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.
Took the day off, nothing to report.
I spent the day working on a few new rooms, and then built a “new” shadow system (really, just a recalculated version of the former one) that’s much more realistic in terms of the length and angle of the shadows relative to the actual position of the sun.
I’ve also disabled the occlusion layer for now – ever since moving all the shadows to one surface I’ve been having some problems with the occlusion layer drawing improperly over objects – and I’m thinking about just disabling it altogether.
Lastly, I cleaned up several of the trees to look more legible. It’s an ongoing concern that I’ve noticed – how harsh some of the environments are, especially in screenshots – and I’ll have to be particularly vigilant about it moving forward.
Didn’t get much work done today in way of the game itself, just a few very minor backend implementations that don’t really need to be elaborated upon. Work has been going much slower than I would have liked and I think it’s gonna be almost impossible at this point to finish the first zone by the end of the month like I’d wanted last week. Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to get some more work done…
I did however spend some time revamping my Github site this afternoon, which feels a lot better now both to look at and to use. I significantly reduced the site load and resources, and cut away a lot of the unnecessary elements of it, including all the subpages. I finally feel it’s something to which I can refer others without shame now.
Much cooler today, and even better, much less humid. The pressure in my head has largely dissipated. Spent the day working on a few new rooms. In the process I also managed to implement an effect for the standard grass (which was previously static), which now waves about slightly in the wind. In the meantime I’ve also disabled shadows for buildings. I hope I’m able to get more rooms done tomorrow. I made decent progress today and was able to work all throughout the day.
Despite the godawful heat and humidity once again, I was able to work steadily this afternoon and got a decent amount of work done. I made a few new tree variants as well as several new rooms. I also got a decent amount of backend work done on various effects, including improvements to the item pickup UI, and reallocating the shadows to their own independent surface (not sure what this can be used for yet, but it’s now available in case anything comes up in the future).
Got a steady amount of work done today despite the awful heat. The biggest one involved the total reorganisation of the map, with which I’ve been struggling for the past several days: each side of the gorge is now inverted (both mirrored and flipped) relative to the other, which I believe will further exacerbate the effect of disorientation without directly impeding upon the player’s ability to navigate. The nexus I think will be the suspension bridge (which won’t be available from the start).
I also implemented a new item pickup UI for objects such as sticks and stones, which feature a “portrait” of sorts for the object as well as the option to either take or leave it. It looks a lot better now I think, although I think it could still use some improvements.
Overall I think I’ve definitely overcome a major hurdle that was preventing me from working well the past few days. I hope I’ll be able to return to a normal pace of operations tomorrow.
Another day with little meaningful work. I had a strange dream about people from my past – old friends, I guess – that filled with intense anxiety. The day was hot and humid, just like yesterday; I spent it in a state of listless fatigue. I tried my best to work on some new foreground elements (and actually got one done!) but it turned out looking kinda like shit, so I didn’t end up implementing it. I’m really gonna have to step up my rate of production: June is somehow already almost over…
Didn’t end up working today at all, it was too hot and humid when I awoke and I just had a headache all day. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.
Worked on a new area. Did the calculation today for how many cells I’d have to finish on average per day to be able to meet my goal of finishing the first region by next week: each day I’d have to make at least seven cells. That’s pretty insane… but I think that once I get past this initial hurdle of more complex topography, the rest should be much more straightforward. (I always say that, it seems like every time I do I’m working on something that’s very much not straightforward…)
Not too much visible work today, most of it was in spritework that I’ve yet to import into the main project file. I really need to start getting some actual visible work done; it’s quite a stretch goal but I’d like to be able to get all the cells in Zone 0 done by the end of next week. If I’m able to accomplish that I’ll be able to effectively set myself relatively back on track in terms of progress.
Added two new varieties of large trees: birch, and dead trees. Tomorrow I’m gonna work on some more small vegetation, including stuff like shrubbery and low-lying dead trees. In general I’ve been interested lately in experimenting with some visual effects.
I made some adjustments to the opening area as well, including removing the border around the precipice, and separating the barren tree into its own object, with a shadow and wind physics. It makes the scene feel considerably more natural in a subtle manner.
Missed my entry last night because I was kinda spent after writing for a few hours consecutively. In any case, between yesterday and today, I just finished up the Kickstarter update for this month, and continued working on story-related planning. I think I have a very good idea now how I want to handle certain parts of it which previously left me kinda confounded and stuck for weeks. Tomorrow I’m gonna get back to work proper on the environments.
Started working on new areas earlier but quickly got distracted by fixing some weird visual bugs, nearly all of which had to deal with volatile surfaces that I failed to properly clear up. I went through my code and – at least to the best of my current ability – cleaned them up. I haven’t been able to reproduce any of the issues I was facing earlier since, so hopefully I actually managed to fix them for good…
I also implemented a pretty straightforward dynamic letterboxing effect that gradually eases in/out the margins when moving from areas where the letterboxing shouldn’t be present (ie near precipices) to areas where it should (ie within the forest), and vice versa. It looks pretty good and does a good job I feel transitioning between the spaces somewhat naturally.
Gotta do the write-up for this month’s update tomorrow…
Didn’t end up working today. I woke up well into the afternoon around 1530 following a series of rather intense dreams that left me in a dazed state. It’s alright though, as long as I make up the work tomorrow.
The constant rain yesterday cleared up all the humidity and as a result it was actually very pleasant outside today. I spent the day working on a new environment and connecting it to the opening area. I’ve also completely mirrored and retouched the first overlook area which begins the game: it makes more sense spatially to have it in the original position rather than mirrored (as it was previously). Tomorrow I’m gonna try to figure out how to transition the areas more seamlessly into forest. The problem, as usual, is the complexity of the terrain and foliage distribution in reality versus the perspective and visual style I’ve chosen to work with… if there was ever a temptation to move to 3D, this would be the impetus.
Heavy rain all throughout the day, incredibly humid and unpleasant. Continued working on environments, and in the process I also finally got around to implementing diagonal collisions so that the player no longer gets stuck on diagonals and will instead slide along them depending on the direction being applied. It still looks rather rough, but it’s far better than getting stuck on every other stray pixel.
Ludicrously hot today, I spent most of the day with a wretched headache. In any case, not really much to say in terms of work: just worked on a new room today. I still have yet to add any collisions into the environment, but as far as appearances go, it doesn’t look too bad. The hardest part is making sure the environment feels continuous both with regards to the topography and map, and more importantly between adjacent cells. I’m still working through photographs and videos frame by frame trying to piece together some kind of cohesive vision but it’s proving much more difficult than I expected. Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen such an inherently frustrating terrain to work with from the start. Well, too late now…
Whatever work I got done today, I lost it all because GitHub – of all things – fucked up and overrode all my commits. Fucking hell.
EDIT: After about an hour of frustration and fucking around with all sorts of reflogs and reset –hards and shifting .gits around I think I’ve managed to recover the bulk of the work I lost. I’m too irritated right now to do a full rundown of what I did today but basically I just built the foundation for the grid-based map system and improved a bunch of smaller effects across the board. Not many front-facing changes.
The week didn’t start nearly as eventfully as I planned – I didn’t even turn on my work computer today – but I still managed to get some stuff done. I made a good amount of progress on the story this afternoon, and spent some time looking up footage of the region on YouTube. It’s not much – a lot of is aerial drone coverage which, while certainly impressive, isn’t nearly as useful as on-the-ground material – but it definitely does give me a better sense (however limited) of what the area looks like and more importantly the scale. I’m certain now that attempting anything even close to a 1:1 recreation is gonna be an exercise in futility and frustration, to say the least; I think instead I’m just gonna build a general sketch around a few obvious points of interest / geography and then improvise the rest from there. I’m gonna start working on environments first thing tomorrow: I’ve delayed long enough.
Spent about an hour this afternoon working on story stuff outside. The weather was exceptionally nice today: the horrid humidity that characterised the past week or so finally dissipated overnight and the temperature was comfortable, with sunshine and a strong persistent breeze all throughout the day.
I hope by the end of this coming week to completely finish all story-related planning. As of today I think I’ve finalised the zoning for the various areas of the map: tomorrow I’ll start on zone 0 and work my way outwards along the river. The hardest part I imagine is gonna be establishing a sense of scale and verticality, which is consistent across each area; it’s been difficult to gauge as there’s not too many extant photos/videos on the internet that I’ve been able to find which demonstrate a good sense of how the area’s laid out in reality. I suppose in the worst-case scenario I’ll just have to take creative liberties with it… but seeing as I’ve gone this far already to ensure a degree of verisimilitude, I feel like it’s a bit of a copout if I just start bullshitting at this point.
The other day I went through some scans of the area using both Google Maps and OpenStreetMap; I’ve been using the height map exported from the latter to Cities: Skylines to visualise scale and distribution thus far, but the quality of overhead data from either is predictably kinda lacklustre given the amount of tree coverage in the area, plus the failure of Street View (as there are obviously no roads). I’ve been trying to convince Haleigh to get up there at some point and take some pictures for me, but she understandably has school stuff. If it weren’t for the pandemic I would just go myself. At this point I’m strongly considering just opening up a general paid call on Twitter or something…
Completely forgot to make an entry these past two days. Well, it’s not like I accomplished anything whatsoever anyways – in truth, I didn’t even make the slightest effort to try. I started Darksiders 3 some time in the afternoon yesterday and just now completed it: just a few more collectibles until I clear the 100%. I had a good time with it, much better than I expected.
I think I’ve taken long enough of a break now to be able to get back to work again starting Monday. Although I still kinda feel like shit, at least my head’s clear enough (or as clear as it’s gonna get for now, anyways). I’ll write up a more comprehensive plan tomorrow, but I reckon I’ll probably just start right away on environments, and see what happens from there.
Managed to finally get in a bit of work. Spent about three hours this afternoon working on mapping: setting up grids,
regional boundaries,
figuring out how to distribute content evenly across cells, etc. I decided to do most of the work by hand this time. It was surprisingly calming although my hand now feels stiff since I haven’t written anything in so long.
Being on the computer for any extended duration of time just feels strange to me now, I can’t really describe how or why but it doesn’t feel so right. I haven’t been able to play any games either since last week so it’s not just work. I think that, whenever I’m able to finally get back to work proper, I’m just gonna stop working on the outpost for now and start building locations within the world. I’m just not in the right mindset to work on systems – and haven’t been in some time now, before this all started.
Another day without any meaningful work. I’m in a constant state of barely-subdued rage from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. Even when I go to sleep my dreams are filled with vicious and grotesque visions of extraordinary violence. I think I really have to take a break now for my own good, not just from work but from looking into the outside world in general.
Well, for better or worse, June’s finally here, meaning this year is already basically half over. I woke up this morning around 1100 and spent the next two and a half hours just lying there in a state of growing despondency and rage. I thought I was gonna take the day off again but I did end up getting a little bit of work done after all: some writing and a bit more conceptual planning for what I think will end up to be an inventory weight management system. I don’t have much more to say about that now – mostly because I just don’t have that much energy to say much right now – but I’m gonna try my best to continue working every day, however much I’m able to get done.
It’s getting harder and harder to focus on my work; every minute, without exaggeration, I feel inflamed by a spike of anger and restlessness, the desire to get up and do something, to hit someone. I wasn’t even able to write a single full sentence all of today. It’s already June by the time I’m writing this, and the progress on the outpost is not anywhere close to where it should be by now… I think I’m finally beginning to feel a sense of urgency (and the concomitant anxiety) that I’ve fallen behind. I feel like I need to take a break: an actual break, not one in which I’m just sitting around waiting for the bad feelings to pass so that I can work again. I also feel like I’m running out of time though for some reason.
Another day without any meaningful work. Tried to get some writing done, but it wasn’t that successful, to put it one way. The state of the world outside is really starting to get to me. I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find the motivation or necessary context to justify my work. I suppose I don’t have much other choice though but to continue. I just wish it didn’t have to be this way.
Didn’t get any meaningful work done today whatsoever. I’ve been in a slump these past few days or so, which has been considerably exacerbated by the humidity. I wasn’t able to fall asleep last night until some time around 0700 and even afterwards I suffered from yet another strange and rather disturbing dream. This time I witnessed a series of increasingly bizarre and grotesque murders without any apparent context or relation. I woke up feeling haunted by an obscene sensation.
Spent some time today redesigning how the fog overlay’s opacity works, as well as the spawn system for it. Previously, the cloud instances were spawned in incrementally on a timer, which resulted in the potential for uneven clumps to form. Now, the cloud instances will all be spawned simultaneously along evenly-spaced cells on the height of the room as soon as the fog starts, but won’t animate (that is, move into position) until the overlay opacity has reached a certain level. It results in a much smoother and more consistent transition, as well as a dense fog cover which feels more realistic in terms of its spacing and uniform distribution.
It’s been incredibly humid since yesterday and I’m having difficulty going to sleep at night. When I woke this morning, I had a rather severe headache, following a very vivid and intense dream about catastrophic events to come which left me feeling uneasy throughout the morning. My computer is also heating up to a rather concerning degree, which makes working difficult for prolonged periods of time as the keyboard becomes uncomfortable to use after a bit. If this is a harbinger of what’s to come this summer, well…
Finally finished up the recipe selection UI for the printer… unfortunately it’s also only now fully dawned on me just how much work the rest of the stuff – calculating the exact ingredient values for the recipes, especially – is gonna require. I not only will have to figure out the actual approximate recipes for every single one of the rations, I’ll also have to create variables to track how many of each ration Avery has at any given time, and then I have to save/load all of those, and then I have to implement the popups for each individual recipe in the printer UI and check against some kind of master list whether Avery has enough of each ingredient to prepare them…
To put it very lightly, it’s gonna be a real pain in the ass all the way through to the end. The sole upside to all of this is that I can very easily just blunt-force it with a whole lot of global variables. It’s definitely not gonna be either pretty or clean but I suppose that this is just the price I pay. I’m not sure yet if I’m gonna start on it tomorrow – this whole printer business is really burning me out a bit, I’m not gonna lie – but if I can dedicate two or three days of full-time work to it I think I can get it done one of these weeks. Not too many days left in the month either, maybe I should finish up the other systems first…
Spent the day working on a bunch of backend tweaks for the fog which have improved the overall experience. Some changes of note include improved depth sorting, a smoother transition for the overlay, and the addition of a Perlin noise filter to the weather particle layer (ie raindrops and leaves). I still have issues to address, the most notable being improvements to the spawn pattern for the clouds – it feels inconsistent right now, sometimes it ends up looking pretty good but other times the clouds just bunch up together in a rather disorienting and ugly manner – but it’s looking pretty good now and I can probably let it go for now after a few slight adjustments tomorrow. Tomorrow I’d like to get back to working on the printer, and hopefully get it done for good.
Got a lot of progress done today although not on the printer: I got distracted shortly after I woke by the sound of the brook in my backyard and decided instead to work on environmental stuff. Amongst the number of additions I made, the two most interesting ones in my opinion are:
+ The implementation of a subtle darkening effect at night which causes objects to appear darker the farther Avery is from them (along with the re-implementation of a very old shadow system that I disabled almost a year ago in favour of the current one, but which works well with the aforementioned effect to produce a kind of harsh lighting appropriate to torchlight). This alone took me several hours of what I now realise to be effectively pointless work sifting through forums trying to figure out how to pass a texture to a shader. After maybe the fifth hour or so I finally decided to give up and just use surfaces instead. Initially I’d avoided doing it because I feared that creating a new surface for each sprite of every piece of flora would have destroyed the performance; well, I should’ve just tested it directly from the start because my assumption turned out to be basically negligible at the end of the day.
+ The addition of fog, which previously I’d just handled via an overlay but which now also includes in-world cloud objects which have their own depth and gradually move across the screen. I’ve also tied in the overlay’s degree (ie how much it occludes the screen) to the number of cloud instances on screen at once, meaning the overlay will now dynamically adjust itself based on how dense the coverage is. It’s not perfect yet as I still want to adjust the depth a bit more to produce better consistency but it turned out looking much better than I’d initially expected.
Didn’t quite manage to finish the printer as I would have liked, but I put in a decent amount of time and effort – well, better than the past few days combined, I reckon – and got the most annoying part of it done, which was setting up the framework for the “Recipes” screen. There’s no interaction yet with the actual recipes and I’ve yet to implement any meaningful visual effects (I suppose that’ll constitute the bulk of the next two days’ worth of work), but I think the worst part of is now behind me so the rest is just a matter of moving things into the right order.
When I woke up today it was incredibly dim and humid, and I felt completely drained. I still haven’t been able to progress on the printer UI much, although I did implement a very minor change, which aligns the ingredient amount display for the composite materials to the OK/REFILL/EMPTY style used by the rest of the ingredients (will probably put a toggle in the options screen for choosing between approximate and exact amounts). Instead, I spent most of tonight working on new UI audio for the satellite view. All of the environmental audio is muted once the player enters the satellite view and is replaced by a new ambient track (not exactly “realistic”, I suppose, but I think the effect works well enough). There are also unique sounds for zooming in and out.
Tomorrow I’m gonna finish this printer shit for good, no more delaying it.
Didn’t get anything meaningful done today. I designed the icons for the recipe categories – they’re split into meal and sundry rations (I haven’t finalised the names yet, although it’s probably gonna be either “meal/sundry” or “primary/supplementary”) – with the intention of building the full menu today… but lost all motivation to continue working for some reason almost immediately afterwards. It was incredibly humid today, which I imagine had some kind of effect upon my mood, although I can’t quite articulate how… fortunately I uploaded my #screenshotsaturday post today so tomorrow I can just focus on getting the printer UI done.
I’d initially planned on getting some more work done at some point tonight, but I no longer feel motivated to do so. I didn’t get much done today, just the save/load for the ingredients. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I can finish up the printer’s UI at the very least: I’ll spend some more time tonight figuring out how I’d like to handle the recipes (basically, if I want them all in one list alphabetically, or if I want to have separate categories for different types of rations etc) but once that’s sorted out the actual execution should be pretty straightforward. Just slightly over a week left until the end of the month, which means I’m about two weeks behind schedule now…
Finally got around to putting in some dedicated work on the printer. I implemented the full interface for the available ingredients, including the transferal prompt for the raw materials: the only thing left to do is to integrate the stored ingredients into the save/load system, which shouldn’t be too difficult as it’s basically just a stack of single variables. I’ll try to get that done tomorrow, and then start on the recipe page.
Another slow day. Once again got distracted and didn’t work on the printer, but instead decided to implement cattails (I’ve yet to add interaction for them but that shouldn’t be too difficult to implement). I also touched up the wind FX again across the board, and added a new grass pattern which is a bit denser and reacts to the wind slightly, unlike the static small grass. I’m still trying to figure out the precise tuning on it but so far it looks decent enough.
Wanted to work on the printer some more today, but I decided not to for whatever reason at the last minute and instead spent the day dealing with a variety of miscellaneous adjustments and whatnot. The most interesting one involves player-based collisions with solids; before, the player could just force Avery to slide against solid surfaces by pressing two directions (ie, up and right, or down and left), causing her animation to get locked in a weird position. I’ve now implemented a fix which aligns her properly with whatever direction she’s “sliding”: for example, if the player presses up and right against a wall to her right, instead of using the upward-diagonal sprite as before (when her sprite was tied entirely to player input and ignored her surroundings), now her sprite will change to the more proper and natural upward sprite. Her walking animation is now also properly disabled when she’s stopped by a collision, meaning she won’t continue to walk forward into a wall that she cannot pass. Lastly, I fixed a long-running issue which caused her animation to spasm when two keys in opposing directions (ie, left and right) are held down simultaneously. She now will default to her base idle animation, and won’t move.
Outside of movement, I also fixed the movement (or lack thereof, as I discovered) on the tall grass when Avery passes through it. I was wondering why it looked off for so long and I finally figured it out why tonight. I still have to figure out how I’m gonna handle the depth issues on it, but I’ll save that for another time.
Lastly, the wind movement of the trees and smaller flora have been adjusted to feel much more natural. Instead of just standing still at rest, they now sway in their “idle” position, with a wind collision triggering a particularly strong rightward sway. The intensity of the sway can be adjusted via a script and is relative to the mass of the objects (so trees don’t sway as much as various plants and such).
Took today off, nothing new to report. It’s getting colder again.
Spent about an hour or two writing up this month’s update, which is available to read here; then worked on a new environment for a bit for the #screenshotsaturday post. I decided to work on a less… ostentatious(?) environment this time: just a stretch along the lake. It doesn’t look anywhere near as good as I envisioned… I’m mainly just not that satisfied with the way the waterline blends in (or rather, doesn’t) with the contours of the shore; it feels way too linear and unnatural, it just seems to kinda immediately begin with no degree of graduation of any kind. The water effect itself also looks pretty flat, I’ve now come to realise; it works well for shallow water, like puddles and stuff, but there’s no sense of depth really, which makes it problematic to communicate. Well, in any case, I suppose I have plenty of time to work on it and improve it moving forward.
The weather was exceedingly pleasant today and it had a positive impact on my sense of self and others. I think it’s gonna get colder again soon though…
Didn’t end up getting any work done today, although I did manage to finish the write-up for the Kickstarter tonight. I mostly just spent the day in a kind of anaemic haze, looking outside and fiddling with LUTs in Far Cry 5. It was a very warm and bright day outside, slightly humid: the highest the temperature’s been probably all year. The air outside was saturated with the scent of fresh rain and fertile soil.
Tonight I watched The Forest of Love with Haolun over call. It was deeply unpleasant, to put it lightly, and filled my soul with a bleak and dirty feeling. It was well-made, as to be expected, but I find myself questioning now if that even matters.
Still not enough amount of work done today but I at least managed to accomplish something: got the home interface for the printer set up, including the graphics for each individual button, as well as a very basic framework for tomorrow’s work. I’ll try to implement at the very least the ingredients page tomorrow: then I have to start working on, and hopefully finish up the update for the Kickstarter campaign. I still haven’t really figured out what I’m gonna be covering this time, to be honest…
Struggled throughout most of the day to get work done but finally managed to get about an hour in just now at the end. I got the framework for the printer set up: now all I have to program the actual interface for it. The next two days or so are probably gonna be a bit busy since I have to write this month’s update for the campaign tomorrow, but I’ll try to fit in time for it and hopefully get it at the very least started by the end of the week. I have no idea what I’m gonna write about: honestly, I can’t even really remember what happened this month. The year’s almost halfway over already…
No work today either – although I certainly tried (well, a little bit). I actually woke up relatively early today (given the fact that I didn’t go to sleep until 0500) – around 1130 – but I just didn’t feel like getting up and at some point must’ve fallen back asleep again, because the next time I awoke it was already nearly 1600. I sat at my computer for a bit but I couldn’t remember what I was trying to do whenever it was the last time I worked on something (I think it was probably three days ago). I’ve been feeling real tired lately; not specifically of my work, but my life in general. I don’t think there’s anything I can really do except just wait until this passes, whenever that will be, and in the meantime I’ve just gotta keep on putting in the effort.
Julia and I watched the Mamma Mia! sequel today, it was astoundingly good and put me in a very positive mood, at least for a little while. The feeling unfortunately didn’t last too long but at least it was there at all, even if just for a moment.
Tomorrow, I’ll specifically be focusing on implementing the framework for the UI for the food printer, including design and layout. Once I finish that, hopefully I’ll be able to get started on the interface for the ingredients hopper/processor. It should be very basic: display the number of each material being processed, and the existing amount of materials stored, and a confirmation + progress prompt. If I can get that all that done by tomorrow, I’ll be back on track for the week. But first I have to find within me the will to start.
Fell asleep early yesterday, around midnight, and completely forgot to make my entry for the day. Rest assured – I did no work whatsoever. These past two days I’ve just been working on an essay that I started on a whim when I woke up yesterday and decided I was gonna take the day off. I’ve just now finished it, and it’s sitting at a bit over 12,000 words. I can’t even be bothered to read over it at this point, and I’m just tired: there are some parts of it that I think are decently interesting but a good amount of it, especially towards the end, probably just fucking sucks. Whatever, it’s done.
Tomorrow, I’ll get back to work proper.
I woke up incredibly late today, around 1600, after feeling completely unmotivated to get out of bed. It was snowing when I awoke. I’ve been feeling something akin to a totalising sense of emptiness once again these past few days. It’s that feeling just after you’ve come off a high, or when you’ve just finished watching a really moving film or something and you step out of the theatre or open the window and the blankness of reality hits you again… and it all just feels terribly unreal, like you were never really there.
I built a new environment for #screenshotsaturday – another waterfall, as you may – and then spent the rest of the time addressing minor QoL changes and fixes in several of the interfaces. I’ve decided that certain rooms will now ignore the top letterbox. The game also now saves and loads properly once entries have been backed up.
I don’t know if I will or even should work tomorrow, nor what I’d work on if I do; I should probably take a break, but the problem is I don’t feel like I have anything else to occupy my time, let alone meaningfully. I guess we’ll see tomorrow.
Got up pretty late today, around 1500; every time I woke up prior to that I just felt incredibly exhausted for some reason. I’ve been having rather intense dreams lately, that leave me feeling haunted and oddly nostalgic when I wake. They’re full of people… most of them from the past, but some of them whom I don’t recognise.
In any case, I didn’t get to start on either the foraging system or the interface today as I’d planned but I did manage to finally implement a proper save/load system. It’s pretty straightforward – just an INI read/write operation with a bunch of variables – but seems to work completely fine for the moment, so I’m just gonna stick with it until problems present themselves (although I don’t expect they will). I’m probably gonna have to rethink how some of the inventory management will work, as there’s gonna be an ungodly number of tracked variables eventually; although thankfully the vast majority of them are just static integers or booleans. If I’m able to get back to work proper tomorrow I’m gonna try to implement the inventory screen for the materials, as well as loading them into the food printer.
Good progress throughout the day: set up the raw food materials today, including assigning them individual masses and calculating combined mass by total quantity. It’s probably the most taxing part of the entire process honestly, at least on this end: the rest of the stuff is just implementing that back-end into the interface, which I imagine will be shared with the general PDA interface (which admittedly I haven’t touched in quite a while…).
Tomorrow I’m gonna implement the foraging mechanic, which randomly generates a number of raw materials depending on the environment and time of day, and try to get the interface set up.
Another day with no tangible work. Despite going to bed at a pretty standard time last night, I woke up well into the afternoon around 1500. The sky was blank, completely overcast, and I felt utterly demotivated. I spent the afternoon playing WWZ and managed to completely finish all the campaigns on Extreme, including the new Marseille one: one of the few, if not only accomplishments I managed today.
I did spend some time throughout the day periodically thinking about various directions I want to take the game in in terms of certain implementations. I’ve been thinking a lot about the overarching story in particular, and the history of the region. If I’m not able to find the motivation to work again tomorrow I think I’m gonna spend the day writing. Otherwise I think I’m gonna start working on the food printer. I realised just now that that’s an essential part of the game yet for whatever reason I never actually got around to implementing it.
Woke up at a respectable time today feeling alright… and then proceeded to do nothing the entire day. I think it’s because I sat at my computer and started to draft the structure of the thought-map, before it dawned on me rather gradually after fifteen minutes that it actually completely didn’t fit my vision of the game’s structure after all. Realising that probably threw off my mood for the entire morning as I’d planned on working on this all week. I went to sleep shortly after that for a few hours, woke at around 1600, and then just played WWZ for the rest of the day. I’m not really sure yet what I’m gonna work on tomorrow. Maybe it’s time to start making more environments.
I felt strangely anxious all throughout today, probably because of a strange and intensely vivid dream I had earlier this morning involving Alexandra. I spent all day in a restless and vaguely disturbed mood, unable to concentrate on anything for longer than two minutes or so at a time without having to get up and walk around.
Nevertheless I still was able to accomplish the objective I set out to do yesterday – the search function for the Log app – as well as a bit of general cleanup. Tomorrow I’m gonna start drafting out and setting up the foundation for the thought map.
Took the day off from work, and watched a few films with my friends. The weather was once again exceedingly pleasant, probably even more so than yesterday actually. Tomorrow I think I’m gonna implement the log search feature. After that, I’d like to shift focus and start working on the thought map, which hopefully I’ll be able to finish next week. I’ve been maintaining very steady momentum this past week at least and I hope it carries through.
A whole number of various implementations today, some more major than others. This morning I decided that, instead of posting about the UI again for #screenshotsaturday, I’d create a new environment. It took me only about half an hour (although if you count the time I spent recording a suitable reference for the waterfall to begin with – I ended up using one from Odyssey – I suppose it took just over an hour) but the results were surprisingly decent. Admittedly the area in question is very mechanically simple, with few actual objects of interaction: but it looks very good and took very little time to build and see immediate results.
I spent the afternoon continuing to build upon the framework for Log, focusing this time on expanding the UI’s visual components. The overall UX is basically complete as of today: the player can type and submit new entries, read all previously saved ones (with ones that have yet to be uploaded denoted with a direct message), and back up entries to the server, saving the game (this latter part has yet to be implemented because it involves building a comprehensive save system, which I’ll handle in probably a week or so). The upload dialog now successfully and dynamically accounts for cases in which there is one available entry for upload, multiple entries available for upload, no new entries available for upload, and an unsuccessful connection to the host server.
I also performed some general housekeeping stuff in regards to cleaning up other code along the way. The most imminent issue involved some kind of extreme slowdown when accessing the stored logs, that was due to a poorly-written string exploder code that I use to calculate the word count for each entry. I just replaced it with one from GMLscripts and it now seems to work completely fine without issue.
It was a very nice day outside today. It was warm and the air smelled clean yet full of scents that filled me with nostalgia. Days like these make me sad in a way: they remind me of my childhood, of high school. Of my friends back then and the things we used to do together, the endless numbered days we wasted away thinking that the future wouldn’t matter and that anyways, we could, we would last much longer. It’d be reckless of me now, knowing what I do, to say that things were any simpler back then, but we were all certainly much more stupid, and in a way that ignorance freed us I think: from the burden of responsibility, of accountability for our lives and our desires. We cared for nothing but love and to be loved, and love and lust together seethed within us. I’m not gonna pretend that things were categorically better then, or that conversely, things are worse now. But I secretly hope I’ll be able to feel that again some day: a warm spring evening, and the blissful fragility and tenderness of my friends.
Spent most of today figuring out how to implement the save/load system for the log entries. I finally managed to get it working right after several hours of rather frustrating fiddling: basically, the ds_grid containing all the log entries and their relevant information is written into a virtual grid made up of two ds_lists, which is then added to a ds_map and encoded via JSON. All of this is done in a DAT file. When it comes time to load, the DAT file is opened, and the massive string (generated by json_encode in the save script) is decoded from JSON into a useable ds_map, which is then unraveled line by line essentially back into the ds_grid. If all of this sounds a bit abstruse, don’t worry, it was even worse to figure out.
I’m gonna try to completely finish the Log application by the end of the weekend. Tomorrow I’m probably also gonna take a brief detour to create a new environment for #screenshotsaturday: I reckon I can only show the same interface so many weeks in a row before people start getting tired; and anyways, it’s been a while since I’ve worked on a new environment anyways.
All in all, this month has started off pretty well.
April is already over… I feel like at the end of every month for the past year at least I’ve been expressing an ever-increasing amount of both bewilderment and anxiety in equal parts at how quickly time has passed, always concluding that the most recent month seemed to have passed especially quickly… but I feel that this month in particular has really passed by uncomfortably fast. All of a sudden the amount of time I have left compared to the amount of work I still have to finish has begun to feel terribly daunting…
I spent a few hours today trying to work through the backend of the log entry storage system. It involved reading a lot of documentation and forum posts, but I think I’ve finally figured it out. I implemented a two-column ds_grid solution: the first column stores the text for each log and the second column stores whether the text has been written yet (in-game, that is, once the player submits a new entry). When the game begins, a certain fixed amount of entries will be prepopulated to represent older entries Avery wrote in the past, which are all readable. New entries will throw an error message (”The entry you searched for does not exist.”) until Avery/the player submits the respective entry.
I’m still trying to figure out the exact details for it but I think I’m gonna implement a search-based system instead of the traditional list when it comes to presenting the log entries for the player to read. While the list is a more immediately familiar interface, both for the average player and when it comes to average software design, I’m leaning towards a search-based design in which the player/Avery must manually type out a number, which then is submitted as a search and if a corresponding case entry exists, it’ll be brought up. That saves me a lot of time in sorting through the grid and trying to figure out how to skip empty entries, to name just one issue that it solves. I might add in the ability to move backwards and forwards – namely, between the previous and next entry – but we’ll see about that tomorrow.
I also implemented mouse-based scrolling for the actual stored logs themselves. It’s a bit rudimentary right now and is strictly tied to the mouse’s position in the room instead of a fixed point (meaning it can’t be scrolled with the mouse wheel or keys, which is the ideal implementation); but the fix shouldn’t be too difficult I think (/ hope).
Another somewhat unproductive day. To be completely honest I don’t remember what exactly I worked on, but in general, I spent time planning out the backend for storing written logs, and began to implement that. This shit has really ground my workflow to a halt honestly… if this lasts longer than tomorrow, I think I’m just gonna move on to something else for the time being.
Went to bed early last night around 2200 hoping I’d wake up earlier. Well, when I woke, it was still completely dark. I figured it was around 0500 and that I’d just lie in bed and think over some stuff for an hour until sunrise – then I looked at the clock and realised it was only 0100. I ended up not only completely failing at what I initially intended, but I actually managed to fuck up my sleep schedule even more, as I wasn’t able to fall back asleep until, ironically enough, 0500.
As a direct result of that, when I finally got out of bed (around 1300), I felt listless and couldn’t bring myself to work on anything, especially something as technically involved as trying to figure out a save system. Instead I spent the rest of the day working on revamping a number of assets for the Steam store page. I think the changes I made were improvements across the board… but you never know with these kinds of things, maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow, look at them, and feel like they’re total shit.
That’s how it is with this kind of stuff: every few months I’ll take a look at a graphic or something I made earlier and suddenly something will stand out to me as needing correction, and then I’ll have to go back to every single public instance where that graphic occurs and update it accordingly. It’s a real pain in the ass. I wish I could just get things right the first time.
Made a number of minor improvemenets and changes to the log experience, the most significant of which being the addition of a fully functional main menu screen that allows the player to write new entries, access stored entries, upload any local entries to cloud storage (which can only happen in a specific window of time during the day), and exit to the home page.
As I just mentioned, I also implemented a day counter into the game finally, as well as a global variable tracking the status of the outpost’s connection to the satellite server, which only becomes stable enough to sustain full networked activity for a brief, semi-randomised period during the day (anywhere between ten minutes to two in-game hours, occurring any time between midnight and 0300). This way the player is constantly given the choice of whether it’s worthwhile to keep Avery up pretty late into the night waiting for the signal to come online so she can upload her logs (and save the game for the player), which will cause her to sleep longer and thus waste daylight the next day.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about timekeeping in the game, and I think at some point – maybe tomorrow if I get tired of this interface stuff – I’d like to experiment with the idea of implementing a mindmap of sorts, that allows the player to direct Avery to “reflect” on certain concepts (ie, how she feels overally, how hungry she is, etc). Amongst these I think I’ll add a prompt that allows her to estimate the time based on the available light, within a range of the actual backend time. When she’s indoors, or where there’s little meaningful natural light such as when it’s raining, this will be more difficult, if not outright impossible, for her. I’ll start drafting all that tomorrow I suppose.
In the meantime I still have to figure out how to store logs. I’m thinking I’ll just take the easy way out and keep two copies of each log – one finished, and one to-be-finished – that get synced up once Avery submits them. I’m too tired right now though to think through it properly, I’m just gonna go to sleep and hopefully it’ll come much more clearly to me tomorrow.
Didn’t get as much work done today as I would have liked, but I managed to definitively solve a pretty major issue that kept on populating the ds_list storing all the separate log entries, which caused them to repeat. It was because, for whatever senseless reason, I’d placed the ds_list_add command in the Step event, causing the list to be refilled every single step. The solution was extremely straightforward once I figured it out but I’m not sure why it took me this long to figure out. I also added a word counter to the log entries themselves.
Tomorrow I’m gonna focus my attention on trying to save, store, and access entries, as well as a window prompt that appears when the player attempts to manually exit the log prior to it being completed.
Not too much work today, just spent time writing new entries and fixing some bugs that prevented suggestions from being displayed properly in the console. I’m gonna try to get some more substantial work done tomorrow, hopefully in saving and storing written logs. I want to be able to finish up all of this stuff with the log system by the end of next week.
Started working today on the text input backend for the log entry UI. I’m not sure if I’m entirely satisfied with my current implementation – I imagined it was gonna be a bit more like a traditional text editor compared to what it is now, which is more like… a longform messaging service? – but maybe a good deal of that has to do with the fact that the overall visuals are pretty unsatisfying currently.
It includes audio, which I’m not sure how to handle: I initially had it so that each keypress input one letter, but the overall process was incredibly slow and taxing upon one’s fingers after a while, and on top of that, the audio for each keypress played too quickly so that it sounded really robotic and not lifelike at all. As a solution to both issues I’ve currently implemented a solution which involves having the player hold down a key to advance the text automatically (as opposed to manually typing in each key), which then loops a prerecorded audio sample over it. It’s still rather tiring in the way that I initially intended as the player has to sit there and “manually” enter the text in a way, without being overly taxing to the point of frustration. This also makes it easier for me to implement controller support later on as well in a very straightforward manner, as opposed to individual keypresses.
Well, I’ll continue experimenting with it moving forward.
Tomorrow I’d like to try to implement a system for it to save/load written entries, as well as the ability to read previous entries. Hopefully I won’t have to build an entirely separate object for it and I’ll be able to keep it all pretty contained… but we’ll see.
Finally got to work on the workstation UI: completely finished the login/logoff animations and started implementing the foundation of the command prompt, which I’m gonna try to fully set up (at least visually) by the end of tomorrow. Today was a pretty productive day and I’m satisfied with both the rate of my work, as well as my overall mood and ability to stay concentrated.
Started the day off intending to work on the UI for the computer, but ended up almost immediately switching over to writing some more logs. I got a pretty substantial amount done today: two full entries, and a bunch of revisions and edits on some former ones as well.
Jacob released ITTA today! So far it seems to be doing quite well, both commercially and critically. I hope the rest of the week goes well for him…
Making my entry a bit early today: I woke up very late, around 1400, and just felt incredibly tired, so I decided to take the day off to refocus my attention and recuperate some energy. Tonight I’m gonna review my list of priorities and write up a new task list for this week. I’m also going to try to go to sleep earlier so I can wake up back on schedule tomorrow.
Finished and submitted the Ludum Dare Entry, called “First Love / Late Spring”. I’m quite satisfied with how it turned out, although we could’ve used a bit more time fixing bugs… All in all Ludum Dare was a very good experience, and I’m glad I participated.
Tomorrow it’s back to work as usual. Even though it’s just been a weekend, it still feels good to return to schedule.
Thought the submission deadline for Ludum Dare was tonight, but it’s in fact tomorrow (Monday) at 2100, meaning we have an extra day to work. We finished up all the fundamental framework – for better or worse… – meaning that all the work tomorrow will just be spent on whatever additional content we feel like adding for fun and flavour.
Working on all this has given me a lot of experience and motivation to get back to work proper, especially considering that just before I started this side project I was struggling to find a sense of structure while setting up the diegetic UI for Work. This detour has definitely improved my sense of confidence in myself and my ability to work quickly and with great intent; not to mention my mood in general.
Woke up at 0700 and spent the rest of the day working basically continuously on the Ludum Dare entry with Nate and Jacob. It’s the most productive I’ve both felt and, in virtually every sense, been in over a year now I reckon. I’m quite surprised not only how efficiently I was able to process the tasks at hand – which admittedly I underestimated pretty dramatically, to put it one way – but also how consistently I was able to work throughout the day and stay focused. It really helps to have good friends to work alongside, as well as the brevity of the overall project. I have high hopes for the project, and it’s already turning out considerably more impressive than my initial expectations allowed.
Woke up late today around 1400 even though I specifically made sure to go to bed on time last night… I struggled for about an hour to figure out what to do, before starting work on building the framework for the computer. I got the basic animation for accessing it ready – it shifts in from the bottom into the centre of the view, and then zooms in until the in-game screen fills the actual screen (probably gonna have Avery log off every time she finishes using it so it reverts to a static screen that can be used every time the animation plays instead of having to fuck around with a dynamic surface) – so next time I work on it I’ll probably design the login screen, with an automatic password fill animation, with a login sequence.
In the meantime Jacob, Nate and I are participating in Ludum Dare Jam this weekend, so the next two days’ work is cut out for me. The idea we came up with is very interesting to me and I’m excited to see how it turns out.
Woke up on time for the first time in a while today at 0630, and spent the morning until just after 1300 recording foley for the washer-dryer and implementing 3D audio in-game, after which I fell asleep for some time. It sounds pretty good now and the 3D audio works well to sell the effect. Although it’s not really the most interesting or important thing by any means, I’m still satisfied with the effect and consider the day’s efforts to have gone well.
Woke up late around 1300 and didn’t work on anything in-engine all day. I spent most of the afternoon writing up the update for this month, which you can read on Kickstarter here as usual. It felt a bit more taxing to write than usual but maybe that’s just because I haven’t written anything meaningful in a while. Tomorrow I’m gonna try my best to start working on something more substantial: maybe more interface stuff, or some more environments (which I haven’t really touched in what feels like over a month now). It’s still a bit early to say for sure but I have a feeling I’ll probably work this Sunday again too.
Implemented JSON-based save/load system for room-based objects (ie, fire structures, the bivouac, etc). It was surprisingly straightforward and went without any major issues whatsoever.
As part of this, I also switched the initial player spawn from an actual in-room object, to an independent instance_create call that runs in the room’s creation code, and checks to see if the player object already exists (which it should, as the player object is persistent). This functionally means that the player can now return to the starting gorge area.
I spent the rest of the afternoon working on this month’s Kickstarter update. It’s not anywhere near done yet but I think I’ll be able to get it published at a respectable time tomorrow: the article itself is pretty straightforward in terms of topics (UI stuff, the outpost), so I don’t foresee any potential blocks.
Woke up at nearly 1400, then spent the rest of the afternoon more or less responding to emails. By the time I was finished I wasn’t really in the mood to do any in-engine work so I spent some time working on conceptual stuff.
The most major decision I’ve come upon is the implementation of a world clock, which will start ticking as soon as the game is loaded, and track changes and events across every part of the world. This means that the player can at any given moment be “missing out” on one event or the other, and that it will be impossible to experience every possible thing in the game in a single playthrough. This not only is a more realistic solution I imagine – seeing that in reality, events occur entirely agnostic most of the time of one specific observer – but it also encourages multiple playthroughs to experience “everything” the game has to offer. The idea originally came to me after seeing a video of a Dead Rising playthrough recommended to me on YouTube.
Easter. Implemented interactions – audio and visual cues – for when Avery interacts with locked doors. Nothing fancy, but work is work. Also spent some time cleaning up the overall project structure.
Built the foundation for viewing documents, starting with the poster for decontamination procedures in the outpost washdown room. Graphics such as documents will now be displayed at full-resolution, preserving the crispness and legibility of text. They can be panned vertically using both the movement keys and the mouse wheel. I didn’t add horizontal motion given the aspect ratio of the screen; I don’t think it’ll be necessary but if it is for whatever reason it should be very easy to implement.
I went to bed almost at sunrise yesterday (or perhaps today…), I stayed up all night playing Modern Warfare for no particular reason and woke up some time around 0200. I really need to rein myself in and regain some control. My work schedule this week has been pretty poor so I think I’m gonna continue working tomorrow as well instead of taking the day off as I normally would. Hopefully it’ll make up for some of the work I lost this week due to my inefficiency.
Finished up the audio for the shower and implemented functionality for the toilet. Tomorrow I’m gonna draft some interior graphics – various diagrams and posters and such – which will the player will be able to view. I’m not sure yet how I’m gonna handle the resolution issue; ideally I’d like the player to be able to zoom and pan the image but depending on how difficult that is to implement (I imagine it’s gonna involve some bullshit with views), I might just not bother. We’ll see though tomorrow…
Completely finished up the toilet, and implemented several QoL changes to the action menu UI that improve its flexibility universally. I still have to work on the shower tomorrow but it’s not too much work; I’ve just been lagging behind for no particularly good reason.
I’ve been waking up later and later this week: today I didn’t get out of bed until 1300. I’m not exactly sure what it is. I’ve actually been feeling pretty okay lately, and I don’t feel particularly tired or lethargic during the day either. I’m also not going to bed at unreasonably late times. I guess my discipline has just loosened for whatever reason.
Finished up the audio for defecating in the outpost toilet. I still have to make audio for urination and implement the appropriate excretal mechanics but neither of those should be particularly difficult and I imagine I’ll be able to get them done quickly tomorrow. I’d also like to get the audio for the shower done tomorrow as well, and implement the basic foundation for hygiene.
Implemented basic interactions for interior toilet and shower modules. The player can now enter and exit them properly. I held off working on them for a while because I thought I’d had to do special animations or whatever but the solution was thankfully much more straightforward in reality. Tomorrow I want work on the audio for them and hopefully get them finished up proper.
Woke up late today around 1100, and felt a complete lack of motivation to do anything, let alone work. After answering some emails shortly after I woke, I spent the rest of the day just playing video games, without any real sense of purpose or even desire. I thought about perhaps making up some work tonight… but honestly, I don’t feel like I’d be able to get anything done anyways at this point even if I did make an effort. Hopefully I’ll have a better time tomorrow…
Took the day off. Finally picked up Modern Warfare for PC – it’s quite good, it feels a bit different in pacing from what I remember of what I played on PS4 (although I’m not quite sure if the $45 I spent has really justified itself yet).
Finished up the initial pass for the whiteboard today, and got it uploaded for #screenshotsaturday. The idea is that it’ll gradually change over the course of the game to reflect events and thoughts; I’m not sure how many variants I plan on making yet but it shouldn’t be too difficult to implement once I do manage to figure out.
My goal for the end of this month is to completely finish up the outpost, and all of the miscellaneous player interaction animations such as smoking, and variations for eating different sizes of rations. The outpost interactions are coming along quite nicely and most of the remaining ones are not too bad; the most difficult ones I foresee are gonna be the computer and the food printer, both of which require extensive UI frameworks to be built.
I think once I finish all the basic animations – I think all that’s really left are the shower and the toilet, although I’m yet not sure if I’m gonna add anything else – I’ll start dedicating work to diegetic interfaces. The three biggest ones are the computer – which itself is at least two different systems – and the food printer, as I just mentioned; and the PDA, which is already partially built but not fully implemented in a satisfactory manner yet. I’ll most likely start with that lattermost one. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish up the basic interactions by the end of next week.
I’d like to start formally writing in-game documents some time soon as well… hopefully I’ll be able to reach that stage by next month. If I can hit all these goals by then, I’ll have mostly recovered the progress I lost these past two months and be on track again towards my initial schedule.
Implemented basic functionality for the whiteboard (no longer a corkboard…) and started designing the layout for it. Also started working on a basic fog effect, whose purpose will remain obscured for now. Tomorrow I’m gonna finish working on the layout of the whiteboard so I can get it up for a post, and maybe start tuning the appearance and behaviour of the fog so that next week I can integrate it fully into the weather and time system.
