Category: Entries

First productive work day in a while, although I ended up staying up way too late because I lost track of time (it’s now 0540). Significantly expanded the motion camera UI, including a much-improved label-based navigation experience consistent with other systems, and developed a general framework for all the repairs moving forward. I’m starting work on a sensor radar device now which will help the player locate sensors in the immediate vicinity. It’ll vibrate when Avery enters a world cell with a sensor within it, and pinging it will return both its type and current status. 

Saw the doctor again today. It was nice seeing her. I wasn’t feel so good when I woke up but talking to her made me feel a lot better. The weather outside was also really pleasant today. I decided to just stay outside for as long as I could. I didn’t end up working today either but I don’t feel so bad about it. I’ll have to spend some time tomorrow writing this month’s update. It should also help me orient myself back towards my tasks moving forward.

Guess what? I got nothing done today, either. I’m seeing the doctor tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back on track done again after I see her.

Last day on break. Felt a little better, or maybe just not so bad. Back to work tomorrow.

Took another day off. I feel… unwell, in a way can’t quite articulate. Like I’ve been suddenly robbed of all hope in, and concept of a future. It’s not even a question now of motivation, but sheer purpose. It’s like I’m drifting through an abstraction of the world, and who I was even just a week ago. My work holds almost no weight to me anymore… everything just feels completely insubstantial. I don’t necessarily even feel bad on a foundational level and truthfully, I only start feeling bad when I start becoming frustrated with the realisation that I don’t even really feel bad. I just feel utterly adrift, is what it is…

Ended up just taking the day off. I felt oddly a bit… off today. Not necessarily in a wholly negative way, but something just felt disturbed within me. I feel like I’m growing bored of living…

Started implementing the technical framework with the sensors, beginning with the motion camera. So far, I’ve implemented basic controls for removing the battery cover and batteries, and laid out the foundation for the draw stack. Before I progress much further, I should probably spend some time developing a draft for what elements go where, and more importantly, what elements I even need to begin with…

First day of in-engine work (technically) in almost a week, although technically it was still entirely spritework. I think I’ve settled upon a pretty satisfactory UI solution for navigating the sensors, that’s mechanically applicable on a universal level to all of the sensor types, while allowing a good degree of flexibility in terms of specific details and approaches. I also finished the sprites for the toolkit, and the four different kinds of batteries. I think I’ll definitely be able to have at least one fully functioning sensor by the weekend.

Decently productive day, got the spritework done for the motion sensor, the camera trap, and the EMF reader. I also finished the spritework for the toolkit, which I have to remember to add into the global inventory at some point. (Along with this, I also have to build in an extension to the inventory framework to accommodate for the new module system… that’ll probably take a day of work, I don’t imagine it’ll be too hard but the thought still fills me a sense of vague dread). Didn’t end up implementing anything in-engine though today: I still have to figure out the specific mechanics before I start designing any UI, and that’ll take some time for me to think through in general.

I woke up really late today – around 1400 – and felt awful at first, but then I started feeling a bit better. The weather’s gotten very pleasant lately. This evening, there was a strange scent in the air: something sweet and vaguely reminiscent of fresh hay, or maybe even Christmas trees. It made me a bit sad, although I don’t know why.

Spent the day researching designs for the motion sensor. I’m pretty confident that I’ve settled on one and I’ll spend tomorrow implementing it proper. I also am close to settling on a design for the trail camera, I might be able to get the spritework done for it tomorrow as well. I hope I’ll have the energy to be able to work effectively.

Felt awful today, but persisted through it and spent some time organising my immediate priorities for the next week (or two, but hopefully not that long). I think for the rest of this month, or at least the part of it I can/am willing to look ahead to anyways, I’m gonna be focusing exclusively on overhauling the game’s existing interfaces, including building new ones to accommodate a few more mechanical nuances.

Next week (tomorrow), I’m going to start with the sensor interfaces, getting one done every two days max. That includes initial design, and spritework for each of the three repair procedures. I hope to have at least four interfaces completely done in terms of design, graphics, and audio by next weekend.

Another dead day. Thought this morning that maybe I’d actually get something done today but, well, it was just another day. I’m gonna spend tomorrow laying out a list of hard priorities and tasks to accomplish. I should’ve done that a lot sooner honestly… there’s just too much that needs to get done and I don’t have the strength to even just sit down and think through it. I feel constantly distracted, but I’m not sure by what. I’ve become trapped on an obstacle of my own creation. An utter absence of either push or pull.

Just need to get through these next couple of months intact…

Accomplished nothing today. Didn’t even try honestly… I just suddenly started feeling like shit some time around yesterday and I hoped it would subside but, it didn’t. I’ve been sleeping worse and my appetite has been pretty poor as well, and every night I have these incredibly unpleasant dreams, a bunch of them about some girl I’ve never even met stupidly enough…

The doctor’s away next week on personal business, so I won’t be able to see her about it until the week after. I’ll probably make it through fine, but… I wish I could talk to her. I don’t want to capitulate to my weakness and waste away yet another week. The amount of work left to do right now seems impossibly insurmountable, even though I know logically that that’s just a matter of perspective, and logistical positioning. Even still though… it just makes me want to give up.

I want to say I got stuff done today but the truth is that even though I “worked” the entire day, I accomplished basically nothing of worth. The medical menu is now “finished” in the most nominal sense, in that I can no longer suffer thinking about it anymore. I don’t even know what I’m gonna work on next. I don’t want to think about it right now. What an awful way to start off a new month…

Spent basically the entire day procrastinating on writing item descriptions… but fortunately they’re now all finally finished. I also integrated the global inventory into the medical menu. Now all I gotta do is add in support for consuming items upon use and checking usage against the global stored quantity… shouldn’t be too difficult, just another day of boring work. Well, I suppose I’ll have to get to it…

The end of the month’s now here. It fills me with anxiety, and a sense of restless despondency at the realisation of just how little I’ve managed to accomplish with my time. Granted, this month was pretty disruptive with everything that happened with… well, you know. Hopefully things are more settled next month…

Today was not as bad as the days before. The weather was very pleasant and I felt a lot better in general, especially after I visited the doctor. I won’t be able to see her next week so I hope my mood can remain relatively stable until the week after. I think it’ll be okay though. It feels like a lot of my stressors dissipated, or at the very least, receded today.

I finally decided to re-attempt converting the project file to GMS2.3. In my last few attempts, which were over a year ago at this point, I suffered some major technical issues and in general I found the new update to be rather dramatically overrated in terms of the expanded utilities it promised. 

This time however I’m compelled more by necessity: a project that I’m collaborating on as designer is targeting a Switch release, and I discovered today while watching Nate port Dogworld that the Switch runtime will not function properly with earlier versions of GMS2. So I decided to just bite the bullet again and commit this time. 

It seems like they fixed a lot of the issues and incompatibilities that I’d been plagued by the last time I tried. The transition was remarkably smooth and as far as I can tell, the project seems to work completely fine without any major modifications to the code base. I still have to get used to some of the new code-based features they’ve implemented, but overall the process went astonishingly well. The entire IDE just feels a bit more stable and responsive now than before. I’ll keep the old project files on storage for a month or so until I can complete a more thorough rundown of everything, but with what I’ve seen so far, it doesn’t seem like that will be necessary. Here’s hoping.

Minor progress today. Continued modifying the medical menu a bit, I moved around some of the elements in order to accommodate a new information panel which displays the item attributes, including the quantity and description. I think it looks better, and has as bit more functionality now. Barring any unforeseeable personal issues, I’m pretty confident I’ll have it completely done by tomorrow. The rest of the work on it is just busywork.

I think Gloria and I are more or less done. Not that there was anything much there to begin with, but… it’s gotten to the point where I want to talk to her but when I go to message her I find that I can come up with quite literally nothing to say. She barely responds anymore and when she does she might as well not have with how little she gives me to work with. 

I think I’ve tried my best, I really do. Told her everything I meant to say and actually meant everything I said. Reached out when I thought I should, gave her space and time and most of the patience I usually reserve for my friends and myself. I dunno, maybe I’m just not a very interesting person. Maybe the distance was just too profound.

In any case, I don’t feel any kind of anger or bitterness or even frustration, nor do I hold anything against her. I don’t regret anything either. I’m just disappointed. In the way things turned out, in how quickly they turned out that way, in how easily I’m giving up, and all the stupid expectations and hopes I’d placed into this to begin with, even though I knew better from the start. Most of all though I’m just disappointed in myself. In who I am, in what I am.

God-damned coward.

Felt even worse today than I did yesterday. Went to bed real late last night for no reason at all, woke up in a mild haze with something like a headache and didn’t even try working on anything for the rest of the day. It’s days like these that really make me reconsider the possibility of a future.

I felt pretty awful today for some reason, just totally apathetic and filled with resentment. Regardless, I actually somehow managed to get a decent amount of work done today. I spent the entire morning clipping samples from a bunch of ASMR videos to make a breathing track for Avery. Originally I’d only intended the tracks to be used in the medical menu but actually they sound good enough that I might consider using them elsewhere as well… they’d certainly add a bit more texture to a bunch of the generic animations.

I also ended up actually achieving my goal earlier this week to fully finish one wound treatment. All the basics are in place and can be easily modified to serve as a template for other wounds in the future.

Spent the morning working on more log entries. I feel like I should start setting aside dedicated time for them soon, get at least two done every day… I definitely need to catch up work on that part of development, it’s been almost three months since I last took a serious look at any of it.

I spent the entire afternoon and evening hanging out with Haolun. We went up to the dam at the reservation, and then just drove around for a while and talked about a bunch of stuff. It was pretty nice.

Spent the afternoon recording and mixing a bunch of sound effects for the wound UI. There are a few that are still missing and/or need to be improved – basically all of the tools – but most of them are good enough for now and have been fully implemented in-game. I’ll have to give the remaining ones a bit more thought…

I also started implementing full functionality for the menu itself, in accordance with the description I wrote out a few days ago. It’s mostly just a lot of tedious work, although I’ve been facing some logistical difficulties trying to figure out the most efficient solution for dealing with alternative solutions animation-wise: for example, due to how involved the sprites are, I potentially may have to create up to four different copies of each wound model based on what combination of treatments they decide to apply (sutures + bandages, sutures + duct tape, glue + bandages, glue + duct tape). It’s not the end of the world but it’s definitely not my preferred method… although I’m not sure how else I’d go about doing it in a way that won’t cause massive potential frustrations later on should I decide to add more treatment methods. Lastly, I also have yet to do any of the sprites for when bandages/tape are applied…

Regardless, today was a pretty good day. I made a decent amount of progress – more than I’ve made on any single day in a while – and I felt pretty good about things in general.

Finished iconography for the medical UI. I hope I’ll be able to get the menu fully finished by the weekend… I’ve been spending way too long on this, it’s starting to really frustrate me.

Saw the doctor again today. I like talking with her. She asks the right questions, makes me feel like she really gets what I’m trying to say. I just wish it wasn’t so expensive to talk to her. I get it though. I’m gonna need to figure something out pretty soon, I don’t think my current savings will last me long at this rate…

I took the day off. Gloria was acting a little weird I think. It felt like she was being oddly reticent, and in the few moments she did get back to me, she came off as a bit passive-aggressive for some reason. I hope I’m just being paranoid. I wish she would talk to me more about how she feels. I wish she would just talk to me more in general. I dunno, maybe I’m just projecting. Whatever, it’s not my problem. Back to work tomorrow.

Added visual selection options for the wound treatment UI. So far I have two categories done in terms of iconography – cleaning/disinfecting, and tools/devices – which leaves two more: sealing, and pain management. Neither should be particularly difficult, and I hope to be able to get them done tomorrow. I’ve yet to implement functionality to any of it but I’ll work on trying to get one full wound model done by this Saturday.

Started working on a proper revamp of the wound treatment UI, focusing on the information hierarchy as well as setting up the initial visual layout. After a few hours prototyping a bunch of designs this afternoon I feel I’ve finally arrived at one that feels straightforward enough to simplify the user’s experience (as well as my own workflow) without sacrificing nuance. 

The system revolves around a universal three-step treatment solution – roughly, cleaning/disinfecting, tool application (stuff like scalpels, pliers), and sealing/binding – with two additional optional steps in the form of pain management and medicinal aids (stuff like antibiotics, and booster shots). The player chooses one tool to use in each category from a list of any available treatments in that category and the efficacy of the solution will be calculated using a hidden list that attributes each tool a percentage (for example, using sutures to seal a wound is much more efficient than using duct tape or superglue). The final efficacy percentage, which is additive and takes into account each category including pain, will determine how much willpower Avery loses after the procedure is complete. 

I wanted to get the wound treatment UI done today but I ended up wasting a bunch of time trying to figure out the iconography and eventually just got frustrated enough that I decided to do nothing. Otherwise the day itself wasn’t too bad at all actually. It was the first day of spring and the air was light and cool. The mood felt apropos to the weather despite my utter lack of progress, and I felt vaguely optimistic all throughout the day.

Didn’t get as much work done today as I wanted, but I did get the UI for the journal app finished. I still have yet to figure out a landing screen (or whether I even want a landing screen at all) but I don’t think it’s that important right now. Eventually I would like it to display in reverse chronological order (latest entry to earliest), which shouldn’t be too hard. 

Actually managed to get a bit of work done today. Set up the foundation for the journal app in the PDA: the entries properly display with functional scrolling and navigation, although the formatting is still pretty off and I think I’d like to have an index screen that allows the player to scroll through a list of all entries. I’m pretty hopeful that I’ll be able to get it done tomorrow.

Nate launched his game today. From the initial streams and impressions, it seems that the reception is overwhelmingly positive. I hope that the sales will be able to corroborate the sentiment. I’m proud of his achievement, and seeing his success in being able to accomplish what he set out to do makes me feel a little bit more optimistic about my own chances.

Wanted to work on the PDA a bit more today, but suffered a rather extensive spike of anxiety which persisted all throughout the afternoon. Ended up getting nothing done.

Managed to finish up the update on time, got it out around noon. A minor victory. Didn’t get much else done beyond that, but hopefully that can change tomorrow. This afternoon I visited the doctor. She seemed nice, a good conversationalist. Asks the right questions, picks up on the right things. It’s a bit early to say anything for certain, but so far I like her well enough. I’m going to be seeing her again next week, the same time. In a bit of an odd way, I’m looking forward to it.

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.

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.