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.

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...)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

so coherence will be holding a game jam for a few days at the end of november. i'm definitely interesed, but the time period is short. it would still be a cool way to get to talk to people actively involved while coherence is publicly available. it would also be a good excuse to do a bunch of satellite-adjacent prototype work (while still being its own project for fairness).

i ran around trying to collect the rest of the video in coherence's hidden youtube tutorial series, but it seems the third video was actually the last. it was still useful to go over, but it basically means i'm on my own past syncing cubes over the network.

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.

i'm trying to color in an NPC and man. this is tough

very tired today. i should be asleep already, honestly

before describing the events that take place on the main planet, i also have a section describing what happened before any trouble even arrived in the first place. the further i go back the less specific i want to be about any of these details. i think telling the story through the lens of the game is probably more impactful and i don't want to leave too much to go off of.

needless to say, there is big trouble for the inhabitants of the planet in Satellite. i think my explanation of how this sets itself up is interesting in a sci-fi way, but of course i would think that. it's an idea i had many years ago and i think it makes the premise of a video game an interesting medium for telling it.

i didn't finish this section tonight, but i wrote the start of it in a more coherent way than i think i've ever written it before.