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.

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.

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.

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?

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...)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

a little bit of work on the uno magic mash, and i also opened the web project to check my work from the weekend. i wanted to get around to more of the web thing today but things didn't time out well.

today i did some work on an idea that is adjacent to but not directly for any of the projects i've mentioned before. it was some spreadsheet organization for a project my friends and i are working on, although i say "project" pretty lightly.

there's been a Trello column for the Satellite prototype for ages and i've only just remembered to touch on that instead of writing lengthy bullet point lists.

it's hard to keep everything concise but still cover the enormous range of functionality that an MMO is supposed to have. i think that the player's basic actions, enemy interactions, and world networking are the most important things to show in the prototype. although i also think having a rudimentary version of the upgrade system, which is one of Satellite most interesting features, would be a good idea to include. other than that, nothing needs to be pretty or extensible or robust or anything. just make it work.

i forget if i already mentioned the name of this in a past streak post...

coherence.io is a competitor to SpatialOS, both of which offer live service assistance for developers in engines like Unity and Unreal. they help run all of the big networking issues that typically plague an MMO, and since they're available to developers of all sizes, this is realistically the only way a small dev can make a massive game.

...or at least, SpatialOS did fit this description until they pulled most of their services out of the public view a few years ago. so now i'm looking at coherence.io, who promises a lot of the same things but with even clearer language about how the architecture of the game needs to work. and it describes the kinds of problems i want to solve in Satellite perfectly.

so the just of today is that i went through the coherence documentation pages, or at least the early ones, because deep in my gut i'm starting to want to see a little guy move around and attack in a prototyped Unity scene. i have to try to get to features other than just movement.