Woke up late into the afternoon on account of an unusual tiredness, likely the consequences of the past few nights of disturbed sleep catching up to me. I was unable to focus for some time, resulting in only about three hours of productive work before being pulled away by general tasks. During this time, I was able to draw and implement the static PDA animation while initiating a data transfer with field sensors.
At night, Haolun and I went for another drive, and discussed a great number of troubling things.
Reasonable progress today. I’ve counted eighteen unresolved items on my list, which means every day, I should seek to complete at least two. Some of these, of course, are significantly more involved than others. Regardless, I think it’s doable, especially once I get towards the end of the list. The most time-consuming stuff is easily the interface stuff. I can probably do two a day if I work steadily into the night, which I plan on doing tonight. I just finished up the spritework today for the PDA interaction with the field camera. What’s left is the implementation, of which the most laborious part will be the alignment of elements that I have to draw in by code. After that though, I’ll be completely finished for the time being with elements outside of the outpost. I’ve been thinking about adding some more observable POIs in the environment, which will be very quick work comparatively. Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow on break.
Didn’t get any work done today beyond doing the write-up. I woke up late on account of staying up too late last night (also not really doing anything except procrastinating) and then immediately had to go take care of a number of necessary non-work-related tasks, which took up most of the afternoon. By the time I arrived home, I made the questionable decision to expound the rest of my energy on writing up the monthly update which, fortunately, I was actually able to finish, so at least I have something to show for the day.
This rate of progress, or lack thereof, is unacceptable. I’ve already burned away two days. Tomorrow I need to get something substantial done. I’ve created a list that breaks everything down to the molecular level. My plan now is to get everything built in place structurally, and then fill in the animations afterwards. I’ve been getting too bogged down by all this sprite-work otherwise. I’m going to sleep early tonight, and when I wake up tomorrow morning, I will begin properly.
Finally had the call with Raw Fury this morning. They’ve given me the green light to proceed on the demo, after all! Now I have to actually get it done.
In practice, this more or less necessitates me to work continuously with little rest for the next ten days until the 25th, which is the soft deadline for builds to be approved on time for the start of September. Although I understand that, as far as concepts like “best practice” and “healthy work/life balance” go, this should give some cause for concern, privately I must admit that I actually welcome it: not only because it is the first time, not just in recent memory, but possibly in years that I’ve felt genuinely interested in not just the project itself but actually working on it as well, but because the constant external pressure grants me the perfect excuse to withdraw myself from the world, and avoid unpleasant thoughts.
It catches up to me as soon as I stop. My dreams these past few days have been increasingly filled with odious, monstrous things too appalling to recount. I spend most of my forced breaks either obsessively “maintaining” this site (I strongly suspect its very inception was a decision born far less from actual judicious planning, than a product of unsettled restlessness), or ruminating over Ana and other humiliating personal failures. I feel emotionally stifled, and work feels like the only real reprieve from it within my immediate control.
At the end of the day, I guess it’s not a terrible place to be, though. I could feel like this, and also not be working. As long as things are getting done on time, maybe it’s not so bad after all. I’ve come to realise that it’s only when things are like this that I have genuine hope that I’ll be able to finish this.
Slow, tiresome day. I made a mistake staying up last night: it turns out the meeting is today, so I stayed up until sunrise for nothing. I woke up way too late as a result, and in a thoroughly discombobulated state. To add insult to injury, I have to do it again tonight, for real this time.
Work has been slow and fatiguing on account of the inherent tedium of the animation process. I have one more set of animations left — flipping the page forward and backward, and then two or three transitional frames between states — before the worst of it is finished. I should take a break tonight with the time I have remaining before the meeting, and implement the existing assets in-game before I embark upon drawing out the remaining ones.
Continued working on the animations, although with limited progress. I hope I’m able to pick up the pace soon once this stuff is done, I just realised it’s already almost the halfway point of the month.
I completely rebuilt the site tonight, and moved it entirely over to WordPress. I discovered to my great consternation that Tumblr had finally decided to force the usage of its new post format, which completely altered the internal structure of the posts themselves and in turn destroyed the interactions I’d built for it into my main site. Honestly, I’ve been looking for an excuse to do it for a while now anyways, as I was getting sick of the advertising on Tumblr, and constantly having to reset the theme to light mode.
Unfortunately, moving to WordPress means I now have to completely rebuild the functionality within the website itself. I took a brief look at WP’s API and immediately concluded that I have little interest (or time, to be honest) to figure it out right now. For the time being, I think I’m just going to hide it until I have the energy to figure out a more elegant solution. At some point, I should also look to update everything for design consistency…
Vaguely distracted throughout the day, worked inefficiently. Spent the entire day animating the opening and closing interactions with the field notebook. It’s still not done, but I am certain I can finish it by tomorrow.
I’m a bit apprehensive about how I’m going to handle page-turning, if I even want to do that at all. I could do it programmatically with a 3D surface and a shader, which would allow me to authentically preserve the contents of each page with the flipping animation since they’d be rendered directly onto the manipulated surface – but then that would compromise the quality of the animation, and I’d have to do a lot of coordinate positioning of the hand movement itself, which will be a exercise in abject tedium.
Alternately, I could animate it entirely by hand, with pre-drawn text on the pages that are affected directly by the flip. This involves a lot of sprite work, but it’ll guarantee that the hand and page turn animations are synchronised properly. The problem is that it severely limits the amount of dynamic information I can place upon each spread, as the face that will be turned has to be fixed since it’ll be pre-drawn in the page turning sprite sheet itself, instead of being rendered mathematically.
That means that, on the starting spread, only the lefthand page can be drawn via code; and for any following spreads that the player can flip to and from, only the righthand page can be drawn.
Actually, this will work well. I can have the collected IDs pinned on the lefthand side, and related notes and thoughts Avery has about them “written” on the right. This could in fact even be a hand-drawn sprite for each page…
It looks like my work is cut out for me for the next few days.
Didn’t work as much as I’d have liked today. I was overcome by a dim cloud. Most of today’s work was custodial, going through all of the flagged code instances and making the necessary adjustments. I don’t know how much any of these changes actually matter – I don’t think any of them really do – but at least now I don’t have to look at any more warnings.
I’ve decided this morning that, unrelated to the previous, I will switch my code editor entirely to a proportional font for my next project. The compulsive need to ensure typographic alignment, even when doing so is outright destructive to legibility, has severely impaired my ability (or perhaps desire) to abide by reasonable standards of consistency throughout this project. I long for the future.
Work has been going really well. Not only has the work itself been getting done, but I feel a great sense of fulfillment getting it done, even on days like this, when the actual measurable progress feels so slight. It’s the strangest thing; as if suddenly, the long fog that’s so thoroughly eclipsed the past two years of my life cleared away with such abruptness that I find myself astonished to even recall it was ever there. I’m so terribly happy that I was there to share in its witness, but I think it’s over. No one’s coming back, I’m sure of it now, and I can no longer be moved to leave. The city’s emptied out, the nights are getting cooler, the summer will soon draw to a close. Things will never be like the way they were again. I have to find my place in all this again, and I think my place is right here. I’m plummeting through my memories. I know I shouldn’t have done it but the other day I found myself on the L and by the time it’d passed by 1st I’d already stepped out into the evening, careening, against my better desires, the trees far greener than I remembered and the light warmer, and by the bitter brine waters I sat down and from deep within my lungs I heaved forth what felt like the last of the winter, all winter, pooling across the parkway. It catches up to you, I guess. I don’t think people change anymore so much as they just seem to fall apart, unravel, first at the atomic level, and then in whole systems and tectonics. No one seems to take circumstance seriously until it’s the only thing they’ve got left to talk about. I felt it again tonight for the first time in a long time, you know, the real thing, lying there in my bed, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what the night breeze is like right now in Austin. It wasn’t fear, or heartache, or longing, or even sadness, really. Just plain loneliness. Ah, man.
Uninteresting but necessary work today. Cleaned up the tutorial prompts and some save events to improve the onboarding experience for new players. Work has been coming easier after this weekend. Maybe the sadness is not so bad after all. It feels more familiar to me. I think I’ve been too distracted these past two years. Maybe this is finally an opportunity to return to where I belong.
Tawanda’s left New York for good. I guess that’s that, then. I know things aren’t gonna change much but things will change a lot. He never came back to New Jersey, at the end of it. A profound sadness has come over me over the last few weeks. Too tired to stay awake, possessed by an insatiable hunger. There are days and nights when I miss Ana so terribly that the ache seems to seep into my bones. I’ve fallen behind the pace of my life.
First day back to work, and first entry in over a month. I’m not really sure what to say. I’ve been real tired lately, a full-body fatigue. They’ve got me working on a demo for the October Steam Next Fest. I don’t know, there was some kind of confusion on the timing of when this build would be due. They haven’t updated me on it yet. I don’t know. I don’t really care anymore. I have two weeks left to get it done on my own terms, I don’t care what happens on their end internally: I’m submitting it, come hell or high water. I need the public release at this point. Without it, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to recover enough morale to finish this thing. Hell.
No work today. Still feeling fucked up, but doing my best to work through it. I spent much of the morning in prayer. I’m not very good at it. Sometimes though it gets me from one moment to the next when nothing else really seems to be working. I spend the rest of the time sleeping, or trying to, anyways. I think I’m in trouble at work. Something about the invoices I submitted the other day. Probably about the rate of progress too.
The bitter irony of all this is that it all hits just as I was just about feeling like I could start doing things better. I’d finally started feeling a bit better about work, like I could get things done. Started feeling better about Ana, like I could finally let go of some of the more painful, resentful things, and just talk to her, plan things with her, think about her like a normal human being. I enjoyed it. I get it now, what Ada’s talking about. I enjoyed feeling like I could be happy. Fuck.
Life just seems to fold over me in waves these years. Just as I start to feel better, like I’ve got enough strength to get over the next berm, I just get knocked back down again, over and over, by the same goddamned problems every time. I feel completely powerless against any of it. I’m not yet suicidal, which I guess is good. But I feel like all my progress has just been wiped, again. And I feel so thoroughly impotent at contesting any of it. Nobody trusts me anymore, it feels like. Can’t convince anyone of anything. I’ve run everybody’s patience down. Nobody believes me anymore. And man, I don’t have too many more words. And man, I don’t have too much more will.
Feeling fucked up again. I’m trying my best to get through it but right now I can’t even get out of bed. God damn this wretched soul of mine.
Published the monthly update today. Writing it exhausted me beyond reason, and I was no longer able to work afterwards. I feel like a mild sadness has also settled into me somehow. It feels like some kind of disappointment, or disillusionment, although I don’t know why. It’s 2100 and I can’t think of any reason to stay awake any longer. I don’t think it was a bad day. It just didn’t feel like it was enough.
Another good workday. Pushed my first commit of the year, I’m pretty sure.
Set up the link point to the basement in the outpost, so the player can now move between the two in-game. There are a lot of issues with regards to the lighting system though, and the movement animations for Avery are completely broken when she’s in the basement. I don’t know how to solve it right now.
This is one of the biggest issues, I’ve come to learn, about working on things for so long. I’ve almost completely forgotten how I built so much of the early systems in the game. So much of it just seems so convoluted as to appear effectively foreign to me.
I need to focus on producing a whole bunch of assets tomorrow, as well as getting the update written. I’m going to go to sleep early and try to get it all out by the afternoon.
Felt better today. Woke up pretty late, but made good progress on the basement. It’s been fully imported into the game itself now and should be ready in terms of decorations by tomorrow. I’ve decided to postpone writing this month’s update until tomorrow, and releasing it on Saturday. I will have to create some visuals for it soon.
I was feeling quite well for the majority of the day until, with the light encouragement of a friend, I decided to make a new Hinge profile and see if anything’s changed. Nothing has; and in fact, I believe that my sense of antipathy and revulsion has only further grown in its intensity over the course of the past months. The obscenity of it all has become genuinely unbearable. I was originally planning on working for the rest of the day, but I have felt my mood palpably darken by the minute over the last two hours. I have been thinking about Larry Hall. I have become gripped by the fantasy of violently drowning myself in a shallow trickle of gutter effluvia.
The humidity passed overnight. The day was bright and cool. Didn’t get anything done today, either. I felt better though. I’ve gotta start working again. I haven’t accomplished anything I set out to do, either this week, or this month. Frankly, I haven’t accomplished anything the entirety of this year. I almost feel bad about submitting invoices these days.
Humid. Wasn’t able to accomplish a single thing I had set out to get done by the end of today.
The air was hazy all throughout the day, and the sun was blood orange. I wasn’t able to get anything done today. I’ve been feeling pretty listless and lazy lately. Getting started is the hardest part, and a lot of days I don’t feel like I can overcome that initial barrier for some reason. At least most days these days, I’m in a good mood…
Tomorrow I’m going to get the layout for the basement sketched out, and rewrite the sound design document for Sam.
Missed Trinity Sunday service. It’s a shame, I was looking forward to it. I didn’t get any work done today. Tomorrow morning I have to get up early to help them clear out the last of the mulch. Hopefully afterwards I’ll feel better and get some work done.
It’s cold again at nights. I spent the afternoon finishing up the procedures for the cooking system. I’m going to start working on the basement tomorrow, and hopefully get most of the layout and pathing blocked out for it.
June’s here, and with it, the summer proper. It was uncomfortably hot in my room today, which bodes ill for the coming months. I’ve been sleeping terribly lately. I spent all afternoon gathering and coming up with recipes for foraged ingredients. I’d like to get one animated in full by tomorrow.
Was supposed to get back to real work today, but I ended up just reading and sleeping throughout most of the day instead, since Tawanda had to take the train out early in the morning. I’m heading to sleep early tonight, and tomorrow, I will begin working on the cooking system. A good way to ease out an otherwise unfruitful month, and move forward into a hopefully more productive one.
Another day of Breakpoint work. I’ve made a resolution to spend the length of next week completely rebuilding the cooking system, including all the recipes and sprites. It was cool and humid today, and the sky was dark with stormy winds, but it did not rain. I ate a pizza from Costco.
Spent the weekend almost continuously working on Breakpoint stuff. The downside obviously is that I got no real work done, but the upside is that I feel a lot better. I’d even say I’m pretty happy with things right now. I’ll get back to work after this upcoming weekend.
Spent most of the day just reading, and sifting through BuildTables in Breakpoint. I haven’t quite gotten acquainted with any of it yet, but it’s pretty exciting work. It’s moments like these that remind me that I actually quite like working with games. I just wish I could feel the same way about my own again…
Not much practical work done these past two days, I’ve mostly just been reading Charles Taylor, and going through old documents from various points throughout the project looking for points of inspiration. I’m gonna start working on new sprites tomorrow though.