although the post-GDC days are passing pretty quickly, i'm feeling more productive than i have been all year, so it's better than nothing. i'm working on some of the same old prototype stuff in the background right now, but i did finish the interactive starry background for my portfolio website.

after doing taxes and handling some medical work over the last week and a half, i've gotten this crazy idea in my head that i should start a business for myself. something to capture some of this work i've been doing lately, and maybe motivate the idea of working with a few other people?

the most troublesome part was somehow just getting the canvas to size correctly in the HTML element...

stars are mostly set. i plan on adding a few more in the foreground to do a funny trick, and then having a very small amount of interactivity with the mouse

hi again

streak club

even though it's not a prominently negative thing in my life (or even close), streak club encourages a sort of obsession with work and deliberate ignorance of burnout that has been unhealthy for me. it's also making me dread posting here, which is not helping with motivation in general. so i'm actually just going to avoid keeping my streak, and submit every other day or so on purpose.

if i had it my way, i would create a streak club where you could post once a day but only lose your streak if you don't post once in X days. for a jam as long as the Decade Jam, i would probably pick a number like 7. i think this would create a much more satisfying experience for keeping up a streak without ruining the value of it.

2024

i just want to take a moment to say that keeping a streak of 285 was difficult, and yet, i'm not that upset about losing it. in fact, i think it's rather funny the day that i dropped that streak, and even more so that the 285 days started after i missed one random day when i already had a streak of 120 or so days. i'm proud of that, even though most days were not confidently leading towards a finished long-term game.

in those 285 days, a forest fire, a flood, and so, so many power outages threatened to end the streak because i live in a place that doesn't get cell service, and i rely entirely on the phone lines that keep getting knocked down. but none of those things ended my streak. what finally ended my streak was when, for the first time since COVID started in 2020, i organized a trip with a dozen of my online friends and missed a day because i was too busy finally relaxing for once. so i'm satisfied with that.

burnout

after a hearty social summer through march, may, and july of last year, i had to spend 8 weeks housekeeping through august and september. by october, i had an absolutely massive bout of burnout. i did some art, but i had zero energy for hobbies after work every day. and then i built a new PC, and then a lot of games i was looking forward to released early this year, and so on... anyways.

new energy

so it's march of 2024, and a year ago i was at GDC. last week, i went to GDC again. it was objectively more fruitful than 2023's GDC, but it still didn't land me a job or anything. what it did do was make me realize how terrible it is to go out to an event like that without a project in the works, and somewhat far along. so i'm going to try to be productive again, in small parts. there's still a lot of game playing that i haven't completely given a rest, but this works well with my new policy to only post in this streak sporadically. so, without overhyping the kind of stuff i want to do, i'm just going to start doing it.

website

the very first thing i want to do is create an interactive background for my website. this was in the plans so very long ago, but suddenly i want a little webdev that i can do for fun. the attached picture is just my normal website, but after a bunch of small QoL improvements to the codebase, i loaded p5.js into this window where i'm going to test working on the background.

so now on this completely separate trip, i managed to snag my own copy of the Heckadeck card game, and am right back at discussing card game designs with friends. cool stuff

kind of a long winded story to this, but in short, i'm trying to physically print a bunch of placeholder images for a card game using as little ink as possible. so with a friend's help, we wrote a userscript that runs on the browser that makes everything way more printer friendly. very satisfying use of javascript. and now i can put together a card game for a much lower price!

our team got #8 out of 330 games! not bad, considering the enormous skewing of low ratings, it felt like a far greater gamble. i went and compiled some of the numbers from past jams and discovered just how much of an outlier this jam is with its huge $100k prize incentive. there was also conversation in the discord along those lines, and although i don't want to seem particularly jealous or ungrateful, i do want to talk critically about how itch.io could improve features they have available to jam organizers!

things like allowing organizers to mark winners completely separate from voting results, and other tools to adjust scoring when results can become significantly skewed for high profile submissions.

although there are still plenty more boxes and shelves left to get, i went out and bought just a couple things so that i could start the first part of physically organizing various game pieces i have around the house. i also want to carry a decent number of things on this upcoming trip, so portability was an important thing to consider. i think everything is ready for that trip, and i feel like i've settled on most of my strategy, so today was a good milestone!

went through and corrected a few sections that had poor wording. also fixed some errors. i remembered that i do want to produce more poorly drawn example artwork for most sections...

opened up my unity omega project today, punched in a little work on attacking. set up my goofy DelayedBool again and got some new ideas for the class. next is just to hit some hitbox to show up.

kind of a lazy saturday. i did sent one bulky email that will hopefully get seen over the next few days. it'd be nice a get a response before i leave on a trip next weekend.

i also helped a friend with a design thing, which is a bit in anticipation of that same trip.

also, voting ended for the Level 99 jam today! i went through the pages for a lot of the submissions again. results will be later this week!

had a meet up today where i showed my progress over the last month and got to talk to others about their own projects. we went over design improvements, helped make decisions, and we all had the excuse to open a game engine to take a small look at how it was made.

i definitely appreciate that these meetings are a month apart because it feels like the right amount of time to get real work done, but at the same time, a small part of me wishes it could happen more often.

today should've been a bigger dev day, but i got so caught up in stuff that i missed the window for it entirely. been planning stuff for this second upcoming trip late next week! but i did poke into that deck idea a little further...

while i've been on a spree of card design and organization, i've spent a lot of today doing research and designing a better system for all of my cards here.

a total of 206 cards. all mistakes amended, but i kind of feel like i might still be able to do a little more with it. for now, it's fine

only now do i realize that i don't have four copies of each mahjong tile. i think this immediately ruins the chances of me keeping the deck at 160 tiles, because there isn't a sensible way to condense 4 copies of 9 numbers of 3 suits into 1 copy of 15 numbers of 8 suits, even if it's numerically possible...

tiresome day, but i was surprisingly mentally prepared for all of it. guess it's easy when your flight isn't all that long.

back at home, i remembered all of my playing card nonsense just before bed and worked on that for a bit.

a lot more work to do today tidying up and getting ready for the end of the trip! but i did draw a little more stuff for the new deck idea

so with all of this rampant card game design nonsense with heckadeck, today i suddenly realized that i could make my own custom deck that is a superset of the games i like, such as poker, president, golf, and... riichi mahjong maybe? so i have a 160 card deck, same size as heckadeck, but with cards that are an unusual overlapping of different cultures of card games. maybe we'll see some work on that later this month?

we ended up designing what i feel is an excellent set of rules for several heckadeck cards in the card game golf... there are still several more to go, but i'm very satisfied

got my laptop open and did some work on some game design diagram stuff. kind of hard to focus with everything else going on, but i'm surprised i found the energy to log into accounts and do something small.

although today was busy in its own ways, today we did design some card game stuff, except it was very different from expected. one friend has actually been meaning to design a card game based on his own digital game, and we spent some time before bed considering some very different game mechanics and balances for it.

so of course i'm hanging out with some gamedev friends, and we're given a very odd superset of the standard 52 card deck. so we're gradually working on designing variations of other card games that would make sense with a deck with up to 160 cards in it (including all of the original 52). today was President, tomorrow is probably Golf.

while i had a little free time inside today, i did some management of my itch games. my laptop has actually decided to have a few issues conveniently on this trip, which i'm still troubleshooting, but it was easy to open some webpages and fix some stuff.

really barely counts as a dev day today, but i did get my development documents open today, and that nearly counts for something considering how busy it was otherwise.

bracing myself for a busy day tomorrow. i'm really only managing to touch on projects in the meantime, so the upcoming week will be a little absent minded.