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.

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.

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.

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.

i did more research. trying to figure out how to get gizmos to display in front of 3D object (like they used, i'm not sure if Unity 2021 changed that or the fact that i'm using URP), trying to figure out what the best way is to register what the player is colliding with to manage normal correctly, trying to turn the player's state into a C# property so i can make the setter fire an event when it's changed...

everything seems to present a tiny little problem. no one is taking about gizmos being faint and too hard to see. everyone recommends stacking a ton of rigidbodies together to identify exactly what collider fired an OnCollisionEnter etc. event, which actually breaks physics entirely (i need the collider to hit the ground, obviously), and the property thing works but is about as verbose as i expected (and changing the value in the inspector during run time will not actually fire the event!)

it starts to feel like anything and everything just doesn't exactly work. i should continue to not expect things to be perfect, even things outside of my control. but it's definitely aggravating.

today, between all of the other things i've been buying over the holiday season, i decided to just lean into it and buy Rider for a year. that's the JetBrains IDE for C# that integrates with Unity so well. i used it as a student for free, it kind of sold me on it, i keep thinking about it, so i guess it's time.

i learned that once the subscription ends after the year, you actually get a perpetual license for the version you bought it out of, so i technically can use Rider 2022 forever! unsure if it would have been wiser to wait until the year turned over, but the actual 2023 version could potentially be months away.

i really don't justify buying this as some kind of motivator. i think it'll just make programming feel nicer, and i plan to do some amount of that now and into the foreseeable future. maybe putting all this money on Unity right now isn't a great idea, but with coherence being so near and dear to me all of a sudden, escaping Unity is not likely to happen for a year.

a lot of progress today, but probably still too little for the scope. i don't feel that bad about it considering how little the competitive aspect matters, and i think we'll be able to deliver something close to what the expected game would be.

finished a couple of daunting work issues, still had to backlog several other things that i knew i wasn't going to have time for.

moved onto solidjs, got a lot of help from a friend regarding proxies and now the future of this app is suddenly visible again. i successfully fetched data from another webpage! hooray!

and then i did some setup on a new coherence project for the jam coming up. if i get some time and energy after thanksgiving dinner, i think i should try to put some shaders into URP, and maybe build up the structure of drawing images onto the UI.

started the tutorial project for luxe. did some skimming across the brief introduction of programming quirks in the language "wren," which is what luxe uses. i've definitely heard the name before. it seems neat but some of the syntax feels a little like it's different just to be different.

the way luxe handles systems and breaking down "units of work" into bits and pieces that make up your game feels really backwards to me. i think a lot of it is related to coming from Unity, and having certain expectations for the responsibilities of a class. i've always meant to learn Entity-Component-System structure for my own sake, because it was described as being only a hop away from Unity's whole Monobehavior nonsense, and i think i agree that luxe is keeping a lot of the good parts of ECS based on what little i've done so far. but some of the syntax is definitely weirding me out.