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.

i started adding tiles today, and the fully horror of 3d tiles in unity hit me all at once. so many gameobjects, the program crashed four times, oh man. so i ended up telling one of our 3d artists we needed to pivot to using a texture with a normal map instead, and he was actually quite alright with that. the result was MUCH easier to manager, even though it sacrifices being a cool 3d model for being a slightly cheaper looking alternative.

still could be getting more done in the day, but i basically had a headache all throughout today.

added the lever and a special grated door for fooling with. also made it so you can breathe fire in astral mode, although this will make level design a little more complicated. animations are rough, timing is a little jarring... but we did get the time for the jam extended back out to a 10th day, so... yay

today was very much a my-body-seems-to-hate-me day. i spent a lot of time getting up and moving around. i added URP and ProBuilder to the jam project, and then i dug my head into the jump physics as i often get stuck on. i really really don't want to overdo this, but dang. i also want jumping to work correctly, and that is just always so annoying! i think i found a way to do it right that won't be too much more work, but if this isn't done by the end of tomorrow, i'm scrapping it for something stupid simple.

the theme is "Take a deep breath." it's actually a lot nicer than i expected considering how much of this event is evidently funded by Olympics related nonsense. it's still obviously strung out of swimming, but it's now vague enough that we have a lot of different directions that we can interpret things.

i also intend to post the satellite document tonight and see what kinds of responses it gets in the morning. might just start in the art discord for spiral knights and a few friends places.

added a bunch of images from old saved inspirations. sourced most of it, still need to add some others. also need to dig through a few other less-convenient places for other images. also also need to look through a few of the artists' works i just saw while sourcing things, since they've worked on a lot of other stuff since i found these images 4-5 years ago... and dang! impressive.

wrote the section on player inspiration. maybe adding images and sources first would be a good way to guide how i want to organize the rest of this document.

a lot of varying work today, but all of it good. crunched the omega bug, now dashing works as intended (still much room for improvement). i pushed suggested changes to my portfolio site, definitely made it feel better, and then added to that by getting a new set of business cards with the URLs updated to all my current stuff.

with two weeks to the start of the event, and after waking up slightly frantic about it, i've started scooping up old business cards and checking my laptop status to see if i'll have some good stuff to throw at GDC. as usual, i don't really mind if all i get out of it is a couple of good conversations at a booth. but my friend's talk has had its time slot confirmed and things are looking very promising, and i'm not sure how many more GDC opportunities i'm going to get!

so a dash actually works now, but it's pretty clunky. there's a bug with repeatedly pressing the button, so i'll figure that out and then any quality of life after that will come much further down the line.

i did some starting work on the player's dash, although i was kind of out of sorts today and had to spend a lot of time catching up on a deep work problem.

it's kind of hard to break down exactly what a "stat" is for an item. i've chosen to make it as general as something numerical that helps calculate a game interaction, but even this feels too specific and like it'll need a lot of future work.

besides, what's an item? a weapon, sure. a weapon mod, probably. a consumable potion, yeah, why not. but what about a quest objective? what about a status effect? are they even items?

recently, an old collaborative game project has been brought back to life, so i've opened an old unity version with an old project and i've started doing what every programmer loves to do and forced myself to stare at old code. it was pretty early in the making, so there's a lot of improvements for me to make.

filled out a bunch more of the status effects table. suddenly had an urge to get to the first steps tutorial for coherence, but it'll have to go to tomorrow or later this week. feeling stressed lately about nothing in particular (okay, maybe upcoming appointments / job applications / other obligations i'm putting off...)

of course, after all my pride finally being rid of messing with player physics any further, i reopened unity and immediately discovered a problem: you can move laterally to slow your descent.

i did deliberately give the player some control over the direction of their velocity in the air so they could air steer... but this seems to have also had the drawback of allowing the player to "rotate" their downward velocity back up, which literally reduce their falling speed. back to the drawing board. the layers of separation between lateral and vertical velocities continues to increase internally.

a little bit of satellite work tonight. started to feel a little ill, not sure why. excited about some unrelated stuff tomorrow, and also still feeling the pressure of recent workloads increasing due to customers coming in with new problems all at once. altogether, still regretting not getting unity open. but trying to make the best of it

did some upload work on a model through unity, was a good refresher on managing materials and such

i added a bunch of todo block all over the satellite document. this is a long-needed addition considering how much time i spend just poking text around without much of a purpose. i'm honestly too exhausted tonight to even solve one of them, but this is a valuable step.

good vacation day, overall!

got a little work done on another side project. also, finding out about some quirks with my laptop, but they're all fixable. i feel pretty good, all things considered. like the flood warnings happening back at home, hm

got a bunch of other things done today in preparation for a family vacation coming up this week.

opened unity with the goal of cloud storing my prototype so i can try to load it on my laptop tomorrow (and take it with me on the trip). i know that unity pivoted to Plastic for version control semi-recently (around 2021)... today i discovered that a subscription plan is required, and you have to input payment information even though it's free until you pass certain limits. i'm not interested in running the risk of a silent bill, but i could cancel the subscription after the vacation, so... maybe? i do want to learn how to use Plastic, to be honest.

and now most of the physical organization of elements are done too! i have to manage an online record of things and keep that up to date, but that's all there really is left to it.

there's some news that another storm is incoming, probably worse than the last. so i will likely see another few days of power outages with some clever wiring to get things powered on occasion. if the internet goes down, we'll pack things up and head to another house that we have permission to stay in.

christmas introduced a lot of new stuff to the house, which means taking care of buying a few extras to sort things out and attending to end-of-year events leading up to new year's.

in particular, i've been thinking about "variable powers" in games. board games are what brought it to mind, but the fact that i attempted to build a similar game inside of a sandbox game a long time has been replaying itself in my head. i don't think i'd immediately pursue anything along this thread, but it's definitely a nice relaxing idea to spin a design off of between other things.

jot down several helpful categories of story arcs. it made a lot more sense after i wrote it out that way, and it helped me come up with a few other ideas.

tomorrow is christmas of course, so we'll see just how much free time i actually get.

did a little more model work. more and more of the day gets caught up in small holiday prep work like tending to some house cleaning

projects are coming to a head. really looking forward to the vacation time all of a sudden. since i haven't had enough to stress about, my brain seems to be doing its best to give itself something to worry about.

i touched on some satellite things, but i wouldn't say i did much more than adjust some ideas i had.