spncryn/log

Forgot to make an entry yesterday – or more accurately, I noted that I had to do it, and just completely failed to do so. I’ve been feeling really restless lately yet also incredibly bored. Any time I’m doing anything except working I feel this vague, free-floating anxiety begin to build. It feels like I’m wasting time yet also I find it kinda difficult to do other things: for example, any time I play a game or something I don’t really feel like I’m enjoying it on its so much as I’m just playing it to get inspiration for my work, which makes me feel kinda bad since I’m not able to appreciate the work on its own terms.

Well, today was my day of rest, so to speak – I’ve decided that every week I’ll work until I have something to post for #screenshotsaturday, take Sunday off, and then get back to work Monday – and I spent most of it in a state of gentle unease trying to do things other than work. The day’s now over and I feel like I’ve completely wasted it. Well, at least tomorrow I’ll have things to do.

Got a good amount of work done, including a new interface for the inventory. It’s rather late now and I’m pretty tired so I’m not gonna say much more about it, other than the fact that, while it’s a shame the older design (ie the physical pack with selectable pouches) had to be discarded, the new one is far better and more interesting, as well as informative. Tomorrow I’m gonna get to work making the animations for it – should be pretty straightforward – as well as the audio for the various buttons and functions. Those are probably gonna be a bit more difficult since I really have to capture and create some distinctive sounds but that’s not too big of a deal for now. 

Spent some time with Haolun tonight. It was remarkably cold and dry. I woke up this morning at around 0900 and for the next four hours drifted uneasily between states of consciousness. It’s been harder to wake up these days, and I’ve been waking up later than usual. It’s not a mental thing: I can feel it in my body. Must be seasonal.

I managed to begin implementing a resting stage based on (ie, ripped directly from) the gameplay footage for Death Stranding. Avery can now take off her pack, sit down and rest for a bit, and engage in actions like massaging her shoulders, stretching her legs and taking a nap. Resting in general significantly slows down the rate at which energy is consumed and completely stops fatigue from building, and the various actions restore burnt stamina (alternately known as fatigue). 

In general, all of this has made me reconsider the design of the stamina/fatigue system in general. Originally, the way I planned it, all actions would consume stamina and every in-game hour a set percentage of stamina used would be “burnt” (represented by fatigue accumulated), with the biggest difference in rate of depletion being tied to whether Avery was carrying her pack or not. Obviously, I imagined, the biggest drain in stamina would be walking and traversal in general. However, I’ve come to realise that in reality, that’s simply not feasible: a highly-experienced and disciplined hiker of Avery’s level would be expected to be able to pretty effortlessly cover almost 50km a day even with a considerable load under harsh weather conditions (and at night as well!), but there’s no way I can properly represent that much square mileage in-game without turning it into an absolute slog to sit (or for her, I suppose, to walk) through. 

That being said, the expedition is also not a long-range exercise and the actual area of investigation is actually pretty small, around 25km^2 (still trying to work out the precise size and scaling, I’ll discuss that in greater detail once I start posting about the world map): so she wouldn’t be operating anywhere near her maximum abilities anyways when it comes to endurance. I’m not sure how I’m going to implement stamina/fatigue in a way that simultaneously represents the scale of the world accurately while also not diminishing her considerable physical clout. 

Well, whatever I decide, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow…

I woke today in a state of confusion and vague dread and didn’t even bother opening GameMaker. For some reason, I’ve been suddenly thinking a lot lately about the future – or rather, the lack of one – and it’s really been wearing me out.

Just now, entering the date, I’ve come to realise that September is halfway over, yet I barely perceived its passage… I’ve begun to feel rather sad these past few days although in a barely perceptible way. I’m almost certain it has to do with my body subconsciously registering the passage of time on a moment-to-moment basis, while my mind is forced to catch up in lurches and sudden shifts. Perhaps sadness is too strong; melancholy is probably more appropriate. The leaves have yet to amber but I can feel it in the air already. The coming autumn: it reminds me of the things I lack. I remember a quote from what seems like a really long time ago: “To a hikikomori, winter is painful because everything feels cold, frozen over, and lonely. To a hikikomori, spring is also painful because everyone is in a good mood and therefore enviable. Summer, of course, is especially painful…” And yet, autumn too… 

Anyways, I finally got around to fixing the UI: and which, by “fixing”, of course, I mean that I just decided to completely replace with a new one. Lateral thinking at its finest, I suppose. Actions no longer show up in the letterbox, but as dynamic bubbles above Avery when she draws close to an object that can be interacted with. I feel like the current implementation looks decent from a technical perspective but also it feels very out-of-place for how smooth the animation looks, as well as the rounded corners (which I’m honestly beginning to dislike the more I look at it). In fact, I’m really beginning to not feel it so much. Well, at least I got the backend done.

The waterfall now has parallax and proper animation, but more importantly: I’ve revamped the transitioner system between rooms. Previously, the character, upon reaching one end of a room, would be spawned on a random point along the width or height of the opposite end, with a check to make sure the player doesn’t spawn inside an object. The problem with this was that sometimes, especially in visually dense areas (ie, the woods), it would be difficult to orient Avery and required the player to actively search for her for far longer than comfortable. Now, each room has a predefined series of points – top, bottom, left and right – where they’ll be spawned in exactly. This gives me a lot more control over framing and instantly solves the issue of players losing track of Avery upon a transition.

I’ve been feeling unusually tired these past few days, I’m not sure why. I wake up and feel… anaemic, I guess, I don’t really know how else to say it. I think it might just be the weather. Either way, I can persist through it, I think. Hopefully it clears soon.

Spent basically the entire day animating the waterfall in rmBridge. Finished the waterfall – it looks pretty decent – so over the rest of the week I’ll have to draw and implement the rest of the background pieces, as well as the parallax for each of them. Maybe even water vapour clouds rising from the bottom of the screen… well, we’ll see about that last one, no guarantees.

It’s pretty late and I feel rather exhausted so I’m gonna keep this entry brief. I spent some time working on completely redoing the way the UI elements are drawn. The good news is that everything – with the exception of the rain, which I’ll have to figure out at a later date – now inherits the visual palette. The bad news is that I’ve completely fucked up the interact and status text and it’s gonna be a total pain in the ass to fix them. More work for another day.

Spent a good amount of the day working once again with the pond, I barely made any progress and got frustrated so I moved instead to general environmental assets. I got some large plants drawn as well as some bushes, although I think the bushes need to some more work, and specifically need to be made larger. I’ve also adjusted the player movement speed a bit and fixed the hand torch’s angle accordingly (it now uses the proper trigonometric formula), and re-enabled the ambient light around the player. It was not a remarkably progress-heavy day but at least I got some minor stuff done.

Spent most of the morning trying to get the water reflection shader working in the context of a pond… it was stupidly frustrated and in the end I didn’t even manage to get it working even remotely properly. I’m honestly thinking about just dropping the system altogether at this point in favour of a slightly less impressive, but far more straightforward solution that I’ll actually be able to understand. Of course, that being said, I still have yet to make said solution, and I’ve yet to find another option that’s free and accepts open-source, so…

I spent the afternoon with Aurora. We went to the diner and then sat by the lake for several hours. It was pretty nice. The sky today was bleak and I felt a pervasive sense of melancholy, although not particularly negative. When I returned home I found it rather difficult to concentrate although I gave the pond a few more attempts before giving up completely. Maybe I should give it a bit more time tomorrow… although I really do feel like I have to move on at this point. 

Started working on an effect for potable, lightly-moving water sources such as ponds and lakes. I was able to adapt a shader effect by GamingReverends to accommodate my needs perfectly; I still have to figure out some of the intricacies of it such as how to properly animate things such as ripples within it and how I’m gonna handle blending the water into the adjacent ground near the shores but otherwise it looks about as good as I can hope for.

I also implemented a culling system for optimising instances (and particularly grass and trees) via two scripts from lazyeye. They work by deactivating and reactivating some of the more taxing instances to reduce the instance load of things like collisions. It seems to work pretty well since the framerate has improved considerably but I’ll have to keep an eye out on it moving forward…

I kinda felt like shit today and kept on getting distracted for unclear reasons. At some point this afternoon I somehow fell into a deep sleep in which I experienced a very strange and alarmingly vivid dream in which I descended into an amorphous and constantly-shifting version of my high school filled with my old friends. None of them seemed to recognise me and we were all lost without any idea how we got there or what we were doing there. The rooms were simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic and while I initially could recognise each individual room for what it was – a certain classroom, the backrooms of the auditorium, a stairwell we used to hang out in, the gymnasium – when I examined them closer or tried to make sense of where I was all of a sudden the rooms seemed impossibly foreign and even ancient, every dimension and corner evading not only description but observation itself. I don’t know how else to describe it. It felt like we’d been wandering for centuries. 

I don’t how I got out; but it was as equally abrupt and inexplicable as the rest of what happened. For nearly an hour after waking I felt discombobulated and completely disoriented, not exactly sure if I was really awake or if I’d just ascended (descended?) to another depth of the dream. I was only asleep for an hour but it felt like far, far longer.

I recorded all of this down immediately upon waking but every time I tried to recall some specific detail I could feel the presence of this… it felt like there was something burned into the inside of my skull, that I would be able to see if only I could somehow look behind my eyes. I’m not really sure how else to describe it. Thankfully the feelings have by and large subsided, and only a trace of an unpleasant memory remains…

Didn’t accomplish much of anything today in terms of work; I sat waiting for the mailman to arrive with the new hard drive, which I’ve now installed (and works perfectly). I couldn’t work for most of the morning anyways because Windows was updating, which took far longer than it has any real right to take. Consequently my sense of routine was disrupted and I spent most of the day feeling rather restless, simultaneously wanting to work on something yet too distracted to be able to even identify something to work on, let alone concentrate on it.

This evening for some reason I was suddenly seized with an urge to write something again and in a paroxysm of compulsion I started writing the next chapter to I. Doing so has left me feeling rather drained however (which is how writing has made me feel for years now, to be honest) but it’s revived within me a curiosity that I haven’t felt in a few months – and with that, the inevitable and concomitant frustration of feeling such a strong desire to say something while feeling completely impotent in my ability to actually say it. I guess that’s just how it’s always been though. Maybe some day it’ll change. But probably not.

Implemented waves that don’t really work exactly as they should for some reason. I originally designed the system in GMS1.4 (slightly faster workflow for smaller projects, better sprite editor, you know how it is) and it works perfectly fine there, with the waves rolling in and then gradually receding upon the shore as intended. However, when I port it over to GMS2 – with the exact same code down to the spacing – it fucks up and doesn’t draw the rollback. Something’s up with the way the surface is drawn, I know that much; unfortunately I can’t figure it out beyond that. Well, in any case, it doesn’t look bad as is (although it certainly doesn’t look too great either). I might honestly just completely revamp it anyways down the line; we’ll see.

Also added footprints. Right now they’re applied in every room for testing but eventually I’ll just remove them and have them appear only when it’s either muddy after raining, or the player is walking on some unstable surface (like sand, by the water). I spent an unnecessarily long time messing around with the code for them, and I’ve realised now that not only is the timing of the footsteps off, but the speed at which the animation plays and the character walks is completely off as well, as well as the timing of the footfall audio… basically everything about the player movement is just very slightly (or maybe a bit more depending on how you look at it) fucked up but I’ve already spent way too long today messing around with it to very little avail so I’ll worry about it some other day, if at all. Well, at least the footprints fade pretty well.

+ Implemented footprints with fading steps and duration
+ New audio for footsteps on sand, and in shallow water
+ Created room (rmShore) with new wave effects
? The tree occlusion now works exactly as intended – no more clipped masks!
? The game now runs at full-screen instead of windowed
? The game can be exited by pressing ESC

Spent a few hours trying to figure out why the rain audio wasn’t fading properly only to stumble across the rather obscure realisation that asset_get_index does not in fact take string() when working with sound ids, and instead you have to use audio_get_name() instead. That alone took me far more time than I’d care to admit; then I had to deal with audio_sound_gain not working in an intuitive manner(turns out you have to first play the sound via an id of its and THEN feed the id as the index, instead of just being able to plug in the sound directly)… it was all rather frustrating and tiring process but I guess that’s just how it is.

I also implemented a new rain system which uses particles instead of individual rain drop objects. It looks and works a lot better and the overall performance has predictably improved; there are still some minor issues – for example, the rain falls beneath the roof for some as of yet inexplicable reason, and I haven’t implemented rain splashes yet – but otherwise it’s a good start in a good direction.

+ New particle-based rain system
+ New audio for all rain sounds, wind audio in rmGorge
+ Implemented basic 8-directional hand torch, along with toggle in menu
? Trees no longer are drawn twice and now look much better when moving in the wind
? Wind is much more frequent
? Lightning effect has been improved and now illuminates the entire area briefly

Sawyer came over, we went to a diner as usual and then viewed a thoroughly unpleasant and disturbing film. We then discussed the details of how I envisioned the trailer, as well as my projected timeline for work goalposts and target releases, which goes something as follows:

Next week, I’m going to start shifting focus over to implementing environmental stuff which means new rooms / world cells, as well as all the associated spritework. My goal is to have by the beginning of October enough visually diverse and interesting content to be able to begin production on the trailer. Although I don’t imagine it’ll take too long at all, since I’m targeting a winter release date for the first public trailer, I’ll be working these last two quarters at an accelerated rate with the intent of solidifying the foundational mechanical frameworks while simultaneously developing a wide variety of content for the trailer. 

Four months should be more than enough, although I have to be careful given the way I work not to burn myself out or even let that become a remote risk. So long as I maintain my current pace and expectations however I believe I’ve achieved a stable momentum that’s highly productive without becoming conducive to unnecessary stress.

We also discussed a bit about my commercial projections and hopes for this title. I’m not gonna discuss them here because I think those are the kinds of things that – at least during the process of development – are best left private but I will say for certain that I’m broadly optimistic for a number of reasons which I feel are well-substantiated in reality. Here’s hoping my optimism pays off… although first, of course, I have to actually finish the work before all else.

Spent some time this morning sitting outside recording… urination sounds. It’s been unusually cold lately – I suspect it’s the hurricane – but I got the sounds I needed and they work well. I spent most of the day revamping the audio and specifically adding different varieties of footsteps based on the terrain and wetness (which is another mechanic I’ve implemented, or at least begun to implement). 

For some reason I still have yet to commit, let alone push a single changelog these past few days: I don’t know why, I have more than enough changes by now to warrant it. I should push my progress now that I’m thinking about it…

+ Implemented biomechanics for urination, including bladder, stomach and colon volumes
+ New audio for urination
+ New footstep audio based on weight, terrain and environmental wetness
+ Added player status UI
? New audio for picking up / dropping the bag

It’s been pretty difficult keeping up to date with posts. Any time I sit down to write I just feel suddenly overcome by immense exhaustion. Even now I just feel totally wiped and it’s difficult for me to formulate complete thoughts. In any case…

Haolun visited last night and we talked as usual. It was nice seeing him, helped me reground myself. I woke early this morning and spent the morning playing through the Breakpoint beta. It’s seen marginal, although significant improvements from the OTT and I’m looking forward to the full thing next month. I’m running out of money though pretty quickly, and I’ve lost all sources of income… I haven’t really had any significant expenses in a few months but even still, my overall worth is so low that the few things I do spend money on somewhat regularly still manage to feel significant. Well, I can’t think too much about it now. I’ve gotta focus on work.

Speaking of which, I’ve finally managed to implement the backbone for the urination biomechanics, as well as the necessary spritework. The system itself works well and is very flexible; it’s just a matter of fine-tuning the exact values. Honestly the most difficult part wasn’t even implementing the system but figuring out how to design it in the first place; it turns out processes like urination and water intake/output and defecation are much more complicated than I imagined them to be and are contingent upon a whole host of factors that make things like universal predictions and averages very difficult to arrive at. Consequently a lot of might just be completely inconsistent with reality – I have no idea how many mL of water are filtered into urine from the colon per minute, for example – but at this point, so long as it feels real, the technicalities can be damned for all I care. I spent a few more hours than I’d care to admit this afternoon watching my character piss and tracking the change in volume of water within her bladder over a day in a spreadsheet… I think I’m past the point of caring.

Finally back home today. After an eight-hour flight… well, I felt way too drained to work on anything. I’ve been feeling some rather complex, overwhelmingly negative emotions as of late that I feel are impending my ability to work. I hope that returning home will be able to alleviate these feelings in due time – hopefully sooner rather than later. I would like to return to a normal, stable routine of living as soon as possible. 

In Geneva. Stayed in the room once again the entire day. This room felt nicer than the other ones and the scenery seemed nicer than all the rest – but maybe my perception of it has just been skewed by the fact that it’s the last day of the trip. Hopefully by around noon or so tomorrow I’ll be back home. 

I haven’t worked on anything too substantial the past several days, since yesterday was spent commuting and today I was too tired to really do anything. I’ve been having some trouble designing the biomechanics for urination – mostly regarding volume and rate of filtration between drinking and, well, the act of urinating, the entire process of which I’ve discovered is far more unpredictable than I’d initially imagined – and consequently I spent the entire morning reading (or attempting to read, anyways) medical papers of varying degrees of technical obscurity. I spent the rest of the day lying in bed or looking out the window. 

I feel completely drained by this trip, and I’m still not entirely sure what the net effect of it has been. It’s definitely taken a toll on me in more ways than one and while I don’t necessarily regret having seen all of these places (well, nominally, anyways…) I recognise now with absolute certainty that recreational travel is not for me and that cities in particular tend to exact a devastating toll on my general state. I’ll be returning home in a more psychically precarious and fragile state than when I left, with a far greater appreciation for my isolation. 

And yet, with all that being said… for some reason I still feel a little bit wistful. It feels like the time has passed too quickly, that the trip was far shorter than it actually was (even if the moment to moment waiting seemed interminable at the time). Summer is already over; even two weeks ago seems not so long ago yet it feels so much longer ago than it has any right to seem. I have a feeling though that these things have less to do with the actual trip itself and much more with my general sentimentality these days. I’m not sure though, and that too fills me with a muted sense of… something. In any case, whatever it is, there’s this real empty, almost sad kinda feeling beneath it all that I can’t seem to shake. I just hope it doesn’t persist too long.

Sitting on the floor of a hotel room in Paris drinking a Heineken and eating canned ham out of the tin. Haven’t made any updates in the last couple of days, not even out of inconvenience but mostly just because I’ve been too tired to write anything. The most significant things I’ve accomplished in the past several days were writing a proper README for the repository (which in reality was just a direct translation of the press kit DOCX), and drawing the cover image. The latter in particular I think turned out pretty well: it exceeded my expectations in terms of how I imagined it would look (although to be honest, I actually went in with no idea how it would look) and it does a decent job of effectively capturing most of the major iconography and moods of the game.

Fleshed out the canteen UI a bit, it now displays next to the character menu, and animates properly with respect to drinking. I think it’s a bit too big but scaling it is gonna be a pain in the ass. I also think that the character menu itself is a bit off in a way that I can’t really articulate.

+ Better(?) UI for the canteen, see above for details.
? Remapped controls for interact and character menu to accommodate a greater variety of common bindings.
? Character menu can now be closed with the same key used to open it (instead of just ESC).

Cleaned up UI for character menu, added a white background + black text when highlighting items in the character menu, also changed up the options a bit to reflect streamlining of gameplay. Also implemented canteen mechanics: the player can now drink from the canteen, with responsive water capacity (mL). I’m thinking about adding an animation for when the canteen is empty.

Changing the process of accessing the pack a bit: created a new animation for opening it, and changed the access behaviour so that when Avery’s standing in front of the bag, she picks it up, and when she’s standing behind it, she opens it. The animation itself could use some work and is a bit off in terms of the alignment, but that’s something I can work on later down the line. I’m also testing a dynamic zoom function for certain actions, starting with the pack; hopefully I can get the zoom actually working properly and not looking like shit…

I’m also thinking about moving the game to revolve around a single action button instead of having multiple. What this looks like in practice is having WASD (and maybe the arrow keys, although probably not) to move, and then a single key – for now, F, but I’ll probably add more / change it later on – is used for virtually all player interactions within the environment. What that means is that actions will either be analogue (via the interaction key) or through a menu, which uses the movement (WASD) keys + the interaction key. I probably articulated all of this in a very unnecessarily complicated and drawn-out manner but it makes a lot more sense in execution. We’ll see.

+ New animation for opening pack
? Pack access behaviour changed relative to player’s position
? Added sound effects for picking up and dropping the pack
? Removed all button prompts (ie, “[F]”) in interaction text for cleaner experience
? Removed B as pack key, switched picking up / dropping the pack to the character menu instead

Sitting in a hotel room in Rome. In the past several days I’ve traveled through four countries and yet I feel nothing but profound exasperation and an overwhelming sense of exhaustion. All of the progress I felt I was making in the weeks prior to this trip is being rapidly undone the longer I stay out here – and I still have another ten days left. Well, at least the next few days will see slower movement. Hopefully I’ll have time to work more.

Lacking a proper connection as well as a consistent power source, it’s been a total pain in the ass working on anything these past few days especially. I decided to get started on the press kit, which turned out alright. No images or videos so far, obviously, but it’s a good enough foundation to build off in the future. Gotta keep busy somehow.

Onboard a train en route to Stansted. It’s been rather difficult to maintain a stable signal the past several days, let alone one that’s consistent enough to attend to all of my work: I’ve spent the past several days in a state of continuous disorientation due to all the transit and I haven’t really found the time to get work done, although I think for what little time I’ve had so far I’ve made decent progress.

I’m not sure how I’m gonna handle entries for the duration of this trip – whether I’ll update them as the opportunity arises – but for now I think what I’ll do is log per diem and then once I return home I’ll do a more comprehensive cumulative write-up in a single dedicated entry, focusing on points of note. 

Anyways…

The door now has a proper caster, as well as a dedicated animation (for both the player and the door itself) for opening and closing it. There are also sound effects as well, although at this stage they’re more just for prototyping than anything else.

+ Implemented proper shadow caster for door

+ New animation for door (door and player)

+ New sounds for opening and closing doors, and attempting to open locked doors (not used so far)

+ New sounds for footsteps on grassy, hard and muddy surfaces

+ Created new script “sound_play_pitch” for repeating sounds with on-the-fly pitch changes (ie, footsteps)

+ Created new script “sound_lowpass” to shift between regular and low-pass audio.

? Renamed “sound_play” to “sound_play_3d” for more precise description

? Stones, sticks and tall grass are now automatically deleted if in contact with interiors to prevent clipping

? Changed the shadow mask on the cabin to more accurately reflect visibility via a window in the front

? Being in an interior now also displays a cutout of the front wall, specifically highlighting the location of doors and windows

Gonna be spending the bulk of tomorrow in transit to London, which means I had to pack up all my stuff. I worked almost entirely on audio today and specifically on implementing a low-pass filter on rain when the player is indoors. I set up a pretty flexible crossfade system that works very effectively and I’ve also begun using it for the overall forest soundscape as well, moving between day/night ambience. Speaking of, I changed those sound effects to quieter, less wind-heavy tracks, and converted all the ambient audio files over to OGG to further reduce size on disk and memory footprint. I’m feeling pretty good about the audio right now; when I return (on 3 September…) I’ll have to make sure to get new recordings for moving through brush and maybe even footprints, although that might require better equipment to which I don’t currently have access anymore. Well, I’ll figure it out then.

Staoue came over today and we spent some time by the lake and then we went to the high school, where we passed the time lying down and watching the sky as the storm moved in. It looked like a massive, dark wave surging towards us and it made me feel uncomfortable but having a friend by me made it a worthwhile experience. We talked about high school – it seems like that’s all I ever talk about these days when I meet my friends, but we do talk about other stuff – and girls. I’ve been feeling real nostalgic lately. It’s not that I want to be back in high school: things were just much more straightforward back then. Everyone was just put there all together, and you never had to really reach out and find people: they were just there and all you had to do was find some common ground and all of a sudden you were great friends and you felt something in common with them. There was a clear and palpable understanding of the future and even if it looked totally empty, the sense of a schedule gave the days a kind of structure and intertia towards which we constantly stumbled and occasionally hurtled. 

It’s much harder now though. 

Everybody’s either gone away or they’ve all got their own goals now and I can’t relate to so many of them. Going out to see them or to meet new people costs money that I don’t have and can’t make. Even if I were able to meet them, I don’t know if we’d have much to talk about anymore: in the lack of common interests, there are no more shitty assignments to bemoan, no more teachers to mess around with, no more rumours to piss away the time. All that’s left to us to share is this creeping sense of uncertainty about ourselves, our futures, where we’re headed as individuals and as a nation and as a species. I know that sounds really dramatic, but really, it’s actually quite banal. And that’s the saddest part. We think we’re becoming mature, you know, we’re becoming adults or whatever and learning how to deal with “the real world” – but actually, we’re just growing more cynical, more indifferent towards and even accepting of the casual cruelty of the world. That makes me really sad. I don’t want to get used to being swept away. I don’t want to see my friends get used to being swept away either. But I’m afraid we already have.

Didn’t do any work today but I met up with an old friend from high school and we got some ice cream and sat in the park and then we went back to her place where we (mostly I) drank so much that I threw up in her basement bathroom twice and then we talked for a long time about those bygone years. It was nice seeing her again after all this time. I missed her more than I realised.

Finally got around to implementing the grouped prefabs I mentioned in yesterday’s post for the grass. It works very well and although the dispersion pattern could be significantly improved and the wind pattern tweaked a bit the tall grass now works as intended. Other than the aforementioned tweaks, the only things I can really think to add are mild particle effects for various leaves and such blowing off when the player passes through into the wind. I think tomorrow I’ll work on that as well as particle effects in general. 

+ Tall grass, with randomised dispersion and player/wind-based motion.

+ Added ambient soundscapes for the forest during both night and day.

? Slightly sped up the speed at which rain accumulates during transitions. 

? Significantly increased (5s to 20s) the time it takes for ambient soundscapes to fade in during transitions.

? Doors now have proper shadowcasters blocking and opening FOV when respectively closed and open. They also have slightly more legible sprites.

Hung out with Sawyer today and watched both Blair Witch films (that is to say, the original and the 2016 remake). They were both much better than I remembered, and I had pretty good memories of both of them. Watching them definitely helped me get a much better idea of how to handle certain elements of My Work Is Not Yet Done.

Speaking of which, I finally managed to implement the rest of the door, however half-assedly, which still needs a proper shadowcaster and animation (maybe a good sound effect would suffice in place of the animation) but is otherwise working as intended; and I started work on denser grasses featuring wind animation which proved to a much bigger pain in the ass than I expected. 

That being said though I think I’ve finally solved the main issue – smaller grasses were animating way too fast – although tomorrow I think I’m gonna try a new solution where I’ll separate each individual blade of grass into an object, create a bunch of what are essentially prefabs of grass clumps with those blades clustred together in various configurations, and then spawn the prefab objects rather than the sprites themselves. It’ll be pretty annoying to set up at the start but I think it’ll have a very positive impact on the appearance of the grasses overall. Hopefully though it won’t dig in to the performance too much, which is something that I’m already beginning to worry about: I noticed today that in some areas the framerate dips down to around 16 or so, which is completely unacceptable for a game that already runs at 24fps to begin with. I’ll definitely have to take a deeper look into optimisation. Maybe I’ll work on that next week on the plane…

I didn’t do much today either but at least I got the door done. It’s real primitive right now – interacting with it basically just toggles the visibility of it at the moment – but hopefully I can improve it in the coming days. The ideal goal is to be able to gradually open it on the hinge so that the player can peek out of the door slightly if necessary; however, I’m not sure if the lighting solution I’m using currently supports casting at an angle (or any kind of dynamic caster manipulation, at that) but if it doesn’t, I suppose this will have to do… it’s not all that bad to be honest, just lacking compared to what I originally envisioned it could be. But then again, if we were to start judging things by what they could be…

I woke up thinking I was gonna get stuff done today but in fact I just sat at my computer and did nothing. I don’t even know if I had any plan for today – I probably didn’t – but tomorrow, I’m gonna work on the door + shadow masking for it, and maybe start on some furniture. 

Nic’s article about Midnight Animal came out today, you can read it here. I still have yet to read it – an odd mixture of feelings – but from what I’ve heard he did a very good job with it and the overall reception has been overwhelmingly positive, so I’m glad that it turned out well for both of us. I’ll probably read it at some point tonight…

Spent all day messing around with various lighting systems across all different kinds of implementations – shaders, surfaces, straight-up line traces – before finally arriving at a solution I’d already been using for over a month now (albeit for different purposes). I’m using a slightly modified version of this lighting system now to simulate FoV in interiors, and it works really well for my purposes because it’s pretty lightweight and slots in really effortlessly without too many changes to any other things.

The one thing I did have to change though was the grass, which I was planning on changing eventually anyways because before I was using a paid extension off of the GM Marketplace. Since both the lighting and the grass rely on vertex buffers, which I know literally nothing about, they broke one another’s functionality so I decided to remove the less critical one. I’m now generating all of the grass as objects, with a single draw pass in the master draw event. It looks basically identical to before although I’ve lost the slight animation for the wind effect; I’ll mess around with some shaders or even hand-animated sprites maybe at some point, I’m not too worried about it. 

I haven’t noticed any major performance dips which is what I was originally concerned about, but also, I have noticed pretty significant dips (down from the fixed 24 to around 18 or so) although I haven’t been able to identify the exact cause. I was also recording footage though when I noticed the dips and I think the game’s been running on the integrated chip this whole time, so if that turns out to be the issue, it’s not too much of a concern. I’ll still take a look at optimising everything later on down the line, but as they said, never pre-emptively optimise if you can help it…

Spent the entire day (up until now, which is 0330, actually) working on implementing a prototype interior space – a cabin, yes, my imagination runs short – and for all intents and purposes, it basically works right now. Basically, all interior spaces can now be rendered in the world space rather than in their own simulated internal cells. What this means in practicality is that I can now have full real-time events happen seamlessly in the world without loading in between different rooms (ie, entering / exiting interiors); the player will also be able to see through windows and doors into the actual external environment, which vastly opens up my opportunities.

There are still some minor collision overlaps that I have to fix and there’s as of yet no furniture (I’m sure that’ll be a separate issue all on its own, which I’m not at all looking forward to dealing with tomorrow), but in terms of all the basic functionality it works as intended, however annoying it was to assemble and subsequently disassemble everything onto different layers and depths. Honestly, if I had known from the start just how much of a pain in the ass all of this actually would take to implement, I probably would’ve never even considered it to begin with. Now that I’m here though, there’s really no turning back…

+ Created modular layers for building (cabin)

+ Created new room (rmCabin) for testing modular interior

+ Added four additional parent classes specific to buildings: BUILDING, FURNITURE, ROOF, INTERIOR

? Created parent object for items named ITEM, containing the children STICK and STONE (no actual event behaviour, just a holder object)

? Created script draw_self_visible as a replacement for draw_self; because pretty much everything is being drawn in DEPTH_SORTER’s master draw event, the “visible” property is ignored; draw_self_visible is basically just a draw_self that takes “visible” into account

Here are some things I still need to add, as well as things I’d like to implement:

– Functional door

– Interactive furniture

– Dynamic field of vision to black out the exterior space and make windows and doors functional (ie, the player can see outside of doors and windows but not walls)

– Global shadow mask for entire house 

– Hide rain overlay in interiors

Started working on animations for firestarting this morning but then for whatever reason I felt that I no longer wanted to do that today so instead I just started worked on implementing interiors. I mostly just worked on visuals today – nothing to push to the server – because I’m still undecided as to whether I want each interior to be contained within the world space in a continuous manner, or to exist as its own discrete room separate from the world within its own space. 

The latter definitely presents me with a lot more flexibility when it comes to certain things – namely, I wouldn’t have to use a surface to occlude the exterior when the player is in the interior space – but it also means that I would have to move the player to an entirely new room while saving the exact state of the previous one, which is kinda annoying since I haven’t built a save system yet to save and track the state of each room (something else I have to do…), so I’d have to do the latter before the former. 

I think I’ll start tomorrow by trying out the former option – continuous interior spaces – with layered floor, furniture and ceiling indices that are de/activated upon contact with the player. Hopefully it goes smoothly and without any major difficulties; but you know how it is with these things…

Didn’t work on anything today; but to be honest, I didn’t even really try. I hung out with Haolun last night until 0400 or so and then I fell asleep, woke up for a few hours and hung out on Jacob’s stream, then I fell back asleep again and experienced a really strange and disturbing dream until I woke up once again at 1600. After that I realised that I’d basically get no work done even if I tried so instead I spent some time reviewing the week’s activities and figuring out what to do next week. Basically, I need to finalise my decisions on how the firestarting minigames will work, and then I need to actually build them (or at least merge them into the main build). 

Once I finish that, I should work on redesigning the backpack and inventory UI; I’m not that satisfied with the ALICE diagram anymore and I’m thinking about moving towards something like an SSO/SPOSN Attack 2 or even a Veshmeshok instead. I like the look and idea of the external frame and all the pouches but… something about it just doesn’t feel quite right at the moment. I’d also like to add a diegetic animation for opening and closing the bag.

Spent the day sitting outside recording audio of wind and leaves. It was a very nice day outside today and although I think it’s gonna rain very soon I’ve gotten a wide range of audio samples that should cover most of my ambient environmental needs. I’m gonna spend some time mixing them a bit more tomorrow but I was able to build in the backend for the audio system today. It works exactly as intended and was pretty straightforward to set up.

+ Added audio files for heavy rain, light rain and the fire.
+ Implemented flexible backend for positional 3D audio, as well as seamless blending for sounds.
? Fixed an issue with the light rain state where no rain was actually falling during the entire state.

Today was pretty productive, despite having finally gotten out of bed at 1600(!) following a long and vaguely uneasy rest. I was able to add both the sticks and the stones as I planned (well, two days ago…) via a pretty flexible and efficient spawner, and all the code for interacting with them and picking them up is modular enough to be easily adapted to any other object down the line. The firestarting is almost done – the last of the work is UI stuff, which is admittedly pretty involved but I’ll cross that bridge once I get there (which I guess is now) – so hopefully I’ll be able to have some new stuff to share come Saturday.

+ Added sticks and stones as interactive objects in the environment
+ Modular spawner (spawn_item) that spawns a certain number of an object without overlap in a room
? Implemented shorthand version of player_pack_add script that takes only the object name as a string for the argument
– Removed fire hole (a bit redundant, and the sprite looked like shit anyways)

Just since starting this project alone, I feel like I’ve become a much more competent programmer these past few months. In fact, I would even admit that I developed more as a programmer in the last four months than I have in the last four years: although of course, hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 and learning tends to function on a curve, so maybe I’m just going too hard on myself (the circumstances were much different back then as well).

In other news, I came across this thread on Twitter which perfectly encapsulates the exact kind of mentality I wish I could embody. I think sometimes I’m genuinely able to feel this to some degree, like I’m right on the cusp of realisation; but always, something or someone comes up that causes me to slip. I suppose that’s the entire point: that a person must never lose sight of the good in both others and himself, especially when under pressure. Anyone can feel good when the times are good, after all. But these are especially testing times. For all my platitudes and supposed convictions, I don’t think I have the strength to be a better person, let alone a good one. But I have to try. That’s the least I can do for both others and myself.

Sawyer and I went to see Hobbs & Shaw today and I think it was exactly what I needed in my life right now: a fun, hopelessly positive and feel-good film about the value of friendship and forgiveness and family. Afterwards we got some ice cream and sat at the station and it was a remarkably pleasant evening, and looking up at the clouds I felt an immeasurable sense of optimism and good faith swelling within me, and it made me feel deeply at peace for some time. That all probably sounds horribly cliched and I’ll straight-up admit that it definitely is; but it doesn’t matter, because it felt profound in the moment and besides, nothing’s a cliche when it’s happening to you.

I didn’t get much work done today, and I don’t know if I necessarily feel more motivated, but that’s okay. I feel much better equipped to handle my work tomorrow. 

Didn’t actually end up adding the sticks and stones today, but I did implement a sort function for the inventory, which allows the player to sort between the name, type and quantity of the items. Nothing significant, just a nice QoL feature.

Got some work done today, although nothing substantial enough to push as a full change. Still working on the campfire: I adjusted the collision detection for interaction on both the campfire and the backpack as to be a little bit smaller and more natural (ie, for the campfire, the player has to be standing above it, and the for the backpack, the player has to be standing below it). Tomorrow I’ll work on adding in gathering for the sticks and stones. It should be pretty straightforward and basic and I don’t imagine I’ll run into any complications but… you never know.

The fire pit now must be assembled manually, in three parts:

1. Foundation: laying stones around the base of the fire to contain it.
2. Firebed: laying tinder and fuel within the pit.
3. Ignition: igniting the fire using a starter.

Not implemented, but planned: the first stage requires the player to gather and place a dozen stones by hand from the environment. The second stage requires the player to gather and place about four pieces of tinder (+accelerant) from the pack. The third stage requires the player to ignite the fire using a starter from the pack. There will be a chance that the fire will fail to catch, in which case the player is given another try with one unit of the starter consumed.

+ New state and animations for picking up / placing objects
+ sprFirePit has many new indices
+ The fire pit is now a placeable object rather than fixed.

I didn’t actually work on any of the games today but instead I stayed up until about 0600 last night (alternately, this morning) redesigning and finetuning this site. I feel like it’s now a lot more professional and presentable without compromising my overall tone. I think I’m gonna start listing this as my primary site with a redirect to the GitHub page as a portfolio. 

Of course, that means I actually have to expand the design of the GitHub page accordingly… It shouldn’t be too much of an issue but I don’t have much content on it currently. I’m thinking I’ll store some of my more long-term pieces there though for posterity’s and portfolio’s sake, and focus on developing more as a comprehensive showcase for my work than as a portal, which is what it basically is right now. 

(I have to admit though, at this point I can’t help but wonder if deep down inside that I’m building all these new sites for myself just so I can experiment with new builds and designs…)

I can’t believe it’s already August. I stepped outside just now to look at the sunset only to realise (too late) that the mosquitoes have come out in full force. Thankfully though at least both the heat and the humidity have subsided significantly. 

Speaking of which, I missed yesterday’s post because it was just too hot and humid and top of that I didn’t even get any work done because I was too preoccupied with adjusting the positioning of my fan. I mostly just worked on some item descriptions – the firestarter kit, ironically – although I didn’t make too much progress overall.

Today was a much more productive day though and I got a respectable amount of actual content done, as well as planning for the next several days.  I completely redesigned the layout and structure of the areas, which started with significantly reducing the size of the rooms, from 2048×2048 (grass: 50k) to 480×480 (grass: 5k). Before, the idea was to have a bunch of larger rooms chained together, but now I think it’s a far better idea (both design-wise and technically, since the pixel jittering on horizontal camera movement is too much of a pain in the ass to work through) for the game to feature a bunch of smaller rooms, some containing locations of interest, chained together instead. Each room has a designated “level” (right now, there are five of such levels) that dictates the chance of them appearing upon a room transition. 

I’m not gonna talk too much about the specifics of how this functions right now because a) I’d like it to be somewhat of a surprise and b) I haven’t figured out the exact details of its structure yet but I do believe that it’ll significantly improve the gameplay overall. In a broad sense, I believe that it allows for much more variety at a more respectable pace (instead of forcing the player to wander around a massive area) and creates a greater sense of disorientation for the player, which is in this case a good thing.

Finally got some work done again. Imported over the VFX stuff from But For Now, We Are Young – chromatic profiles and the night filter – and got room transitions working properly. Also, I made some general improvements to the appearance of the campfire, including dynamic smoke (it blows in the wind!) and animations for the flame being ignited and extinguished. The latter two are far from realistic, and I’m thinking about adding a considerable amount of detail to the process overall – small minigame type things for the starters, choosing accelerants and tinder, dedicated UI animations, etc – and I think I’m gonna end up committing to it. I’m satisfied with my progress today. Tomorrow I’ll start working on the minigame for the ferro rod. Maybe I’ll even get to the magnifying glass as well…

Back at this. I said I’d take a break over the weekend, so I did. Did it work as I hoped it would? Maybe. I spent some time after I woke reviewing what I was doing before and going over my notes. I feel like I’m ready to get back to work now. After that I spent some time with Taylor and we talked about the stuff we usually do. It was nice seeing her again. Maybe we’ll be able to meet again later this week. I didn’t get any concrete progress done today but I feel that tomorrow will see my patience come to fruition. I hope so, at least.

I was unable to work today as well, although I feel a bit better overall. I think I’m gonna take a break and do something else instead of just sitting here all day trying to unsuccessfully force myself to get something done. I’ll draft up a new plan on Sunday and work towards that throughout the week. I think I’ll be able to accomplish it this time, so long as nothing unexpected hits me again. 

The motivation I felt yesterday – and which has in some form or another persisted to today – unfortunately panned out into nothing. I found my thoughts lingering on something unpleasant and was too distracted all throughout the day to accomplish anything meaningful. At least I opened GameMaker though; it may not seem like much of anything to anyone else but it’s a step towards getting back into it and that, while it may not be enough, is still something.

And something’s better than nothing, right?

Severe thunderstorms all day. I still haven’t found it within me to work on anything but I feel like I’m on the verge of another breakthrough in motivation. I’m beginning to think it was a mistake to restrict myself to working exclusively on We Are Young for the entirety of this month; it certainly helped reinvigorate my interest in the project and led to some work getting done but over time I feel like it’s just begun to stultify my progress to a degree by de-incentivising me from thinking about other kinds of work. After all, the whole point of me starting My Work Is Not Yet Done was to work on something a little more mechanical and systemic in approach to design when I got burned out on writing. I’ll just have to remind myself periodically to check in with both projects so neither falls behind too much.

The state of living fills me with profound revulsion.

For the entirety of the past week or so I’ve done pretty much nothing except sit at my desk playing video games. It’s been exceedingly hot and humid so I rarely go outside anymore. I haven’t done my exercises since the beginning of this month. At this point I’ll have to reset again.

I just realised looking at the date that the month is almost over. This realisation has left me feeling profoundly ill at ease – as it always does. I can feel my life cycling through repetitions. Even my awareness of this is a kind of repetition: I’m sure that if I were to go through my notebooks and look at my entries, I would find dozens of iterations of this exact pattern of thought repeated verbatim over the years. Sometimes even in the span of days. 

It’s harder to remember things now, because it’s harder to keep track of time. I’ve become untethered from a fixed and linear understanding of time. Things have begun to repeat themselves; I’ve begun to repeat myself. Sometimes I’m aware of it; but most of the time, I don’t think I am. 

Last night I met up with a friend and got locked out of my house so I sat on the front porch for the rest of the night until dawn chainsmoking. I’ve been feeling like shit lately. An overwhelming sense of slowness and decay. I can’t seem to work anymore. The thoughts come too slowly to make sense of: I find myself getting lost in the spaces between them. I’m always too tired to do anything yet too restless to stay still. I’ve been finding myself dwelling upon thoughts of extraordinary violence lately. Maybe it’s just the heat. The wretched humidity.

I haven’t done any work whatsoever this entire week.

The IGDA meeting was completely unproductive. We arrived over an hour late – mostly due to circumstances beyond our control – and spent the next two or so hours sitting there basically just staring at the sky and the cranes in the distance. Not to say that that in itself was bad – in fact, it was very calming and pleasant,  and the evening was very nice – but I basically accomplished nothing the event itself was actually intended to provide. 

Of course, that was all my fault: it’s not that I don’t know how to network, but rather, because of my social ineptitude, I find myself completely unable to meet new people at all, let alone network. I find it extraordinarily difficult to approach people and only react when I’m approached. In short, it’s the exact kind of thing you’re not supposed to do or be in this world. 

Well, next month I won’t be able to attend it because I’ll be in Europe. Maybe by September I’ll finally find it within me to actually reach out and do something. 

But probably not.

Didn’t get any work done today, but Sawyer came over and we watched some films. Tomorrow, we’re attending an IGDA event in Brooklyn – the same one we attended last month – and I find it astonishing that a month has already passed and I’ve barely registered it. The night has cooled significantly.

Drafted initial visuals for CH09. Looks like a bit of persistence paid off after all. I’m wondering if maybe I should commit to producing the visuals for each chapter every week? That would certainly help maintain a steady sense of momentum… of course, that’s entirely contingent upon me having actually having come up with the idea for the visuals in the first place, which, especially as I produce more and more of these, is not so certain…

Well, I suppose it’s worth a try anyways.

I was able to recover a bit from my malaise today: I got some work done on the graphic assets for CH09, and so long as I can maintain this pace of progress I believe I’m in a position where I’ll be able to release something tomorrow. We’ll see if this persists, though.

(I doubt it.)

I’ve been troubled by dark thoughts again lately. I’m not quite sure what the impetus is for their return: maybe I’ve been spending too much time alone. Maybe it’s because all my income has once again dried up and I can feel my worth receding rapidly by the day. I don’t know. But every morning, I wake up with hatred and disgust in my heart. I can feel my thoughts growing more erratic, and on more than one occasion I have felt seized by bouts of paranoia regarding the presence of observers where realistically I understand there shouldn’t be any. My dreams have become haunted once again by strange and malevolent notions.

Thankfully, I’m an incredibly lazy and unmotivated human being and therefore I’m pretty confident these things won’t unravel into any larger plots or actions. The one undeniably positive side effect of all this is that I feel much more in tune with my work now.

And yet another day passes with no meaningful progress whatsoever. I didn’t even try today: I woke up in a wretched mood just around noon and stared out at the sky for a bit. Then I turned on my PS4 and that was pretty much it. It began to rain some time later – a real downpour – and it hasn’t stopped since. The temperature has fallen considerably but it’s become very humid. I just feel tired.

I have however come up with an idea for another chapter’s implementation. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get the visuals done by the end of Saturday but hopefully now that I have a good idea about what I’d like it to look like the actual work will come more easily. I’m gonna try to get to bed earlier tonight so that I can work longer tomorrow.

No work today either. I don’t think I even opened GameMaker at all today, now that I think about it.

Today was yet another unproductive day. I cleaned and reassembled my keyboard but other than that I accomplished virtually nothing of worth. I’ve listened to “Goodbye Horses” eighty-seven times in the past two days. 

Finally ported over to Studio 2! It was only a matter of time, I suppose. After having spent an entire month working in Studio 2, I’ve gotten too used to its (generally superior) workflow compared to 1.4. Everything was imported smoothly, much to my surprise, and the bulk of the remaining work was just a matter of fixing up 2’s fucking illegible default compatibility conversions with my personal naming conventions. As for the old GMX, well, 1.4’s image editor is still far superior to Studio 2’s, so I’ll continue using 1.4 for creating and editing graphics. I’ve completely purged it of everything else though. I doubt that after this, I’ll ever return to Studio for anything beyond editing graphics again.

I didn’t get anything else in terms of content done today, but this conversion has helped me recover a bit of much-needed momentum and has boosted my morale a bit. Hopefully I’ll be able to get more done this week now that I’m feeling a little better.

Ended up not working on much of anything today. I woke up late into the afternoon feeling completely hungover due to the humidity. I sat down, stared at the screen for several moments, completely disoriented; and then turned on my PS4 and completely ignored my responsibilities for the rest of the day.

I’ve only just recently begun to take note of just how much time I spend not just in front of a screen, but sitting in front of a screen in basically the exact same position for nearly 90% of my waking hours (and probably more, to be completely honest). At first when I think about it it seems okay and justified given the amount of work I have, but then it really begins to dawn on me just how abnormal and unacceptable – not to mention unhealthy – that likely is: and then I begin to think about how many years I’ve been living like this, day in and day out, rarely moving, rarely getting out to see the sun and breathe in fresh air…

Like I said, pretty unacceptable, to say the least.

Didn’t bother making a post last night: it was too hot and humid, and I was far too listless to do much of anything. Today I managed to finally finish working on the general visuals of 03: it turned out looking a bit better than I expected in some ways, although I still have to figure out what to do about the issues with the scale of the view. I also need to work on some more animations for the characters, as well as the actual interfaces for it (which I don’t imagine will be too difficult, to be honest). I’ll probably work on the animations tomorrow, and start the interfaces on Monday.

Independence Day. I mostly just worked on graphics for 03, nothing particularly noteworthy of mentioning. A lot of the work for this project progresses pretty slowly: not necessarily because it’s more difficult in a technical sense (although I suppose this could be considered a different kind of difficulty) but because so much of this game is conceptual. Coming up with all the different scenarios and their implementations is, for all intents and purposes, a seemingly arbitrary process dependent almost entirely on how I’m feeling that day. Although I think my mood has become more consistent in general – possibly as a result of my prolonged (although relative) isolation – it’s still very difficult for me to consistently maintain a stable enough state to work on a project involving this much emotional investment. Well, I suppose I have no other choice but to work on it. Hopefully in persisting through it I’ll be able to improve my resolve overall.

Didn’t get much done in way of in-engine stuff but I got a respectable amount of progress done on writing and outlining so I feel satisfied with my work today. I noticed today just how out of my element I’ve been feeling lately for some reason. Maybe it’s a direct consequence of the heat or something, but I’ve been in what I can only really describe as a palpable state of simultaneous disorientation and restlessness this past week (maybe a little bit longer, time passes too quickly and insubstantially for me to notice these days). I find it difficult to fall asleep and I find it even more difficult to get up. I don’t think I’m depressed but I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve been living alone, I’ve been far too removed for far too long from the broader state of normal society that I’m no longer really sure if I can see myself clearly. 

Missed the post for the first day of the month yesterday, but fortunately (well, in a limited sense I suppose) I accomplished virtually nothing either yesterday or, for that matter, today either. I attempted to switch back to working on But For Now, We Are Young but I haven’t been able to do anything except sit here staring at a blank screen feeling increasingly frustrated and impotent.

To be honest, the idea of writing now makes me angry. I hate thinking about it, let alone actually doing it, and I don’t care about it anymore. Maybe it’s because my prior attempts have failed so spectacularly. Somehow the quality of my work has only depreciated across all these years. I feel like this project is gonna end up as yet another failure. I’ve completely lost my will to work on it. I guess that’s ironic. Maybe it’s because I’m a failure, too.

Added room transition effect. It’s the only major change, but there are a bunch of minor changes as well including new collision masks and other stuff I’ve now conveniently forgotten. My idea with the transitions is that moving beyond the borders of the room where applicable spawns the player in first) a random map (from the nine pre-assembled ones) and second) at the opposite side of the new room (so for example, if the player exceeds the top bounds of the previous room, she’s spawned somewhere on the bottom of the next one) at a random x-value.

– New and improved tree sprites.

– Moved the draw event for GRASS to its own Draw Begin instead of in DEPTH_SORTER’s Draw. Also changed draw depth for grass: it now will always draw below everything else.

– Added sun and sunlight effect in rmGorge

June is now officially over, and with it, I’m gonna attempt to shift my main focus back to But For Now, We Are Young. I’m very satisfied with my work this month and I hope July brings equivalent success.

I accomplished what I set out to do last night, which was to implement the gorge scene view with parallax. It was, for the most part, pretty straightforward (with the exception of a certain 50-line if-else chain…) and it looks pretty good so I’m satisfied with my work today. Tomorrow, I’ll add in collision and VFX to it.

Summer proper has really hit with full force: it’s almost too hot and humid to do much of anything. That being said, today I got a surprising amount of work done on the visuals for the gorge view, and aside from some minor tweaks I’ll be making along the way, it’s pretty much done for now. Tomorrow I’ll separate all of the different layers and add animation, and hopefully I can get a parallax working as well. I want to get them integrated into the game fully by the end of this weekend. If I can accomplish that much, I think I’ll take a break from this for the next week or so and shift focus back to But For Now, We Are Young, which I’ve neglected for nearly the entirety of the month now.

Today was the hottest day of the year so far. I spent most of it in the city. Sawyer and I attended an event out in Brooklyn hosted by his school, a kind of weekly showcase for people interested in receiving feedback for games they’re working on. All of the games we played were pretty interesting and well-designed, and we had a good time. It felt pretty good to see others’ work and to help them out with feedback. I think that’s my favourite part of making games, honestly: talking with other people about them, and hopefully having a positive effect on others and helping them work through issues or even improve their craft.

In regards to my personal work though, I accomplished,virtually nothing. I sat down to work on the stuff I mentioned yesterday – lowered visibility for rain, and smoking – but I implemented neither of them, and instead just wasted several hours thinking about girls and feeling like shit. Spending too long in the city, especially on warm days like these, inevitably has that effect on me. Life is best lived on one’s own, I suppose. 

Tomorrow I’d like to attempt to implement smoke for the fire. I have some ideas for how it might work but we’ll see if I actually get around to doing anything.

Another day with very little progress. I opened up GameMaker telling myself I would get some work done… and then I got absolutely no work done whatsoever. Tomorrow, I’d like to, at the absolute least, implement border darkening for rain. I can also implement smoking as well, since I actually finished the sprites a few weeks ago and for some reason just never got around to actually adding them in. That shouldn’t be too difficult or involved at all.

I worked on some stuff today but honestly I can’t remember what it was that I did. I guess that must mean that it must have not been very important, then.

Didn’t bother logging yesterday for whatever reason. I didn’t get much work done today, I finished drawing the labels on the pack but the kick is that they’re too goddamn small in-game so now I have to completely redraw them again, letter by letter. I probably won’t be able to use the same font due to the scaling, which will look pretty bad mots likely; I’m too tired right now though to test it out so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Another productive day. I didn’t spend too much time outside although I still have time to fix that (although I probably won’t). 

– Added trees.
– Depth sorting works a bit more consistently now (and is fully compatible with grass).
– Camera zoom is much more functional and scales smoothly on the player, with a maximum range of 8x.
– The improved zoom works very nicely with the increased map size (up to 2048×2048, but also works well up to 4096×4096). I’ve yet to optimise the instance count (since there are basically no other instances of which to speak…) but as they say, don’t pre-emptively optimise, so we’ll cross that road when we get there.

The first day of summer, and an appropriately pleasant, if not otherwise unremarkable day. I got some work done but nothing significant enough to warrant any further details (or even a dedicated commit, for that matter). At least it wasn’t a shitty day.

Added grass, plus a whole bunch of other changes, most of them insignificant enough to not warrant an attempt at documentation. I’ve been working very inconsistently the past few days and have been overwhelmed by a general sense of free-floating anxiety.

Anyways, the grass is pretty much directly imported from matharoo’s “Depth-Based Grass + Wind” asset, and the only modifications I’ve made deal with formatting and minor changes to variable names. Technically it’s a paid asset so I really shouldn’t commit it, but… I’ll probably end up just removing it in the final build or something and hoping nobody reads the commit history. It uses a vertex buffer to draw all the grass sprites programmatically distributed throughout the room, and then uses a shader to slightly skew the sprites to simulate wind. It’s a pretty straightforward process (although the implementation and execution of it is pretty involved so I won’t go into any further detail about it), but ends up looking really good, with little cost to performance.

I’m thinking about adding a bunch of larger, thicker vegetation – things like long weeds, bushes, rough brush, patches of tall grass and the like – using objects, and adding some player interaction to them. By that, I mean stuff like dynamic movement when the player walks through them, since the grass doesn’t have any effects. For stuff like that I think I’m gonna handplace it.

In general, I’ve been working on systems a whole lot these past two weeks or so, but I think I’m gonna switch over to environmental work for a change (and also because I’m not feeling so good all of a sudden, and don’t really feel mentally equipped to work on systems). By the end of this week I’d like to try to get a decent-looking environment together, with trees and rocks, maybe a structure. Well, we’ll see if it happens.

I tried working today for a bit, labelling diagrams and such – to be honest, I didn’t really try much at all – but predictably, I got very little work done and instead I just spent the entirety of the day suspended in a state of vague unease. Last night I suffered a profoundly disturbing and disgusting dream, whose contents I’d rather not share. I feel as if my life has taken a turn for the worse once again as of maybe a week or two ago. I’ve been feeling overwhelmed by minor deluges of strange and frenetic notions lately but I just can’t express or articulate them in any way. Tomorrow I’m going to try to get more work done, which is to say, I’m going to try to work on something in the first place. I hope I’ll be able to recover from this soon.

Woke up today to find a message from Taylor telling me she had to cancel on me at the last minute, which honestly, I’m not even too surprised about at this point. I turned on my PS4 only to discover that my external storage had corrupted, meaning an entire terrabyte’s worth of content was now unusable and the only way I could remedy it was by reformatting the drive, thus wiping it entirely. On top of all that, it’s extremely humid and raining, and the paper is too damp to write on.

Fuck this shit.

Missed my entry last night; not gonna bother making it up. The day was complete shit and I wasted hours wandering around the city for literally no reason. Needless to say, I got effectively no work done whatsoever.

Fortunately, today was much better. Sawyer and I went to Brooklyn to attend a social event hosted by the local chapter of the IGDA. I was at best mildly curious about it but there were a surprising number of people there and I met some students, all from NYU’s Game Design MFA programme, with whom I talked for some time. It was a nice social experience – it’s been a good several months since I last spoke to someone new in person – and also, I gained a good deal of knowledge about the MFA programme in particular, in which I had previously held a passing interest but I never seriously considered it because I had some doubt in the professional efficacy, for lack of a kinder phrase, of the degree. She seemed to be genuinely enjoying the programme however and spoke highly of it, as did the other two, and meeting people who worked with games and seemed actually well-adjusted and enjoying life has been really encouraging and I feel imbibed with a greater sense of optimism. 

I think that I’ll start the application soon.

Nothing really to show today, although in terms of the backend, I’ve managed to fully segregate each subinventory from one another and I now have different child inventories set up under a single parent object. It works well so far, although I still have to touch it up a bit; I’m thinking that maybe I might investigate the possibility of reading and loading the data from a JSON file (maybe CSV?) rather than one ridiculously long series of “pack_add_item”s. That might be a bit beyond my current abilities though…

Earlier, I finally fixed the font scaling and implemented a pixel-perfect viewport. Got tired of seeing the font getting warped and stretched out weirdly, so I fixed the dimensions of some characters (mostly just the “M” and “m”), reduced proportional character spacing to -1, and set the view scaling from 3 to 4 (for a clean 2:1 upscale, instead of 1.5:1, which was fucking up the fidelity before).

Spent a good while implementing the fundamentals of the inventory system and while I’ve got something decent to work off now, I don’t feel as if I’ve accomplished much of anything. There’s a lot of formatting and modularising left for me to work on before I feel comfortable pushing anything and I’ve been feeling pretty tired lately but the truth is, the real reason behind all this exhaustion lately, is that I really just feel distracted, and honestly kinda fucked up by this whole business with the girl. 

She left for back home today and while I realise that there was really nothing there – that there is nothing there – and that it’s all just in my head, I can’t stop thinking about it regardless. Acknowledging that on its own already makes me feel like shit, and that’s just how I feel when I’m actually trying to be responsible with my feelings; when I let myself slip, it just feels even worse, i start feeling hopeless, it makes me feel like this is just yet another one of those many things in life that so many other people can enjoy, from which I’m just permanently shut out. I know that’s not true – probably isn’t true – but the feeling persists regardless and eats away at me and my motivation and my ability to envision a better tomorrow, or even just any tomorrow at all that isn’t defined by persistent loneliness and the gaping abscess of possibility. 

Well, at least no one can blame me now for not giving it a try.

No work done today. Too tired, didn’t feel so good… I think this weekend I’m gonna take a break from all of it.

Began implementing the backpack inventory into the game, the spritework and key-based navigation are entirely in and I slowly worked my way through a rather convoluted initial approach towards a solution that, while not in any sense elegant, is definitely more legible than hardcoding several dozen image indices via stacked switch statements. I feel sadder and more tired today than I did yesterday, and tomorrow, if I get in any work at all, I think I’ll just focus on one particular thing and get it done and call it a day instead of spending so much time scoping like I usually do. 

Worked for a while on the spritework for the backpack UI screen, and aside from the labels, it’s pretty much finished. I have to figure out how I’m actually gonna implement the mouseover events – doing it by the sprite dimensions is gonna be an absolute pain in the ass, I’ll say that much right now – but at the end of the day, if it really gets down to it, I can just create a bunch of objects layered over one another and call it a day. I think I’ll work on implementing the basic mouseover event behaviour tomorrow: and maybe I’ll even have something to show for once.

It’s strange to think that I only started working on this project since the beginning of this month – but then I realise that that’s actually a good deal longer than I realise, and that it’s almost halfway through the month already. That concerns me greatly, and fills me with no small amount of anxiety. I haven’t made any significant efforts on But For Now, We Are Young since the end of last month (although today I did make a few very minor entries into the spec document); but my mood has begun to degrade once again and I feel that soon, I’ll be able to resume work on it once more. 

I started using OKCupid again for no apparent reason (no: the reason was that last night, I felt a tremendous pang of loneliness, more acute than usual, and sought to immediately fill it by seeking out the most socially encouraged form of partnership, which is coupling) and in a disturbingly short period of time I matched with this strangely attractive girl. We talked about sad Radiohead songs (what other kinds are there?) for a brief moment and for just that moment, I felt a kind of strange feeling that this might be – no, that this was – nice, that maybe I could get back into all of this, to rehabilitate into the fold of society; but then the moment passed and in the space left behind I realised I’d run out of things to say and I started feeling hopeless once again just like I always do and now I’m thinking she’s just not really that interested in me and now I’m thinking that I should just leave her alone and that this, all of this, was just a big mistake from the start, that maybe this just isn’t for me that I don’t deserve it if I’m not willing to tolerate even the mildest setback and that I don’t belong here and that this is a world in which I am no longer welcome and it’s all on me, a punchline I couldn’t quite catch, a joke on me but probably not.

Implemented a smooth(-ish) camera zoom… and that’s pretty much it. 

I watched the entirety of the Ubisoft E3 conference today and for a while it was pretty exciting and I felt very motivated and I wanted to get more stuff done, but then, for whatever reason…

Well, I know the reason. But it’s the kind of thing you can’t say out loud – so I suppose I won’t. 

Implemented a more efficient depth sorting system, replacing the previous “depth = -y” stuff that I was using with a grid-based data structure. Supposedly it should be much better for performance – not that I imagine that’ll become an issue any time soon, but futureproofing is always good. I haven’t posted any images in a while, mostly because I’ve been working on a lot of systems. Next week I’d like to get started on environment work and get this actually looking like something presentable. 

Successfully implemented player and object directional shadows, despite believing just yesterday that I couldn’t get that shit figured out. Now, not only do nearly all objects cast shadows, but the shadows are relative to the position of the sun, which moves in the sky (note that the top of the screen represents cardinal SOUTH). Although it’s unrealistic for the player’s shadow to remain fixed at all time relative to the sun (especially at night) regardless of closer light sources, I’m strongly thinking about keeping it anyways as a means of telling time without having an actual time display. We’ll see how I feel about it when I wake up later today though…

Sawyer came over today. We watched some films and then observed the redness of the evening sky. I didn’t get too much work done today, but I did successfully clean up and modularise some important repeating scripts, and I also added the sitting behaviour when the pack is equipped. I feel completely wiped today, probably because I stayed up until 0500 yesterday working on… stuff I can’t even remember now. I’ll take it easier tonight. Probably.

Finally got the day-night cycle working as intended. Created lighting for both the player’s vision, which uses dithered tiling to represent visibility, and a much stronger light source for actual light sources (in this case, the campfire, but in the future, things like the emergency flare, the hand torch, the improvised torch, and the chem light), which aren’t dithered. The lighting changes dynamically and is directly tied to the time of day.

I also implemented a shadow system (well, one script: draw_sprite_shadow), but since it’s entirely based around the sprite dimensions, and since a good number of the player sprites are off-centred, the alignment is off and it consequently looks like shit. So for now, I’m keeping it out of the game; but maybe later, I’ll be able to revisit it and get it working properly.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll work on a smoke effect for the fire – it’s a pretty straightforward particle system, I don’t imagine it’ll be too complicated or time-consuming to figure out – and hopefully afterwards I’ll have time to work on another system.

Another late night. Worked all day on a stupid day-night cycle system that I didn’t even end up using; I couldn’t figure out how to get the view consistently situated relative to the player movement, of all things (although on top of that, since my knowledge of surfaces is, to put it lightly, abysmal, I couldn’t get it looking the way I wanted it to look in the first place), so instead I just abandoned it entirely and decided to work on something else. 

I implemented the hunger system successfully, although I’ll have to adjust the rates of intake on the calories relative to hunger level a bit; more excitingly though I got the vomiting working, spritework and all, and for whatever reason it’s oddly satisfying. Vomiting is tied to two (well, three) major factors: excess consumption of liquids or foods (ie, hunger or thirst bars exceed their maximum limits), and ingestion of indigestible items such as mouldy / expired food, or raw meat. In the former case, once the player has ingested too much of something, a randomised timer will begin (around three to four seconds) after which the player will stop walking and vomit. In the latter case, the player may contract food poisoning, and this causes them to periodically need to purge the body of toxins via either vomiting, or defecation (it chooses between the two). 

Being near puddles of vomit (as with faeces) dramatically increases the player’s risk of infection: within 64 pixels of either, any action the player takes sees a 35% increase in risk of infection, which, combined with low-quality tools, basically guarantees some kind of affliction (depends on what the player is doing). Like faeces, vomit can be cleaned up using 

– a plastic bag (completely removes infection chance)

– an entrenching tool (drops radius of infection to 5% within 32 pixels, and leaves a visible mound)

– a shallow dirt hole (drops radius of infection to 32 pixels but leaves the initial 35% increase in risk of infection)

Stayed up last night until 0830 the next morning playing Outward. I have no idea why I stayed up that late; there was no sane justification for it. Well, whatever.

Got some work done today tweaking hunger, before deciding I wasn’t completely satisfied with how simple it was… and then decided, after watching some gameplay of SCUM, that I would instead work on a needless complicated and mathematically convoluted metabolic simulation that tracked caloric intake and output. Well, I worked on that for some time (much to my utter astonishment, I actually somehow got the model working out quite well in GM, mathematical relationships and all), before deciding again that it was way too complicated for literally no other reason than to sate my momentary curiosity in the matter; so I cut it out (and saved it in another file…), and restarted the design.

Currently, I have a more simplified version of the caloric system which balances calories as energy against hunger as a more abstract psychological metric. Currently, it’s planned such that hunger will deplete at a generally steady rate while calories – the sole source of energy – will be burned in direct relation to actions (ie, walking, setting up camp, breaking down materials, picking up the pack, etc). Hunger depletes (or, with respect to common language, builds up perhaps) much faster than caloric output and, if not treated, will lead to starvation, which directly depletes willpower (around 2.5% /hr). Starvation also begins drawing from the greater calorie store (accumulated body fat, that is), which will allow the player to survive for several days without food despite starving. Each meal has a hidden caloric limit; any additional calories consumed that go over that limit used go towards the calorie store, where, like I mentioned before, they basically serve as backup energy.

In short, calories are used to perform tasks and once they begin running low the player must rest; hunger is more tied to overall condition, and affects willpower the most.

I’ll work on it a bit more tomorrow, but I think I have it mostly figured out now.