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.
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.
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.
A little bit better today. No hard progress, but I finally got around to the evaluation of the map and was able to finish inventory on the remaining world spaces. I’m not gonna go too much into it right now – both because I’ve yet to fully work out a plan moving forward, and also because the conclusions were rather bleak – but it’s given me a much better idea of what needs to get done moving forward.
Here we are, final month. Every day I tell myself, “Today didn’t go so well, but tomorrow, I will…” and yet tomorrow arrives and once again, nothing gets done and the process repeats. It’s getting to the point where just the realisation alone that that’s draining my will to work is in itself directly draining my will to work further. But maybe tomorrow, I will…
Last day of the month… and yet another dead day. The sky was dark with rain from the moment I awoke. I don’t feel as if I’ve accomplished anything this month: in fact, I think it might just be the least productive I’ve been since I started working on this project. I really don’t know what’s been going on, honestly. I don’t even feel that bad, at least as far as I’m aware. Just… languid, I guess. Completely unmotivated and unenthused about anything. Every day I fail to work I fall behind my schedule further and further. At this point I honestly have no idea when I’ll finish, my mood’s just too unstable. It feels at once as if there’s not much work left to do until I’m done, and yet when I actually sit down and look at it, it feels like there’s an almost overwhelming amount of work left. And then I start thinking about the fact that it’s not just my work schedule that I’m actively wasting away each and every day, but the hours and days of my life as well…
No progress today. I woke up early hoping to get things done but I just wasn’t feeling it. Otherwise, I took a walk with my mother this afternoon at a park in an adjacent town. It was pretty nice.
Slow day today. I finished surveying the existing landscape and finished up the last of my significant edits. I’ve concluded that the best way forward at this point is gonna be to develop a new map of the area, with the current layout as the foundation, instead of trying to retrofit the existing one by brute-forcing it to the actual physical layout. It’s a real pain in the ass conceptually but I think that practically speaking, I can probably get it done in about an afternoon’s time. I should probably just do it tomorrow…
Spent the afternoon revisiting older rooms and touching up wherever I feel there could be improvements made, either for pacing or consistency’s sake (ie updating vegetation models, collision masks, etc). It’s gonna take a bit – maybe half a week, if I’m being optimistic – to go through and renovate all the existing spaces, but hopefully it’ll set me up in the right mindset to finish off the remaining ones. Man, if I weren’t so exhausted all the time…
Decided against my best interests to take the day off for the holiday although – both in general, and in retrospect – I really shouldn’t have. It never quite fully dawned upon me until today just how empty my life actually is outside of work. How little structure there is actually propping me up, how insubstantial my so-called “interests” actually are. I just spent the entire day mindlessly grinding through video games I’ve discovered I no longer even really enjoy on my own… I can barely recall what I even accomplished in them, if anything at all.
Made steady progress today, more or less finished up the major work on the shoreline, which effectively concludes the hardest work environment-wise (at least for now). The next major task will be to continue developing the interior using the boundaries as guidelines: although originally I adhered pretty strictly to the grid laid out by the map I’ve since deviated from it considerably, which is gonna make further planning (as well as keeping track of both what has been completed, as well as what needs to be completed) significantly more complicated than I’d initially anticipated. I’m no longer remotely confident that I’ll be able to make my desired deadline of having the map completely finished by the end of the month, but I’m still gonna try to aim for it regardless.
Continued working on the shoreline today, made decent progress developing a more interesting contour. Almost done with it… I started looking into therapists today and I found one who I think might be able to help me. I’m gonna reach out to her more formally after the Thanksgiving holiday is over but I’m feeling optimistic about it.
Took a sleeping pill last night to try to get to sleep, ended up so tired that I slept almost the entire day. I tried to work a bit during the night once I woke but made limited progress. I’m gonna keep on trying for a bit longer before attempting to go back to sleep…
Woke up early thinking that today was the day I was gonna get things done, but it wasn’t.