of the test room, or with multiple object containers.
Regardless, I’m just glad that I got it working at all. I’m actually pretty impressed with myself to be quite honest. At many times it just felt completely above my skill level, and yet I somehow persisted through it and even managed to end up with a solution that, while probably not elegant, is definitely flexible and legible enough to be reused later in a more modular contexts.
Tomorrow I hope to get item transferral set up and hopefully maybe even finished. I’m probably gonna have to start by revamping the way items are generated, and reducing the pack_add_item script to a simpler form that allows items to be generated using only the item names. I’m currently trying to decide whether I want to do that with a CSV or external text file, or just load it in via a massive switch statement at the beginning. I’m leaning towards the latter, but we’ll see…
I don’t think it’ll be too bad once I get going on it, especially since I feel I’ve set up a pretty decent framework today to dynamically handle weight/space calculations, but we’ll see. There are also a few fringe cases, like transferring item counts over certain quantities: right now, I’m thinking I’m just gonna lift the implementation from Fallout once again, and have it so that if the player attempts to transfer more than 10 of the same item, it’ll open up a prompt that allows them to manually select a custom quantity. I’m not sure how the input for that will work right now, but again, we’ll see…
I hope that I’m stable enough tomorrow so I can get this done, and get back to work on environments.
A productive day. Got a bunch of rooms done, and started work on the inventory system. I was able to set up the foundation for it, including basic navigation and all the general GUI elements. There are still a few things I’d like to expand upon in that direction beyond just making it look better – namely, additional information about storage capacity and weight – but overall it’s a good start, and I’m surprised I was able to get it done so quickly.
After that, I have to implement functionality – basically just transferring items, and properly calculating combined weights and storage space – but that requires me to first build in those systems, as well as potentially revamp the original inventory system pretty substantially to account for, and properly calculate total combined resource values (meaning that the previous implementation, which segregates resources by category, has to be either redone or seriously reconsidered).
All in all, it’s simultaneously a lot of work, yet not as much as I originally thought. I’ve learned that as long as I’m able to find the patience to slow down and concentrate, visualise things in the right order, I’ll be okay with these kinds of things. I hope I can finish by the middle of next week.
Took the day off today. I’ve been having particularly unpleasant dreams these past two nights for some strange reason. When I wake I no longer feel rested…
Nothing really that interesting, just continued working on new rooms. I also implemented a very basic spawner for certain trees – really, just the tall ones – whose bases previously didn’t mesh that well with the ground, that spawns in a few shrubs around the base to blend it a bit better.
Today was the first day I actually got my five rooms done! Hopefully I’m able to continue with this.
I also got a lot of additional work done, improving the procgen system used to generate the generic forest sections. I added a few new variations of dead trees and various brambles for the underbrush, and rebalanced the placement algorithm a bit. The result is a much more “natural”-looking forest I think, with a lot more diversity in terms of both distribution and types of flora: now I just gotta work a bit more on improving overall legibility for the player…
Didn’t get as much done today, unusually tired for some reason tonight. However, the area around the observatory’s road is functionally complete now, including sound masking (along with new audio for footsteps on hard surfaces, although they still need a lot of work I think). The Capitol Building was temporarily stormed today, which is probably why I had such difficulty concentrating. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to get back on track.
Resumed work on environments, starting with the area around the observatory. Although I didn’t technically get five new rooms done today, I significantly redid the terrain around it (as well as added some additional visuals such as vines to the building itself): the “road” system leading up to it is now more or less finished in terms of layout, it’s just a matter of improving legibility in a few of the rooms and adjusting the precise placement of the observatory itself on the larger map with respect to distribution and density of PoIs. Figuring out how to (mostly, for now) resolve the issue of the observatory’s previously sudden and jarring occurrence has significantly eased some of my frustrations in this area and particular, and once I finish up the road complete, I think I’ll feel much better prepared to expand eastwards, equipped with a better understanding of the scale and shape of the terrain relative to early major landmarks.
A slower day, didn’t get around to doing my rooms for the day after all. I did however finish up the sub-lighting effect that I started yesterday – most light sources, but most noticeably the torch, now have a soft darkened gradient around their edges, which fades out appropriately according to the time of day – as well as the visibility system for interactions: interaction prompts will still appear, but the text will be dimmer and potentially even illegible in the absence of nearby light sources, whether that’s the player-mounted ones, or exterior ones such as fires. I spent some time figuring out whether I wanted to just hide the visibility of the prompts, or completely disable interaction altogether. Ultimately I ended up going with the former, as the latter proved to be a bit too cumbersome to implement properly, both design-wise, and technically due to the weird masking issues on the light textures themselves.
I hope tomorrow I can get back to working on the environment.
A dim, snowy day. Spent the afternoon and evening working on fire and lighting. I finally implemented something I should have done a long time ago: fires now burn differently depending on environmental circumstances, particularly humidity, and precipitation. For example, fires lit during heavy rain are much more difficult to ignite, take longer to build up, and burn both shorter, and less brightly (meaning less available light). In contrast, fires lit during clear or cloudy weather are much easier to light and give off a lot more light, allowing Avery to perform a greater range of activities (tomorrow I’m gonna finally implement the light restriction system, another one of those things I had planned out long ago but never got around to doing for some reason). However, larger fires also increase the possibility of attracting potentially unwanted contact, which makes them riskier, and encourages the player to extinguish their fires early.
I also started implementing a sub-lighting surface that adds a bit of a gradient to the lighting at night. It’ll be toggle-able, as with all the other features; I’m not sure yet if I’m gonna have it enabled by default, or left as an option. Lastly, I implemented a visible in-world lighting object for sparks when using the lighter and ferro rod.
Pretty productive day today (although I still didn’t get my five rooms done…). I started by working on the dirtiness effects like I said I would yesterday. It ended up being a little bit trickier than I initially projected: since the game is running at true resolution, the texture, which previously worked fine on a much larger sprite in a different project, had to be manually adjusted in order to not appear blotchy/weird on Avery’s character model. Nonetheless though it turned out fine and everything works as intended now: dirt and grime naturally accumulate while outdoors but particularly during rainfall, and can be washed away in the decontamination shower. I think I’m gonna have the regular shower give a substantial mood buff, which is countered by a long wait time in between available usages (maybe a day or two, as new water gets filtered in).
While coming up with ways to make the two work together well, I also came up with the idea for a small underground area, accessible via a hatch in the ground in the outpost room, leading to an interior cell containing the water and power sources for the outpost. I’m not entirely sure yet what the point of those would necessarily serve beyond demonstrating the functional construction of the outpost, but it’s an oddly exciting idea that I’m gonna work a bit with more tomorrow.
I also started working on directional sprites for the idle animations: now, Avery will stay in whatever position she was facing when she stops walking. It’s a relatively small change, but significantly improves the feeling of the movement overall.
Lastly, I got rid of the alternate lighting system entirely after discovering some gross incompatibilities with the design of the outpost, and implemented an alternate light source instead: a miniature storm lantern, which, instead of casting a beam like the hand torch, casts a small radius around Avery. I’m thinking it’ll be powered by fuel tablets (also used for starting fires), although I’m not yet sure what its advantages over the torch are yet. I’ll think about it a bit more in the coming days and hopefully arrive at a satisfactory solution.
Started off the year on a bit of slow note. Last night I took a sleeping pill so I could try to fix my sleep schedule (I’ve been going to bed around 0600 the past week or so for some reason), but I guess it ended up just being too strong as I was overcome by an intense lethargy early in the afternoon, and ended up falling asleep until around 1900.
Nonetheless I spent the morning reacquainting myself with my previous progress, and ended up working on some minor QoL fixes and visual updates, especially around the outpost. This weekend, I’d like to implement the dirtiness system. It shouldn’t be difficult or time-consuming at all: a fairly straightforward accumulation meter, and a shader-based visual overlay that I already have pre-assembled from another project I worked on last year. I’m also resuming my five-rooms-a-day schedule tomorrow.
Well, here we are, at the end of yet another year. I decided the day before Christmas that, instead of forcibly hitting my head against the wall for the rest of the year getting nothing done, I’d just take the time off instead to try to enjoy the holiday and recuperate my attention and energy.
Truth be told, I actually think it’s worked a bit: I think I do feel a little bit better, and taking a step back has granted me a greater perspective of, and desire to improve upon my efforts, that I lacked before because I guess I was just too stuck in it. I hope tomorrow I’ll be able to return with a stronger and clearer sense of both purpose and motivation alike.
Overall, I think that, despite everything else that happened at large, this year was a good one for me: probably the best in a good while, actually. I feel like I gained a certain sense of clarity over myself and the things that I believe, the things that I desire, that I’ve been hoping to find for a very long time now, but was unable to achieve because I was constantly blinded by distractions before. For the first time, probably ever, I feel at peace most days, untroubled by the noise of the world.
As for the subject of wishes and resolutions… well, I suppose there’s a lot I could say but at the end of the day, all I really hope is that I can continue to get better. In the meantime, I’ll continue to put in the effort all the days I can, and in time, hopefully learn how to better recognise and deal with the days I can’t. And so it goes.
Peace be with you.
Barely got in any work at all today. I woke at 1700 after being unable to wake up from a strange – but not altogether unpleasant – dream. It was already dark by the time I finally got out of bed. I attempted to start working but it was doomed from the start. I’m just gonna give up on this trailer for now and return to my normal schedule. I still technically have just under a week… but with the holiday coming up and my utter lack of imagination lately, I doubt anything will come to me soon. Disappointing, but expected, I suppose…
Watched Tenet tonight with Nate and Jacob. I liked it a lot. I wasn’t able to get any work done today though. I’ve been stuck on the second half of this trailer for several days now and it’s ground down whatever little momentum I had finally started to build up to a complete halt. If I’m not able to come up with anything tomorrow I think I’m just gonna stop working on it altogether for now and get back to my regular schedule. I’m wasting too much time grinding away at this without any progress.
Didn’t end up getting much done today unfortunately. I’m pretty stuck on the second half of the trailer, specifically the visuals. What few ideas I was able to come up with turned out to be much more difficult to actually create in practice. I struggled through many different assets this afternoon, none of which can ultimately be either used, or salvaged. The utter lack of progress combined with the high amount of wasted work has left me in a considerably worse mood, which doesn’t bode well for the immediate future. I can only hope that some kind of inspiration visits me between now and tomorrow when I start working again…
Didn’t get much done in terms of in-engine work today, but I made a good amount of progress on the trailer, which makes up for it. Depending on how progress goes on producing new assets for it – which honestly is the only thing I have left, I finished putting in all of the existing ones today – I might even be able to get it done by the end of this week, which will be pretty exciting.
Got my five new rooms done today, including at least one unique one. I also cleaned up the loose item descriptions in some of the Create events. Except for the character-based ones (ie examining beds adjusts to Avery’s fatigue level), all of the observation ones have been consolidated in a single script, which will make translations – amongst other things – much easier to deal with should that become an issue in the future.
Lastly, I spent some time working on audio. I manually cleaned out all the birdsong from the daytime forest ambience, so it feels a little bit more empty now. I also added a very low-frequency drone to the ambient audio sublayer. I’m not sure if it’ll have the intended effect… but I suppose that can only really be determined by playtesting. I’ll leave it in for now, and continue to experiment with it as I go about re-inspecting and readjusting the audio where necessary.
Although I started working on a few new rooms today, I got sidetracked a bit and instead ended up working mostly on UI stuff. I fixed a number of bugs, mostly involving mouse-tracking, with the system status bar, and then decided to improve the letterbox-less experience. It’s now fully functional – meaning all UI elements will dynamically appear and disappear contextually – and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.
I also added in a small QoL feature that displays a coloured highlight behind the mouse pointer, making it much more visible. At some point, hopefully sooner rather than later lest it slips my mind, I have to add in a toggle for it in the options, which will unfortunately require me to rather substantially rebuild the framework for the options menu. Well, I suppose that’s what I reap for taking the easy way out all those months back.
Tomorrow I’ll get those rooms done for good. I’ve also been thinking about revisiting some of the audio, especially the general forest ambience, and touching it up a bit. While I’m not entirely dissatisfied with the way it sounds now, I do feel like it could be more interesting in terms of the layering. I’ll keep it in my mind in the days moving forward.
Missed yesterday’s entry for no particular reason. I wrote the final update for the year. It snowed all day yesterday, a very steady accumulation. The night was lovely in its stark stillness. Too bad it’s already started to melt.
After a bit of reflection, I’ve decided to commit myself to a new schedule over the next month. Starting from tomorrow, every day I’m going to produce a minimum of five rooms until I’m finished. At minimum, it’ll still take me over a month at that rate – closer to a month and a half, I suspect – to finish the rest of the map, but it’s certainly much better than the piss-poor rate of one room a week, if I’m lucky, that I’ve been “progressing” at lately.
Started working on this month’s update, which is to say, I sat in front of my computer for several hours and wrote barely three paragraphs. This month’s got an odd number of days so technically I’m still okay on the timing as long as I get it out by tomorrow, but honestly the problem is that I just don’t know what to write about, seeing as I accomplished so little this past month. I guess I can just talk about that a bit… as well as do a review of this year’s activity, and my plans moving forward into next year.
Slowly trying to get back to work. Rearranged a few rooms, and parented the generic forest cells beneath a single master room, which will make organisation much easier moving forward. I also removed the restriction preventing the player from leaving the world cell the backpack is dropped in; its position is now saved, meaning the player can potentially lose track of the pack entirely.
I feel like each day, I’m just drifting in and out of existence, slipping through and in between the pores of my memories. An old friend – well, maybe not even a friend, just someone who talked to me for a very brief moment a long time ago – reached out to me earlier tonight, on Tinder of all places. I wish I hadn’t talked to her. My heart’s become twisted with a wretched longing for a past that I’m deliberately misremembering. That horrible, wrenching fondness for people who are no longer here, who might as well not even exist anymore. I wonder if I were to go back and sift through the detritus of my life, if I could find the exact moment, that precise point at which a hairline fracture appeared and bloomed so quickly into this bitter, rotten metastasis. It’d do no use at this point except to confirm my paranoia. When I was young people told me all the time that I could be someone someday, that they were excited to see who I would become in the future. I let them all down, and most importantly, I, who believed in all those stupid things people said, let myself down. Not only did I not become someone, I became less than no one.
I talk a lot about the importance of sincerity when it comes to creating things, but the truth is, I don’t think I even live up to that myself. Or rather, I’ve come to realise, I believe, that the sincerity I practice is sincerity not towards a good thing – that is to say, perhaps, love – but rather, far more often towards spite, and envy. I’ve found that my creative urge manifests most directly and strongly in the moments of my most profound anger and bitterness; when I feel overwhelmed by my hatred for others, and myself.
Realising that is painful, and inconvenient. But what’s even more painful and inconvenient are all the moments – like now – when I feel that anger swell up within me, but there’s no release.
Didn’t work today. I was planning on it when I woke up… but I found myself paralysed somehow and ended up just grinding pointlessly through the afternoon for several hours on nothing, so I just gave up. I don’t know why it’s suddenly so difficult for me to work these days, especially when I know exactly what needs to get done. I always tell myself that hopefully tomorrow will be better, but it rarely ever pans out that way. I think my inspiration has just completely dried up… not only in terms of my work, but just in general. I feel utterly unmoored, and absent of guidance.
A bit of a change of pace today. Decided to start working on a new trailer, got Premiere downloaded and set up both the audio – much more straightforward this time around, very light custom edits – and what I believe will be the first few seconds of the opening shot. I still have a lot of structural work to do – as of right now, I have no idea how I’m gonna fill the next two minutes or so – but I’m optimistic that it’ll come to me soon. I hope that I’ll be able to finish up and have it ready in at most two weeks’ time. That’ll put me in a good position for release. If not, well…
Spent the afternoon retouching a few areas in the lower-left region, and working on new environmental assets. Not much else to report, just the same kind of work as usual.
No work these past two days, made the most likely questionable decision of instead grinding out nearly 80 tiers of the season pass for The Division 2 after realising this weekend that there were only three days left in the season. I can’t say I feel particularly proud or accomplished… but what’s done is done, I suppose. It’s time to get back to work for good tomorrow.
Not much work today, just fixed up the area around the stream a bit.
For whatever reason I was extremely exhausted last night – even more so than usual, somehow – and ended up passing out before I could make an entry. I made decent progress though between yesterday and today, completing a few more areas and in general developing a better sense of the world layout and additional points of interest. At this point the only thing I’m focusing on is just getting the map done as quickly as possible.
I also edited the palette swapper to accommodate a full 255-colour range, which significantly improves the appearance of gradient-based elements like water and fog, and renders the separate background layer in certain rooms obsolete, meaning palette_bg.png can be discarded. It’s a small change, but it still feels like meaningful progress.