spncryn/log

Almost forgot to make today’s entry… Finished up the entirety of the layout of the observatory, including doors, which have dynamic casters. I’m still not particularly satisfied with the final presentation of the doors – I think they’re a little bit too inconspicuous right now, especially with the post-processing on, so I’m gonna spend some time tomorrow trying to figure out a way to make them more distinct. Other than that, the two biggest things left to do are to build a more unique UI framework for interaction text – I have some ideas already that I think will end up looking pretty good – and to write and place all the item descriptions for each piece of furniture. I’m thinking that, since everything’s so abstract anyways, I’m gonna double-down on the scenery and item descriptions. I’ll probably start writing those tomorrow in tandem with the UI work.

Finally finished placing all the casters in the observatory. All that’s left now is to properly map out the collision masking, which shouldn’t take long – then the layout of the observatory will be completely finished. I’m thinking about adding a basement level as well, but we’ll see. In reality, the only thing down there would be storage for astronomical instruments mostly. I’ll have to figure it out pretty soon though.

No work today. Shortly after I woke Sawyer came over to celebrate my birthday and we spent a few hours at the lake working through a bottle of Southern Comfort and some fried chicken. I’ve been talking a lot about God these days with my friends for some reason. I don’t know why it’s been on my mind so much lately. Back to work tomorrow.

Added audio for the sonar pings, as well as a rudimentary HUD (it’s basically just the normal satellite HUD right now, but I’m gonna work on refining it a bit more moving forward). I think I’ve basically finished up the effect as best as I can for right now. I still need to finish up the collision mask and place all the necessary casters but that’s only about a day’s worth of work; after which I can start working on the event system for it. The nice thing about this segment is that it’s self-contained, meaning as soon as I’m done with it, I’m done with it altogether and won’t have to revisit it again. Hopefully I can finish it by next week, maybe even the end of the weekend if I’m lucky…

Another birthday come and go. I wish I could say I did something special, or experienced some kind of revelation of sorts, but it just passed like any other day, to be honest. Just another day in my life. Every year I feel the same kind of sadness, only each time it feels a little more acute than the year before. I guess that’s just the nature of these things. They accumulate silently, until one day you just discover it’s all too much, all at once. I had a call tonight with some old friends from school. It was good hearing from them again, and in a few weeks, they plan on coming over to visit. I’m looking forward to seeing them.

I spent the afternoon working on some more visual effects for the observatory. I got the pulse looking basically how I want it to look I think, although I still have to figure out whether I want the FoV effect enabled or not. I think it definitely achieves the level of abstraction I want, but I’m also wary about it making the space a bit too abstract, to the point of illegibility. I’m gonna continue working with it. I hope I can reach a suitable resolution by the end of the weekend.

Spent the evening driving around and talking with Haolun. We talked for a real long time. Earlier today I decided to pursue a new direction with the observatory interior after struggling for way too long with the wretched curve of the dome’s wall. I’ve decided to commit full-force to the top-down perspective. It’s saved me a tremendous amount of time and work and is also pretty interesting in its own way, which works well with the intended mood I’d like to convey. I’m gonna have to build new visual effects for it – basically, a sonar pulse that gradually reveals outlines of surfaces and objects temporarily, and a tracking interface – but I don’t think they’ll be too difficult and I’m honestly pretty excited to work on them. I think the end effect will look pretty good. Here’s hoping…

Yet another day of work on the observatory. Rearranged the exterior a bit to accommodate some adjustments in the interior layout. The dome is easily the most painful part of the process and for a good few hours today I genuinely considered just rebuilding this entire section in a top-down perspective because I was struggling so greatly not only to build but even just visualise how all the walls fit together. I ended up disabling the FoV system in the observatory because it was getting too difficult to work with; I might still end up re-enabling it later on as the casters are still present, meaning the advanced lighting system will work by default with it which is basically the same kind of effect. 

Work’s been real slow lately as a direct result of my utter ineptitude at visualising 3D space, and it’s been quite testing on my patience, to put it gently. If I can get this shit finished though by the end of the week the actual furniture should be smooth sailing. Fingers crossed.

Nothing exciting, just continued working on the interior of the observatory. Finished up all the shadow and collision masking for the exterior walls today, started setting up the interior as well for work tomorrow. Slow but steady progress.

I felt a bit better today than I did yesterday.

Turns out it probably wasn’t a cold after all, just my body adjusting to the temperature. Nevertheless, I still have a bit of a runny nose at times, and I felt tired all throughout the day again. I got a bit of work done on the observatory, beginning to lay down the interior walls: I think it’ll be simultaneously more and less involved than I’d initially anticipated somehow. I think I’ve finalised the interior layout so at this point it’s just a matter of getting the colliders – and of greater concern, the casters – in the right places. I hope I can finish the observatory by the end of next week… at least visuals. It’ll be a huge boost for morale once that’s out of the way.

Woke up today and felt like shit, got nothing done. Had a runny nose when I woke – I must’ve left the bathroom window open last night, it dipped down real cold and I didn’t sleep too well. I hope it’s nothing serious. Gonna rest early tonight and try to recoup some energy for tomorrow.

Not that much progress today. Cleaned up the lighting (especially when toggling between the two systems), and improved the appearance of shadows to allow the fronts of buildings to be illuminated. I also started working on the interior of the observatory again, and set up the walls. I’m gonna continue working on it tomorrow, and make a full checklist of the things I specifically need to get done for the release gameplay. Even though I feel I have a pretty good idea of what needs to get done in my head, getting it down on paper will solidify it and give me something concrete to work towards in the weeks ahead. A September release date for it is completely unfeasible at this point, but I think mid-October might still be possible if I really commit to my work moving forward.

Stumbled upon an annoying bug with the lighting system where objects with z-depth (ie those Avery can pass under and over depending on her position) would always draw over the gradient, resulting in some pretty awful consistencies that ended up being too frustrating to deal with due to the way I built the depth-sorting (next project, remember to use a custom z variable instead of the built-in y…).

I solved this by adding an option in the options menu to toggle between gradient-based and 1-bit dithered lighting. I’ll have to test how the gradient-based lighting works in a variety of other settings but right now it seems to be working okay in the rooms I’ve tested it in so far.

I’ve also added in a keyboard shortcut (currently bound to F1) that allows the player to fast-toggle all of the post-processing effects on and off. While testing it I realised that I haven’t seen the game in its original state, without any post-processing, in a very long time: it almost looks and feels like a different game in some ways. It was just interesting to observe.

Yet another day with basically no progress whatsoever. These past few days I’ve really just been kinda adrift; although I know exactly what I need to do and even how to do it, I just can’t find the energy to actually do much of anything. My ability to focus feels completely frayed and my sense of time has gotten a lot looser: somehow September is already halfway over and I’ve yet to achieve anywhere close to the progress I’d hoped to accomplish by the end of this month. I’m gonna try to set things straight tomorrow, but we’ll see how it goes…

Spent the entirety of yesterday procrastinating uselessly for no good reason, so I wasn’t able to finish this month’s update in time for publication today. I somehow ended up playing Modern Warfare for nearly five hours straight without even consciously wanting to, and I even forgot to record yesterday’s entry because of that. Well, in any case, I was consequently forced to spend the rest of the day finishing it up in turn, and as a result I’m now pretty exhausted. There’s probably more to say about it but I’m too tired now to come up with anything else so I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Ended up taking today off as well, for reasons I can’t quite remember. Didn’t even open GameMaker today; I must’ve been real tired. In any case, tomorrow I’m gonna have to do the write-up for this month’s update, which I think will focus more on story/lore stuff. I haven’t really thought about what exactly that actually will entail beyond that, but I suppose I have the better part of the day to figure it out… I’ve been getting stuck as of late on this lighting question – which is to say, whether I should bother spending the time and effort to implement the more complex lighting system or not – and I feel it’s begun to drag down my motivation. I think I’m just gonna move on from it for now, and redirect my attention back to developing the observatory.

Took the day off, spent the afternoon at the lake with Sawyer. The weather was very pleasant today. I had initially planned to work at night but I was pretty tired by the time evening came around and ended up falling asleep for some time. I looked briefly at an open-source lighting system earlier today which I’m thinking of implementing as a replacement for the current lighting system, which is a bit convoluted in terms of how it actually works. The problem with the potential replacement though is that it’s pretty heavy in terms of the number of things I need to import, which will be annoying when it comes time. I’ll think about it more tomorrow while I finish setting up the interior of the observatory.

Spent the entire day reworking the way the lighting works, with the goal of improving the overall texture and feeling of night-time environments. I started by creating three separate light layers – previously, there was only one, which was essentially just an overlay, which made the effect look cheaper – separated by artificial height: the lowest for light cast upon the ground, the middle for light cast upon objects, and the highest as a general masking overlay effectively identical to the previous implementation. There’s a bit more depth now to the shadows, although it still needs a good amount of work, especially with objects (ideally I’d like for objects in the foreground to be completely blackened out until Avery passes in front of them). 

I think I’m gonna continue working on it for one more day at the most. The current implementation is not great, but I think it’ll work well enough for its intent, which is to create a constant sense of uneasiness and disorientation for the player, and to make night-time traversal difficult (to encourage players to take shelter). 

Started working on the interior a bit earlier today but got distracted with an interesting new visual effect I discovered while messing around with the shader stack, trying to see if I could implement a slight chromatic fringe. I’ll have to experiment with it more tomorrow but I spent the afternoon setting up the technical foundation, which should be ready to go tomorrow: now it’s just a matter of figuring out how I want it to look and work with the existing systems.

Finally got back to working in-engine. I implemented the exterior of the outpost, including foliage in every room except one (still have to figure out how to handle the transition from the road to the standard ground). This involved reordering the rooms a bit: I had to shift the entire region of the observatory down two cells to make it conform to the dimensions of the map, which I’m beginning to realise more and more is becoming something of a handicap rather than an aid. 

I also created the transition door for large interiors, which functions more or less identically to the teleporter object, just with an added interaction prompt first. As part of this, I sped up the fade-in/out effect when moving between rooms by 200%; it feels a good deal smoother now, which is both good and not-so-good depending on what I’m going for with the final feel of the game. I’m gonna stick with it a bit and see how I feel moving forward. The interior space – which I’ve decided for now is going to be one single continuous space, about 720×720 or so – is completely unplanned right now but the transition definitely works and, as far as I can tell, the dither pans smoothly with the camera, which was the major issue before that prevented me from creating rooms larger than 480×480. I’m gonna start working on the interior layout tomorrow and see if I can get all the walls done by then. Windows are gonna be tricky because of the altered world space but I suppose we’ll get to that when we get to it…

Finished the exterior of the observatory today. It could still probably use a few cosmetic touch-ups here and there – a bit more weathering on the roof in particular – but the overall structure is now complete and ready to be placed in-game. I’ve decided to only include one of the telescope domes instead of all three; although I think I’m gonna add in an array of radio telescopes instead along the upper roof (which would also help disrupt the otherwise continuous texture a bit). 

I woke this morning from a beautiful dream. It was the rare kind of dream that, even though I longed to remain in it, I didn’t regret leaving it either. I saw all my old friends again. It was the last school trip we all went on together. When I woke I felt much better in general, at least for a little while.

I spent the day working on the exterior of the observatory. I made good progress today, although there’s still a bit of a ways to go on the second side of the building. I realised just now in writing that that the temporal scale of the game is pretty off when it comes to the spatial scaling of building, and particularly interiors. I think tomorrow I’ll spend some time adding a modifier that slightly slows down the passage of time when in large or windowless interiors (so ones that are separate world spaces, most likely; and the outpost). 

I also spent about an hour this afternoon cleaning out my phone, deleting a bunch of stuff and uninstalling a lot of apps I haven’t used in a while. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect at work but it actually does feel a bit more lightweight now, like it runs just a little cleaner. Even if it didn’t result in any actual technical improvements though, I still feel it was a good idea overall. 

I was beset all day by an unusual lethargy which made it difficult to concentrate for even short periods of time. However, I managed to finally get at least one thing done: I drew up the base for the road outside of the observatory. I’m gonna try to finish up the exterior of the area tomorrow so I can start laying the blueprints for the building itself. It’s definitely one of the more involved pieces of work but the work is fairly straightforward and doesn’t really require any strenuous mental labour: I just have to put the pieces in the right places. I’m hoping it’ll help to provide a reliable and stable structure for me to gradually ease back into a normal workday over the next week.

No work today either. Didn’t sleep at all last night so I spent the entire day in a state of dissociative haze. I honestly can’t even remember anything I did today, that’s how bad it was. In the evening though Staoue came over and we sparred for a bit at the lake, before getting fried chicken and spending some time at the IKEA, where I did a reading for him. It was a good time, and a much-needed diversion from the ennui that’s been settling over my life as of late. I also feel tired enough to actually get some proper rest tonight. I hope that this has given me the energy I need to begin again tomorrow.

Still no meaningful work, but I think I’m making progress in overcoming this lull. I managed to stay focused and think about work for about two hours this evening, going over logistics for the thought system and looking through potential references for the final visual layout. I hope that by tomorrow I’ll be ready to start sketching it out – at the very least as a formal blueprint, if not in-engine.

Didn’t work much at all in-engine today either. I implemented a very basic save system for doors to check if they were un/locked but failed to actually implement the system for picking up and saving keys, which I deliberately thought about and chose not to do for no good reason. I’d like to be able to say that I worked instead on the writing a bunch but unless pacing around my room for several hours struggling to figure out whether I want to create a full animated cutscene (and commit myself in the future to making more cutscenes) just so I don’t have to redo a few dozen frames in the rappelling animation counts as working, I didn’t do anything of worth either. I’ve gotta get something done at least this week for Saturday…

No work today. I took a sleeping pill late last night because I was having trouble sleeping and I ended up sleeping for way too long, and it completely threw my sense of things off. I think in general I’m starting to enter a slightly mild state of depression. It’s not too bad right now but I definitely feel the onset. It’s difficult to concentrate on anything or find the motivation to get started when I wake up, and it feels like I haven’t done anything these past few weeks in my own time except think about how I’m not getting work done. I took the day off because I felt too tired today but hopefully I can get a bit of work done tomorrow to make up for the deficit.

Last night I had a rather vivid and unsettling dream in which I got into a physical altercation with a woman whom I didn’t recognise but who claimed I’d stolen something from her, and ended up accidentally killing her in the process after hitting her in the head several times with a drilling hammer. I found myself in a place that resembled my house, except it was dimly lit and the hallways seemed to go on forever, leading to rooms that I didn’t recognise. Everywhere I went I was confronted with people from my life – old friends, current ones, acquaintances, authorities, even some strangers I must’ve seen at some point in passing – who each showed me some wretched, shameful thing I’ve did. There were so many of them that no matter which direction I turned I saw at least one of them, although the house appeared empty if I didn’t fix my gaze. I couldn’t find a way out even when I found myself at the front door; when I looked out the windows, the sky was overcast and the clouds seemed to move by at unnatural speeds. I was certain that if even if I had been able to escape I would’ve found that the other houses were just two-dimensional facades, and that at the end of my street was the end of the world. I’ve had this dream many times before throughout my life, from as early as when I was in middle school even. I don’t know why I’m having it again now. There was no escape from that horrible grey place. The simultaneous claustrophobia and emptiness of it all.

I worked today on a new structure to the north. I was able to successfully finish the exterior elements, at least of the structure itself, although the surrounding flora still could probably use some more work. That entire section of the map is a mess right now in terms of the order and placement of rooms; I really need to figure out the organisation soon and get it together. I’d like to be done with that entire half of the map by the end of this month – and hopefully with the relevant plot stuff as well by mid-October at latest. We’ll see about that though…

Tomorrow’s September… which, even though technically I suppose it’s not so, means for all other intents and purposes that summer is over, and autumn has begun. It certainly feels that way in the weather, which has gotten cool enough that the days are now consistently bearable, and the nights even a bit cold. When I was younger, even just a few years ago, every month and year’s passage felt so profound, like a chance to start anew, although I rarely ever did. Around this time I would’ve been going back to school, which was always a bit of an ambivalent event in my life; but at least it was there, you know, as a way of understanding my progress. Now though there’s no more external structure. No more meaningful units to demarcate the moments of my life, good or bad or really just nothing at all: to prevent all the days and nights from just slipping into one another. I’ve never been more simultaneously oblivious to the coming and going of seasons; and yet also acutely, painfully aware of their passage. I never realise it until it’s too late – and by that point, all that’s really left for me is a sense of emptiness, and nostalgia.

Sawyer came over today and we celebrated his birthday together at the lake. I had some tteokbokki and fried chicken delivered beforehand, and we ate it with soju and Asahi. The weather was exceedingly pleasant – cool and dry, with a slight breeze – and the sky was bright and filled with light. It was by all means as close as one probably gets to a perfect day, barring any extraordinary miracles or circumstances. And yet I also can’t help but feel a sense of sombreness as well for some reason: a tinge of sadness, in many ways probably tied to the changing of the seasons. I have the feeling that this winter will be particularly hard, although I hope I’m wrong. I don’t know why these kinds of things make me feel like this, although as long as I can remember, they always have. I really do wish I was more of an optimist by nature.

Didn’t get much of anything done today, to be honest. I stayed up till almost sunrise last night for no good reason and ended up waking up at almost 1500. My brother left early this morning to move in with his friend, and I didn’t get the chance to say anything to him. It’ll be another three months or so before he returns, by which time it’ll be winter, and the end of yet another year. Well, it’s not like I would’ve known what to say to him anyways even if I had the chance. We don’t talk often and our lives are just too different.

The weather was very pleasant today and I spent most of the afternoon outside just walking around and looking at the sky. I felt a bit sad, but I don’t know why, nor can I even really describe what it was that I felt sad about. I tried to get some writing done, and actually did surprisingly, but it was way too little to feel like anything even close to meaningful. I don’t know why things are moving this slowly. The work itself is not even particularly difficult. It feels like it’s me who’s moving through time at a glacial pace. Like I’m just floating, without current.

Spent most of the day working on developing story stuff, and writing the copy for the objectives. It’s not really particularly exciting work, and I can’t talk about it much further beyond that: although the progress is going about as well as I can really fairly hope, I guess. I talk about this a lot already but it’s hard to feel like I’m making progress when I’m not working on the game directly within GameMaker. It’s definitely the wrong attitude to have, I just gotta keep on working at setting it straight, not much else I really can do…

Another hot and mildly unproductive day. I did manage to do the bare minimum by getting the foundation for the meditation set up – basically, just adding the interaction prompt for it, and having the sprites slide in and out of view accordingly once it’s created – but the rest of the day just kinda evaporated and I don’t really know why or how it slipped away like that. I spent a decent amount of time this afternoon messing around with colour palettes on an image I randomly decided to draw and the results look pretty nice, but ultimately it was a pretty pointless exercise and I can’t do anything really concrete with the results. That’s really the best way to summarise how I feel about most of my efforts these days – a whole lot of work, towards very little concrete achievements. I guess it’s better than doing nothing. But the fact that that’s the general standard now is already a problem of its own.

Woke up around 0800 this morning to discover it was dark and raining, decided to fall back asleep again for an hour or so only to wake up almost six hours later, around 1400. I have no idea what happened, but it completely threw me off for the rest of the day… I just fucked around with my websites a bit, performing optimisations and the like. One of the more immediately obvious changes was that I switched over the fonts on both the main site, and this Tumblr blog: the former to a more generic monospace (Inconsolata did not end up making that much of a difference in feeling, there’s no need to call an entire font library for such a marginal difference), and the latter to a much more legible Arial/sans-serif. In the back-end, I condensed all the CSS calls for the former to a single shared master stylesheet (the rest is handled with inline calls), which saves a handful of kilobytes; and for the latter, I substantially cleaned up the HTML theme file by getting rid of a lot of unnecessary features I’ll never use. 

While I didn’t necessarily waste the day per se on completely unproductive activities, I still feel a bit frustrated that I couldn’t get much of anything done on the game as well. I know it’s not healthy to think this way probably, but there’s also no avoiding the fact that is the exact kind of thing that’s stifled my progress so significantly all this time. I really don’t know how to address it beyond the ways I’m already doing so. I hope I’m able to work again tomorrow.

Spent the morning tuning various stat ticks. I’m pretty satisfied with where all of them are now as is: the next major tuning will probably take place after the first playtest (which I tentatively hope to get done by the end of September). I also fixed a minor glitch with the lighting system that incorrectly drew over certain ground surfaces in room without a parallax layer present.

I spent the rest of the day working on a draft of the objectives system, which I think I’ve basically finalised now. A new option will be added to the actions menu (I haven’t figured out the exact name yet but it’ll probably be something like “Review thoughts” or something), which will put Avery into a special resting state. Once she’s in the state, the player will be able to select different parts of her body – right now, I’ve got her head for high-level thoughts such as objectives, her stomach for hunger/thirst/excretion, her heart for fatigue, and no selection for general willpower – in order to “examine” certain thoughts in closer detail. These thoughts will then float around (I haven’t settled upon a final presentation yet), and the player can click on them to reveal even further details if applicable. For example, when reviewing high-level objectives, she’ll be presented first with the general topic (eg “signal”), which will then expand into several sub-thoughts (in this case, indicating the next available action in that subplot). The presentation of the thoughts changes based on their urgency, and unattended ones (for example, if the player fails to complete certain objectives from the previous day) will accumulate.

I’m pretty excited to see it come into form, and I’ve already gotten the sprites drawn out tonight. The actual technical implementation, at least for the UI, should be pretty straightforward; the backend’s gonna be a little more complicated but I think I’ll wait a bit until I’ve developed at least one full subplot before starting work on it proper, just so I can have a general structure. Working on the outline has also really helped me develop a very concrete sense of the moment-to-moment narrative structure, and has solidified my upcoming work substantially.

Not as much work done today as yesterday, but still acceptable progress. I ended up reverting the save-on-exit feature that I implemented late last night: it effectively renders the actual “proper” save system redundant, and I feel that in that form, it’s too easy to either abuse (which I’m not too worried about, what the player does with their own game is their own problem), but more importantly, it diminishes the intended effect of the proper save system unintentionally even for players who don’t wish to exploit it. My workaround for right now is to allow the player to perform a temporary quicksave using the developer console (maybe I’ll add in a keyboard shortcut for this as well eventually), which will be deleted the next time the game starts. I’ll include a write-up for this in the manual, as well as a warning to players that it is not the intended way of saving the game, and is only meant to really be used for inconvenient circumstances.

Tomorrow I’m gonna start working on the mind-map mechanic I mentioned yesterday. I spent a while thinking about it and how I want to approach it and I’m pretty confident now that it’s the right way to go.

Met with Haolun tonight. We drove around and ate fried chicken with pickled radishes. 

Anyways, today was a productive day. Finished up the first section of stream, terminating in the drainage pool; and implemented a number of general systemic changes, including slight adjustments to various ticks (particularly fatigue and willpower. I also cleaned up the rain audio a bit; for some reason, previously, I had implemented the fade-in/out directly into the audio track itself, which led to inconsistent results in-game as the looping did not work properly (the audio would fade-in and fade-out before looping). 

Lastly, I conducted the first full test for all the systemic ticks, including measuring the equivalence between in-game and real-world time. One full in-game day (encompassing a full 24 hours), takes about seventy minutes of real-time. I’d still like to adjust some of the tick rates a bit – especially for hunger and thirst, which depreciate pretty quickly – but overall I’m pretty satisfied (and remarkably surprised honestly, given how little actual testing I did beyond the spreadsheet calculations) with the rate of progression for the stats across the board, including stuff like daylight and weather transitions. 

Overall it’s gotten me thinking about how I’m handling the presentation of various needs again, and I’m once again reconsidering building a mind-map-esque approach to Avery’s various needs, desires, and objectives, similar to how Pathologic 2 handles it. I think I’m gonna start experimenting with it tomorrow so hopefully I’ll have a rough draft by the end of the week; but basically, I think it’ll be a unique state Avery can enter while she’s resting (either in the world or in a static location such as the outpost/at a campsite) with its own animation and UI, somewhat similar to meditation of sorts.

Also

adjusted some of the weather states to reflect more diverse atmospheric possibilities; and implemented a fast temp save on exit, which quickly saves the game should the application suddenly or unexpectedly close (also works for normal exits). A more elegant implementation would probably involve creating a new temporary save file specifically to handle these kinds of cases, which is then deleted upon game start. I don’t know if I can be bothered to do that, though.

Just another day like any other. More environmental work: the first of the streams is almost done. If I’m able to wrap up the last two rooms tomorrow, I’ll be ahead of my schedule – at least for this week – which would be a pleasant turn of events. I’ve been feeling terribly lethargic lately, and it’s gotten hot again during the days for some reason. I’ve been waking up later and later, even though I go to bed relatively early every night. Some days, when I’m just lying there looking up at the ceiling, I get the feeling as if suddenly everyone else in the world has just disappeared and I’m the only one left.

I finished Crash Landing On You last night (or earlier this morning I suppose), and it’s left me feeling in a rather strange mood overall, somewhere between the warmth of happiness and the floating sensation of sudden loss. I had a really good time with it but now I feel like I’m adrift, or more so than I was before, at least. It’s reminded me a lot of my life when I was younger, all the love that filled me back then, for all things. I recognise now in retrospect that it was just the thrill of youth, and that the feelings would not, probably could not endure the casual cruelty of the “real world”, as they said. But it felt so real at the time and although I also remember all the stupid, painfully horrible things I said and did as well, at least back then I still believed in the potential of the brightness within me, the fantasy of something better than me, someone greater than I could endure. Now I don’t even have that for consolation. I think I’ve let myself grow too cynical. I think I’ve hardened my heart too much to the world, to myself. I don’t know how to return, if I’m even able to at all at this point.

Nothing special to report, just the usual. It’s been getting hotter again, and I can feel my concentration starting to slip earlier in the day. I’m lucky if I can get three hours of decent work in these days.

Spent the day working on more environments, as usual. Today’s progress was acceptable, although I only got two cells done. Fortunately, there’s only a couple more left; hopefully I can get this area done by next week, so I can finally move on. The next major difficult sections are gonna be the bridge – which is only one or two cells at most thankfully – and the visitor centre, which will not be easy, to put it lightly. 

Was gonna spend today building new rooms but instead I got sidetracked a bit by some visual effects, and ended up working on those for most of the day. The most time-consuming one involved implementing variable z-depth to certain structures such as bridges and platforms, which Avery can pass both beneath, and over: it doesn’t seem like a particularly challenging issue until you really try to work through it. I thought I’d have to make some pretty extensive changes to the way the depth-sorting works overall – which would have been a monumental task, essentially needing to restructure it to include a third dimension (right now it’s only sorted by the y); but I actually ended up at arriving a solution much faster than I thought, to my surprise. The final solution is actually even quite elegant I think, and is pretty easy to implement in a modular fashion, requiring only a handful of sprites and a single child object.

I also overhauled the water effects a bit, to allow water to appear more seamless beneath large ground tiles. The results are rather impressive and I’m pleased with how much easier it’ll be moving forward to work with bodies of water with more complex shores such as ponds and lakes; as well as smaller features such as puddles. Today’s the first day in over a week now that I’ve felt satisfied with my progress.

Spent the entire day working on assets for new rooms, and although I’ve assembled them, I’ve begun to feel increasingly disappointed with what I feel to be the lacklustre structure of the world at large. A large part of this feeling I imagine is certainly due to the general lack of interactive mechanics, which is something that hopefully can be remedied moving forward: but I also feel like more broadly, the world seems to lack cohesion or purpose of some sort, so that even just the act of wandering no longer feels remarkable. This is a huge problem, for obvious reasons: and while I want to give myself a bit more time to parse it, it’s definitely a matter of concern now.

I can’t really remember what I did today to be honest, which I guess means I didn’t really do anything of worth. The GMS2.3 update went live in stable release today and for four hours this morning after waking I struggled to update the project to it, ultimately to no avail. I think after that I must have just been so frustrated that I wasted away the rest of the day out of spite. I’ve been feeling a whole lot of that these days. It comes and goes in waves. Surges of hatred. I wish I wasn’t this way, you know. But for as long as I can remember… Maybe I should look into counselling again. Just the thought of dealing with all the paperwork though makes it basically unfeasible in practice. I suppose you already know all this though.

Worked for a short while this morning, once again touching up the areas around the stream. I think they’re more or less at their final versions now, all the audio masks and collisions as far as I’m aware have been implemented. Just gotta figure out the textures for the stonework on the bridge and mess around a bit with the collision, and it’ll be good to go. Coming up with new environments, especially around the border, is easily the hardest and most time- and energy-draining aspect of development, without a doubt. Well, it’s too late to turn back now. 

Another pretty low-energy day. It was unusually cold today – like autumn – and overcast. I woke in a sombre but not altogether unpleasant mood, apropos to the sky. Got a bit of work done cleaning up some of the sections of the stream. I think I’ll spend this next week just working on environments.

Took the day off from work proper, just worked on and published this month’s write-up. I spent the rest of the day reading and engaging in contemplation; and played some games with friends in the afternoon and evening. The anger which has been clouding my mind these past several days has subsided enough to the point where I feel I’m once again able to see, if not clearly, then at least not so dimly. Now I’m just tired…

Felt even worse today for some reason: just a constant fugue of anger and frustration, and the sensation of imminent wrath. I spent most of the day just lying in bed too exhausted to even sit upright, staring at the ceiling and coming up with a hundred different ways to get back at all those sons of bitches who told me when I was younger – that are still probably convinced to this day – that I was doomed to failure, that I was beyond their help, that I deserved no good and would have no future. Most of all though I’ve just been angry at myself, all the stupid, wretched things I did for reasons I can no longer even remember. Why is it always these moments that come back to you one by one? What about all the good I’ve done? Why can’t I ever seem to remember any of that?

When I was sixteen or seventeen, after my third suspension or so, the vice principal of my high school told my mother – who then, in a moment of supposed concern which was really just thinly-veiled spite, told me – that if I continued acting the way I was acting, my future would be bleak: the world would crush me. I dunno, maybe he didn’t say that second part. Maybe that was my father. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter. I realise now that they were right. They were right because the world is not a good place, it is not a kind place; but a mean and vicious one where people like them float to the top, where people like them write the rules and set the guidelines and expectations and philosophies for how everyone else should live. Where otherwise decent people become cynical and cruel in their desperation to just survive, to bring home a few more dollars to save up for a room with a slightly better view. 

Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. We are told to trust in the judgement and grace of God, to forgive the transgressions of others against us as we hope God will forgive ours against others. In that sense, violence is its own kind of cynicism, its own kind of desperate selfishness. That recognition alone is the only thing that really keeps me some days from just letting myself slip. I wish I was a better person, someone with a calmer soul, a greater sense of compassion and a greater capacity for forgiveness. But I’m just another wretched son of a bitch in a world full of wretched sons of bitches. Only God forgives. So be it.

Anyways, I just continued working on the foraging system today during the moments I was able to focus for a bit. I implemented the sprites for the plants/fungi and adjusted the statistical algorithm which determines distribution of resources and conditional probabilities for picking up various ingredients. It still needs some work with the tuning – I really managed to come up with a pretty convoluted system – but the comforting thing is that at least it seems to work. 

Another slow day. Woke up around noon for no reason – I even went to bed fairly early last night – and still felt exhausted for a while. All throughout the day this steady tide of anger and spite just ebbed beneath the surface of everything. I felt overwhelmed by the desire to really hurt someone just because they had something I don’t, to beat them down and drag them to my level. Days like these are the worst. 

Anyways, I spent nearly eight hours just working on these sprites for the foraged plants/fungi, and my inefficiency just pissed me off even more. I did another reading for someone tonight though and hearing from her that it helped her a lot and that it was able to provide her with some clarity made me feel a bit better about things, about myself. 

Every day is just a constant uphill battle against what seems like an impossibly overwhelming cynicism, and the concomitant temptations of viciousness and violence. The only things that really manage to keep it back, however little at a time, are the moments in which I realise I actually can still help someone else. That I’m not yet completely obsolete.

Spent the day working on new sprites for foraged plants/fungi, just have a few more left to go before all of them are finished, after which all that’s left is implementing them. Otherwise, my progress today was slow at best; although Julia and Vikram visited for the first time in a long while this evening, and I had a good time with them. It’s always nice to see my friends after a long while. 

Another alarmingly hot day. I felt exhausted throughout most of it and almost fell asleep a few times, although I managed to catch myself at just the right moment. Despite that, though, I managed to put in a decent amount of work regardless.

As I said yesterday, I managed to fully implement the visuals for foraging, at least for all insects currently. I haven’t yet started on the plant matter but the only thing that really needs to get done on that front are the individual sprites for each ingredient, which shouldn’t take too long.

I also started integrating a verlet physics solution to handle stuff like cloth. While it isn’t significant in any manner I do think it’ll add a bit to the presentation overall once I figure out how it works and get it set up properly. Of course, the success of it is largely contingent upon that latter condition, which, at this point, is not looking so feasible… I’ll give it a few more days though before drawing any hard conclusions.

Lastly, I’ve implemented a few general QoL fixes such as dynamic resizing of the letterbox depending on the length of the status text, and updating the position of the status text relative to the height of the letterbox rather than at at a fixed position.

It got very hot again today. I drank a bunch of Rolling Rocks real fast this afternoon and ate almost an entire full bag of Cool Ranch Doritos along with it and to be honest, I don’t feel so good right now. Hopefully it’ll pass overnight…

The foundation for foraging – at least for insects currently – has been successfully implemented. Avery can now search for ingredients anywhere, either via a keyboard shortcut or through the action menu, and different locations/times of day will produce different material yields (including nothing). The UI for it right now is a bit stark but I’m currently working on drawing up unique sprites for each of the ingredients. It’s coming along quite nicely, better than I initially expected. I’m quite pleased with the result so far, and hope to be able to finish it within the next day or two.

Insubstantial progress today. I started working on the percentages for the foraging system but realised I didn’t have any wood log objects, so I set out to draw those, but must’ve gotten distracted along the way. Tomorrow I have to finish those sprites and hopefully get the rest of the percentages in so I can start properly testing it. Man, there’s so much work left to get done…

Minor work today: improved audio for undressing, fixed collision boxes for several items. I woke up incredibly tired today for some reason, as if I hadn’t slept properly, although I’m fairly certain I did. My ability to concentrate has been pretty poor all throughout the day, and I feel physically weak. 

Spent most of the work day today on an animation for getting into generic beds. Stupidly enough, the hardest part wasn’t actually figuring out the animation itself, but trying to work through the mechanical implications of how I wanted to handle generic beds without creating for myself a ridiculous amount of work. At first I wanted to have Avery spread out her sleeping bag over the mattress first, but then I realised that I’d have to create a separate animation just for that, as well as figure out what happens if she’s not carrying her pack, etc…. it was a real logistical pain so then I tried to justify why she’d be comfortable sleeping in someone else’s bed in an effectively abandoned location. 

After wasting about an hour trying to work through that I gave up on justifications and just ended up implementing the mechanic after all. Some stuff still needs to be touched up – namely, the audio, as well as a better transition into and out of her clothing – but it should otherwise be good to go, at least as far as the visuals and implementation are concerned.

Been out of power for the past two days because of a hurricane, and have been working primarily off of a rather limited generator and battery power, meaning I’ve only really been able to work three or four hours a day at best. The power company’s predicted that most people on their service will get power back by the 11th – which is next week – so it’ll be like this for a while unfortunately; but I think I’ve started to get used to it by now.

I’ve spent most of my time these past two days finishing up the exterior of the tower, and then cleaning up a bunch of collision and caster implementations, specifically for doors and walls. While the list of things I’ve accomplished since my last attempted post are too numerous, here are the most significant ones: 

+ Created a teleporter object (backend, not in-game) allowing the player to transition between unconventional spawn points and enter into unique world cells (for example, the upper part of the tower). 

+ Added a slight dithering effect to the occlusion effect when Avery passes behind doors; added the same occlusion effect for roofs as well.
+ Added keyboard shortcuts while in the system menu for opening menus (File, Info, Options) moue input. 

+ Fixed reflections on mirror. 

+ Created spatial limiter objects (ROOM_SCALE_W/H) that allow the traversable width and height of rooms to be manually taken into account during transitions, meaning that transitions in narrower spaces are now dependent upon the relative dimensions of the available walkable space rather than the raw dimensions of the entire room (most of which would otherwise be inaccessible, and shouldn’t be taken into account).

EDIT: The power’s now returned, shortly before 2100. Although I’m glad in some sense that I can now return to work, I felt immediately as the lights came on a kind of profound melancholy, like a small vacuum opened up somewhere inside me. The truth is that not only had I started to get used to it – not just the lack of power, but more so, the concomitant slowness and the deliberate sense of contemplation it forced – but I’d actually started to welcome it I think. For the first time in a long time, these past two days felt genuinely empty in a way that I haven’t felt in a very long time: not empty as in the sense of being devoid of meaning, like most days, but empty in the sense of feeling like a kind of receptacle, open to any possibility. The way I felt when I was younger, in high school: that time was wasting but that it was okay. 

It was rather cool when I awoke and I spent the entire morning until noon sitting outside and staring at the sky. Later, I worked on building the exterior elements for the northern tower. The exterior – which basically includes the walls, the roof, and the tower itself – are complete, although I still need to create the transition point, as well as touch up the visuals a bit. I should be able to take care of that pretty easily tomorrow; then it’s time to develop the interior furniture.

A hurricane is supposedly passing over the area tomorrow. I hope it’s able to abate, however temporarily it may be, this wretched heat that returns every day by noon and clings on until late into the night. While it’s certainly not as bad as it was just a week or so ago in terms of pure temperature, something about it feels somehow just as bad. Maybe it’s just my constant sense of physical exhaustion…

Set up the foundation for the north tower. I’ve decided that certain interior spaces are gonna be treated as separate world instances, meaning that there will be a visible transition in order to enter/exit them, and they will have their own unique rooms. It’s gonna involve way too much work to figure out all the depth sorting and collisions and whatnot for every interior in the game to have a seamless transition. While the effect certainly looks good, it’s just too much of a time sink at this point for an ultimately inconsequential feature, and I don’t think anyone will even notice anyways. I’m gonna start working on the interior tomorrow and hopefully I’ll be able to set up a relatively stable template moving forward. 

The first day of the month’s passed without incident. I decided to take the day off after struggling to find the energy to get anything done this morning. I just feel constantly tired all the time these days. It gets especially bad around noon, at the lowest point of the day. My head gets clouded by idle thoughts and longings, all these memories of the past… I feel simultaneously exhausted yet also restless, and it becomes nearly impossible to focus on anything, let alone work. 

Last day of the month. I’ve reached that point in development where active boredom hasn’t quite set in, but there’s also little excitement left, and all forward progress at this point just comes down to discipline and focus. Seeing as it’s the last day of the month yet I still have so much left to do, it’s safe to say that I’m not gonna hit my intended goalpost at this point. I should sit down one of these days and redraft the timeline proper…

Spent the day working on visual effects mostly, focusing on the colour palettes. I ended up taking a more conservative approach to the default choices but added in support for user-submitted custom palettes that can be easily customised and swapped in/out. It offers a surprising amount of versatility for a very little amount of work, either on my end or the player’s end. I’m pretty satisfied with the results.

Another day without much meaningful progress. I woke around 0530 hoping to get some work done but for some reason I started feeling vaguely pissed off so I just spent the entire morning playing Modern Warfare, and by the time the afternoon rolled around I just felt completely exhausted, both mentally and physically. I did manage to make a few minor edits to the areas around the creek (mostly just setting up sound masks, cleaning up foliage) but it was basically just maintenance work, nothing of substance. I did manage to wrap up the endings of the game in the outline though, which has helped give me a much better sense of the overall scope and direction of the work left… now if only I could actually summon the will to act on that knowledge.

Worked on some new environmental assets but most importantly, finished up the frog’s AI, which now includes screaming when approached at night. Not much else to report, tomorrow I’m gonna focus on building more rooms; I’m not satisfied with my current rate of progress at all.

Adjusted the ambient darkness at night while using the torch: it’s now much darker as to emulate a more realistic darkness. I also re-enabled the masking surface allowing Avery’s silhouette to appear behind vegetation, although I still have to figure out the root of an issue that doesn’t successfully clear the surface in certain particular rooms: that’ll probably be tomorrow’s work.

Lastly, I added a frog…

It was viciously hot today, just like every other day in recent memory. I’m too tired to recount in precise detail what I accomplished today but it was a moderate amount of work which I feel satisfied with. I worked on some new rooms – finally getting around to stitching together some of the more disparate segments I’ve been working on the past few weeks – and implemented a global dithered layer to represent ambient/sky light acting on the background elements (essentially, what it does is prevent the player from looking out clearly into distant background elements like vistas once it gets dark, as in reality a torch wouldn’t be able to illuminate anywhere near that far anyways). It produces a rather interesting and largely unintended effect in certain world spaces where environments that otherwise felt open start feeling much more claustrophobic at night due to the impenetrable darkness.

I’d like to say that I made the conscious decision to take the day off (which, even if I had, I really shouldn’t have) but I didn’t. What really happened was that I started off the day well enough, thinking that I’d have time later; so I just wasted a few hours doing random things. Well, I ended up wasting a whole lot more time than I initially intended, and by the time I finally came around to my senses, it was already evening. I must’ve lain down or something because I apparently fell asleep around 1700 and woke up seven hours later in a state of profound confusion and disorientation, unsure of either the hour or even the day itself. I suppose now I’ve already begun in some sense a “new day”…

My sleep cycle has been completely fucked by the heat these past few weeks, and it shows no signs of receding. I’m gonna try to salvage it today by staying up until midnight tonight. Hopefully it’ll work, because in this current state, it’s nearly impossible to maintain a stable work schedule (let alone a clear mind).

Finally, a productive day. I spent most of the time cleaning up the edges of the stream and setting up the audio masks proper. I also recorded some new audio (technically yesterday…) for water (the previous sounds suggested way too much depth – I’ll probably reuse them later though), as well as the pack rattle while walking, and the generic walking. It sounds much better now and I’m pleased with how much it improves the feeling of just walking around.

One of the more significant visual changes I’ve implemented in a while is the rendering of distant backgrounds in greyscale. I struggled for a long while to figure out if I should actually do it, given my otherwise rigid adherence to the hard two-tone palette; but the results look way too good to not implement it properly and also, there’s a pretty solid canonical justification for it as well.

Speaking of which, I started drafting out a proper step-by-step walkthrough of the game’s plot today and made decent progress. I’ve realised just now how vague the game’s beginning is, especially since I’ve made the firm decision to not build a formal tutorial in the traditional sense. I think over the next few days I’ll split the work between building new environments, and figuring out how the plot flow will work, as it’s gonna be difficult I think to strike a fine balance between intrigue and outright obfuscation.

Started working pretty early but for some reason I quickly lost steam and by noon I was completely unproductive. I barely got anything done – just edited the creek a bit, but even that’s just kinda covering up for the fact that in reality, I essentially accomplished nothing of worth. At this point I’ve basically forfeited this entire week. 

Slowly getting back into the regular work schedule. Worked on a couple of new rooms today, trying to connect back some of the discrete pieces to the larger section. Tomorrow I’m gonna tackle a bunch of the more generic ones and hopefully get a good deal of the lower section of the map filled out. My target for the end of the week is still a dozen, meaning I have roughly ten more to go in the next three days…

Well, it turns out after all that yesterday was actually not in the fact the last day I’d spend working on the Ghost of Tsushima article, as I wasted a whole lot of time today and random shit and once again failed to finish it. However, I am much closer now to the end, so hopefully…

I suppose at this point it doesn’t even matter anymore, seeing as how I’ve already effectively wasted half a week on this. The only positive – and even that is largely relative to how shit the past few days have been – is that I was able to get a full eight hours of sleep this afternoon after having stayed awake for way too long.

Last day working on this article before I get back to working on the game proper. I hope I’ll be able to finish it by tomorrow. I spent a whole lot of time today reading treatises on classical aesthetics and honestly I feel like I’ve just wasted an entire day of my life away. I suppose that’s nothing new though…

Once again failed to work on anything related to the game: I slept incredibly poorly throughout the night and the temperature spiked at over 100F this afternoon, leaving my workstation too hot to work comfortably without fear of potentially damaging the internals. I instead decided to restart the essay on Ghost of Tsushima and actually somehow managed to make some good progress on it. I feel like I have a much better thesis now that I actually care about. I hope I can get it out by Wednesday or so and get back to working on the game soon…

Man, this heat is fucking awful. I haven’t slept since yesterday morning because every time I lie down to rest I find myself overwhelmed with the wretched sensation of the heat suffocating my flesh. I’m too tired to concentrate on anything so I obviously haven’t been able to work either. And if the forecast’s anything to be trusted, it’s looking like it’s gonna get worse before it gets better…

Nothing substantial to report, just continued working on more rooms. It was way too hot today.

Just worked on a bunch of miscellaneous tasks today, nothing really noteworthy of which to speak. Tomorrow I have to present the game at an event but I’m not too worried about it. I’d like to start implementing some more object descriptions moving forward. My goal by the end of next week is to have finished another dozen or so rooms, and implemented item descriptions for all of the common objects. From here on out I’m gonna have to remember to include this as I’m adding new assets.

Finally got this month’s update out this morning, then spent the rest of the day working on new environments. Although the overall rate of progress today wasn’t great it’s still an improvement from yesterday (although I suppose that doesn’t say much at all). I really need to collect myself, I’m constantly slipping behind these days…

I had initially intended to finish and release the update today but instead, for whatever godforsaken reason, I instead just wasted the entire day away doing essentially nothing. Not only did I do nothing productive or meaningful, I didn’t even do anything remotely enjoyable! There are many days in one’s life that just pass by without incident, and slip just as quickly into the fog of forgetting, with little friction or effort. That’s one thing: this, however, is not that. The sheer profligacy with which I’m burning away my remaining hours cannot just be some accident, some slip of the will. I’ve gotta get a grip of myself and get back on track…

Spent most of the day trying to write the update for this month. I say “trying” because, while I indeed sat there looking at it for several hours this afternoon, it wasn’t until just an hour ago basically that I managed to write the bulk of it. Well, that’s the nature of these things I suppose. As long as they get completed on time…

Too tired right now to do a proper full write-up but I spent today working on three new rooms, as well as a random flora generation engine which populates empty generic rooms with various flora. It makes building some of the more isotropic spaces much easier, although I still have to figure out an optimal horizontal density. I also have to figure out a way to save each chunk to the main save file once it’s been generated (or maybe I don’t… we’ll see how it feels) but otherwise it seems to be working pretty well.

Took the day off, helped Sawyer a bit with his submission to the GMTK jam and then we finished up Far Cry 5. He’s really progressed a lot just in these past two days alone and it’s clear that, whatever the results of his submission end up being, he’s gained something far more important as a direct result of this: confidence in his abilities and potential growth as a creator, which I’d say is by far the hardest thing to find especially when one is at an early stage of experience like him. I’m quite impressed by the things he was able to learn for himself and accomplish relative to where he was when he began and I’m proud of him for having committed to this and seen it through to the end.

As for myself, well… although I didn’t actually do any writing today I did spend some time this afternoon thinking through various things and testing a few concepts for the main flow of events. I think tomorrow I’m gonna try to get that stuff down proper and formalise it a bit more, see if I can hopefully finish up a final draft of the overall chronology by the end of the week. I also started thinking about what I plan on covering for this month’s update; I’ll probably work on that on Tuesday.

The storm really picked up today. It was raining for almost the entirety of the day: heavy downpours, as well. It’s gotten significantly cooler but the humidity is still horrid.

Completely finished up the ferro rod, including audio, and implemented proper selection for igniters (so far, only the butane lighter and the ferro rod are available). I think I’m gonna spend the next few days finishing up some of the other igniters, which I hope to be able to get done this week.

Some kind of tropical storm passed by today, bringing with it a whole lot of rain and wind. The temperature dropped considerably and the air was cool; but the humidity is still horrible, and in fact may have even gone up as far as I can tell. Either way though, it still feels absolutely wretched to do anything: I have a lot of trouble falling asleep, and basically doing anything at any point of the day is a constant struggle against the discomfort of seemingly universal humidity.

In any case, I spent the day cleaning up a bunch of miscellaneous QoL + backend fixes for the firestarting activity, including separating the ring and the fire base itself (allowing the fire base to be built independently from the ring eventually). I’ve changed the overall way in which the post-fire stuff is handled: once the fire is extinguished, a pile of ash is left over, which Avery can either choose to bury, effectively “clearing” the pit for either disassembly (or for whatever reason, reuse); or use as the base for another fire. All I have left to do for tomorrow is to add in the audio tracks I made for a handful of miscellaneous actions and UI prompts, and I should be done.

At some point, I plan on adding in the remaining features, which include stuff like drying clothes (which temporarily lifts Avery’s willpower), and heating up / preparing rations. Those require a whole lot more systemic work though…

Added the firestarter kit materials to the save/load system, which is pretty self-explanatory. Most of my work today involved streamlining the UI for the actual firekit itself. The most major change is that now, once Avery runs out of certain tools (or has yet to find them), they will no longer be displayed in the pouch as if they’re usable. The quantities display correctly based on Avery’s inventory screen in her tablet as well, although I’ll have to do some more specific testing tomorrow to make sure the order doesn’t get messed up if she sorts the inventory differently in her tablet. All I really have left in terms of major functionality is to implement the specific firestarter animations (most of which don’t exist yet), and to adjust the probability of the fire being successfully lit based on the materials present (which will require a slight overhaul of the current system). I should be able to get those done by Saturday.

I spent the rest of the day working on writing, and I’ve basically completely finished Avery’s backstory. Now it’s just a matter of writing the logs and completing the others…

Continued working on UI for firekit, and implemented full interaction up until the point of closing (whether due to a successful setup of elements or because of player input). I’m not gonna write much more because it’s too goddamn humid and I feel horrible but it’s basically done now. The only stuff I have left to do is to implement checks for if Avery actually has the items in her inventory, and to make the animations for each of the igniters as well.

Spent the evening recording and mixing some new audio for fire-related activities, and then implemented the basic UI interaction for the fire kit. It’s still lacking actual functionality in terms of lighting the fire itself, but the player can now open and close it with accompanying sound effects. I’m gonna spend all of tomorrow working on getting that fully finished. If I have time/feeling up for it, I might also create a folding/unfolding animation for the fire kit as well, which would really add to its presentation I think. We’ll see though.

A thunderstorm passed over the area today and now it’s very cool. It’s still rather humid though, and I’ve gotten so used to the heat that it still just feels hot for whatever wretched reason. I’ve also somehow run out of alcohol already…

Drew up a new sprite for the firestarting kit, which took up most of the day: but it looks quite good I think, and will significantly improve the experience. I also changed the way that the player places fire structures: they no longer have to dig a hole (which was already stupid to begin with for regular firepits), but can simply select the option to construct a structure (still have to build the menu allowing other options) and Avery will immediately place it down where she’s currently standing. I’m not sure if I’m gonna keep it that way or if I want to give the player a bit more manual control over where it’s placed, but that’ll be a decision I suppose to make over the next few days.

Instead of working on the firestarting interface like I planned, I instead decided to just bite the bullet and get the per-room save/load system for objects done for good. It was probably one of the most frustrating technical challenges I’ve faced heretofore and not a single moment of it is is what I would describe as anything close to “enjoyable”; but thankfully it’s finished and seems pretty stable.

Tomorrow I’m gonna start building the new framework for the firestarting stuff. Much of it uses stuff that’s already implemented so I don’t imagine it’ll be too much of a problem: I imagine I’ll just have to draw the new animations/graphics and do some slight tweaking. I also would like to redo the animation for setting up the fire a bit; it doesn’t look great right now.

Last night I also finally got around to implementing the Tumblr API for my site, and successfully set up the post fetch and archive. It took a while to figure out and was somehow simultaneously more and less frustrating of a process than I predicted… but at the end of the day I got it done and I’m pretty satisfied with the results.

Not much work today, spent a bit of time fixing up the behaviour for starting/extinguishing fires but for whatever reason I stopped working after that. I did manage to get some more work done on my site though, and hopefully by the end of the night I’ll be able to have the Tumblr API fetch working.

Stayed up all night last night working on my website for some reason. I couldn’t sleep: it was way too humid. The heat dissipated today with the arrival of multiple thunderstorms but the humidity persists, and makes it extremely difficult to focus. With the help of some soju however I was able to ignore the discomfort enough to be able to maintain productivity all throughout the day and into the night.

Most of today’s work went into touching up the effects for the flame and smoke when lighting the firepit. I want to overhaul the UI for firestarting this weekend, and hopefully implement the other features of it – burn duration, blowouts, adding fuel and accelerant, etc – by the end of the weekend. It was one of the first things I implemented – possibly the first system actually, after basic movement – and I haven’t revisited the code in a very long time, meaning a lot of it needs to be updated to the current systems. That’ll be a longer project… but maybe I should get to it soon.

Spent the day working primarily on improving the overall feel and tactility of the environments. I implemented new sound effects for walking on dirt and stone, as well as their respective sound masks in the relevant rooms.

I also implemented a new room-based save system for objects which solves the issue of persistence without having to make the rooms themselves persistent. It uses a ds_map to store a number of room-specific keys for each object that can be dynamically placed. It still needs to undergo a fair amount of rigorous testing before I can be fully confident in it, as the current implement suffers from pretty poor consistency – but so far it seems to work at least some of the time, which is better than the previous system which worked approximately none of the time.

Spent the day just working on new rooms. I also cleaned up the reference map a bit to more accurately reflect the current layout of the rooms. Today’s work was pretty straightforward fortunately and although my progress was a bit underwhelming compared to expectations, the results feel substantial enough so that I feel satisfied with it overall. Tomorrow will probably be the same thing. One day at a time…

Well, the month’s now over, and I hardly even scratched the surface of the amount of work I wanted to get done by the end of June. Looks like I’m just gonna have to work extra hours over the next few months…

Overhauled the room transition system and added four new directional elements that now subdivide the room into nine – well, technically eight – separate quadrants (cardinal + ordinal), allowing much finer control over where to spawn the player during transitions. Players should now have better tracking of the character across transitions.

The weather today was exceedingly pleasant: a storm passed in an adjacent area but didn’t hit here, and so the air all throughout the day was clear and cool. Unfortunately I got absolutely no work done today; and not only that, I didn’t even try. These past few weeks I’ve just felt a constant state of exhaustion. No matter what I do I can’t shake it off. Sometimes it recedes enough that I’m able to maintain a good day or two but most days it just clouds everything.

Not too much work today, it was too humid and I slept horribly last night. I finally implemented a gradient solution for the shadows though that allows the shadow surface to be “faded out” depending on the amount of available light present. The shadows consequently will be very dim when it’s raining.

As a part of that I also created new independent weather states for overcast and foggy weather, which gives me finer control over switching between weather states. There’s still a weird bug where the rain audio will for no immediately obvious reason fade out about a minute in and then fade back in to full volume – but that’s been around since last year, so I’m probably just gonna have to figure out a better implementation some time later. For now the weather seems to work fine.