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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

today was absurd. i almost feel like a page just turned into a new chapter for myself, but it's been an emotional rollercoaster and it's just plain late.

today around 6-7pm PST, several of the leading members of the Spiral Knights community announced they had formed a small studio and were now starting their own project called Knights. it's an "interoperable" program that attaches to Spiral Knights that can produce NFTs of your player character. the idea went under fire so fast it was impossible to catch every angle of it. the goal is to generate revenue, purchase the Spiral Knights IP, and assemble a team to continue to develop the game properly. the plan is riddled with holes.

one leading community member, the admin of the modding scene for the game, quit the team months before and then today, with the project public, openly denounced the entire project and severed all ties. ties with people he had been friends with for years.

i wrote many, many messages across servers trying to display some degree of competence on the subject. i wrote to one person i specifically trust, one of the six that comprise this new studio, to reason with him. i still believe that if he were to falter and quit this project, it would be significantly harder for most others to stick with it. i don't think he has complete confidence in the project either.

i was exhausted long before bed, but with what little energy i have tonight i imported the coherence playground into Unity. set up for tomorrow...

i kind of still feel like i'm reeling, i dunno.

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.