{"id":473,"date":"2020-12-26T22:14:31","date_gmt":"2020-12-27T06:14:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/?p=473"},"modified":"2020-12-26T22:14:31","modified_gmt":"2020-12-27T06:14:31","slug":"dev-journal-stop-go-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/2020\/12\/dev-journal-stop-go-start\/","title":{"rendered":"Dev Journal: Stop, Go, Start"},"content":{"rendered":"

Happy holidays! I hope the final month of this… whopper<\/em> of a year has gone relatively well for you. I’m sorry to say it wasn’t the best for me. I had some pretty bleak stretches where I just didn’t feel like I had any control over my life, largely thanks to some… surreal family issues. It was really hard to get anything done, and it didn’t help that I was starting to feel burnt out on building all this code in one giant marathon.<\/p>\n

But things are looking better now! Earlier this week I finally got back in control of things and started putting the pieces in place again for Project Wild One. I’m happy to say the starter AI is complete! It did take about a month, though that partly involved building some supporting things up to make what I wanted possible, and since I finished that I’ve mostly been working on hooking up all the parts that I’ve spent all this time building, filling out sections I’d been leaving “for later when I know how this will work” and stuff like that. I finally got things “complete” enough to try compiling the project to see what happens yesterday, and the last two days have been a lot of debugging.<\/p>\n

I still need to build a couple more things I’d left as “to do” before it’ll actually run, but that’s mostly plugging into the big conundrum I’m facing from here. This project has already pushed way<\/em> longer to get to something playable than I’d like, and while I feel a lot better about presenting this engine with some kind of basic AI to drive it so you can at least have something to interact with<\/em>, I still haven’t built any of the stuff to make this… actually a game. Save system, menus, some kind of progression, some kind of character list or generator, stuff like that. I feel like having these things would help a lot<\/em> with making this actually a fun little game to mess around with and give you a basic feel for what you’d be doing, but… at this point it’s looking more and more like I’d better just push it out there as soon as it works at all, partly just for the sake of my health, to avoid burning out on pure coding. Matchmaker is going to be a lot of coding work too, so at this point I’m probably going to try for an update on MVOL next just to get out of the programming for a little bit.<\/p>\n

For that matter, now that I have a few projects in my stable, I should probably start working on transitioning to a more “fluid” system like I’d been theorizing on when all this started, where I work on each project as the inspiration comes or when I start to get burnt out on something else, to maximize my uptime. I’m still not sure how well that’ll work for me, but it’s the only method I could think of to feasibly *make more game faster* on my own. So I’ll try and start experimenting with that once Wild One v0.01 is out there.<\/p>\n

For now though, I’m basically trying to tie up the loose ends and just put up enough of the barebone basics in this project to make it playable at all,<\/em> in the strictest sense. I’ll put off making it actually feel<\/em> remotely like what I’m hoping to make for v0.02, so I guess v0.01 will be more like a… tech demo? Fingers crossed it’ll be interesting to take for a spin at least, there’s a lot cooking under the hood that may not be very obvious yet. It’ll be a tough call choosing exactly where to stop adding and just accept that it’s not going to look as good as it could, and that pressure is certainly there, that fallacy of “it’s taken so long it needs<\/em> to be good” that makes projects end up taking even longer sometimes. I’m trying to find the right balance against that for my own sake just as much as to keep you guys from going too long without anything new.<\/p>\n

I still can’t put a date confidently on the next release, but I’m hoping I’ll be sending a basic version to my proofers before too much longer. Testing this game for bugs may well be a whole new beast as well, come to think of it, since it has so many more working parts than MVOL. We’ll see how it goes! Thanks for reading, and I wish you a happy new year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy holidays! I hope the final month of this… whopper of a year has gone relatively well for you. I’m sorry to say it wasn’t the best for me. I had some pretty bleak stretches where I just didn’t feel like I had any control over my life, largely thanks to some… surreal family issues. It was really hard to get anything done, and it didn’t help that I was starting to feel burnt out on building all this code in one giant marathon. But things are looking better now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dev-journal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRhev-7D","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":475,"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions\/475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithier.com\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}