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16.09.2022
Once again, I made the mistake of working on the weekend. This has been the second time in a row and the effects are impossible to ignore. Irritability is up. Falling asleep is hard. I’ve written a thread on twitter. The situation is truly dire.
Today (friday), I’ve been unable to get any work done at all. For the first time in years, I feel as stressed and out of balance as in my early twenties. I’ve been eating more and moving less again.
The work itself has been going well enough, it’s the continued lack of good, deep rest that has eroded the quality of life. It’s really amazing how drastic and direct the effects of these two non-weekends have been. I used to live my whole life exactly like this. No wonder I constantly broke down.
Anyways.
The art for the Downtown area has been a thorn in my side for many months now. Nothing I tried really worked. This week I simply wrote a new, rotation based, background animation system. This new style of movement has allowed me to quickly come up with the, now final, artworks.
I finally tackled the physics driven animation for one of the endings. The result is a bit goofy, but it could be shipped, which is good enough for now.
The three major sequences of the third act have all seen some heavy editing this week.
Sequence 1 has been shortened drastically. Instead of choosing the order in which things take palce, you now have to choose one of the things that can happen. The other two don’t happen. This is more “wasteful”, but makes the decision much more important. The now shorter sequence also keeps the pace of the game up, instead of dragging on and on.
Sequence 2 has seen some improvements in movement logic, allowing me to add more options later, if I have the time.
Sequence 3 used to be a parody of adventure game logic that played… exactly like an old adventure game. This boring and slow paced tedium (at a crucial story moment) has been completely removed. The sequence is now linear and features a lot of granular reactivity to previous actions, making sure that it still pulls it’s weight.
Yesterday, I also found a very good workflow that I will try to follow for a bit. I call it the big cycle and it tries to ensure that I work on both micro and macro levels of the game, to not loose sight of the bigger picture.
The big Cycle
That’s all.
Time for weekend.
This time for real.
Cheers, josh