EverEnding DevBlog, June 2016: Paying Attention

This is happening exactly the way I worried it might.

I’m coming to think I have some sort of attention disorder. I have a very difficult time focusing on almost any tasks for more than an hour at a time, and even that much becomes extremely difficult if it’s a tricky task or one I’m unenthusiastic about. And now, before me, I have weeks and weeks of animation work that need doing.

Don’t get me wrong. I think animation is interesting. However, in trying to sketch all these animations out as prototypes, I’ve robbed myself of much of the fun of animating and left myself a big serving of tedious pie. All the interesting stuff, figuring out the motion, expressing it, giving it weight;  I did all that in the prototype phase. All that’s left is drawing it in pixels, making sure the frames are consistent with each other, making sure each individual strand and strap lines up properly, that things don’t float into place but move naturally, that each distinguishing mark stays consistent; I’ve separated much of the artistry out, done it months ago, and left myself only a very dry kind of craftsmanship.

And my enthusiasm suffers.

And my productivity suffers with it.

And I wonder, what am I doing? Where am I going? Maybe these are good questions to ask, but the dissatisfaction that is pushing me to ask them is indicative of a more immediate problem. At this rate, the game will not be finished. At this rate, I’ll drift away and find something else.

I prefer to make decisions like that rather than have them made for me by circumstance.

Well: What’s the good news? The good news is that I have the running animations done and the turning animations done and the stopping animations mostly done except I need to polish them up a bit to maintain consistency. What’s the bad news? The bad news is that I keep noticing that at the end of the day when I’ve done as many of the tasks I’ve set out for myself as I could manage, right before I go to sleep, this game is almost always the one that is left over. I listen to podcasts while I work and I don’t often manage to get to the end of the podcast before I get tired of the work and decide to stop. If I don’t feel like listening to a podcast, I don’t work.

What happens now? I need to take a step back. The animations are of vital importance, yes, but they’re one part of a project that still has many many parts that need doing. If my productivity suffers when I try to do too much animation work, I need to do less animation work, simple as that. Perhaps one day or two days a week will be satisfactory, allow continuous forwards progress, while the other days I’m working on EverEnding can be dedicated to other parts of the project. Parts such as:

Special effects work: The game still needs some water effects and other level-specific effects that need to be programmed. Each of these could be a confounding programming problem; satisfying if I can solve or study my way through it, but potentially just as much of a dragging point as the animations, so I’m wary of over-committing just yet. Still, I should be keeping these on the table so I can research/ponder them as opportunity permits.

Enemy design: I’ve concepted most enemies in terms of behavior and appearance, but only in the sense of creating descriptions; most of the work of visually designing and programming these creatures remains to be done. This would probably be a good thing to work on concurrently with animations, since the two fields are somewhat dependent on each other.

Bosses: These are a combination of the above two, each boss requiring special level effects and animations and behaviors all wrapped up together. These are still pretty intimidating, but I should at least be planning out how to try handling them in the future.

Levels/Tilesets: I was doing this before animation work and felt like I was achieving a lot more satisfaction and success then. Along with enemies, this would be a really good thing for me to be working on

Attention management is so difficult, and I’m only now realizing how carefully I’ve curated my fields of view to make it easier and how hamstrung I’ve been by the necessity of doing so. I’m going to be pushing at this from a few angles: First, seeing what I can do to treat my attention issues. Second, expanding the section of the project I’m working on to avoid exhausting myself on tedious work like I’ve been doing. Third, trying to get a bit more going on in my life, non-work stuff, so that I don’t feel so down and out when the project isn’t going well. I don’t expect any of these to be easy – in fact, I expect them all to be quite challenging in their own ways – but I think they’re all vital to the continued help of myself and the project.

I’m having a bit of mixed feelings about this shift to monthly updating. Though it is nice not to have to write these each week, and I felt like they became rote and obnoxious to the people reading for more analytical content, they were also a useful mechanism for me to assess where I was at in the project and how I felt about it, a functionality I failed to appreciate until now that it’s missing. I don’t really want to go back to weekly updates, but it may be worth considering another process for capturing the internal insights that found their way into the devblogs previously.

Since tomorrow’s the day I put together the schedule for the week, it will be an excellent opportunity to assess what I should be working on when. Here’s hoping next month’s update is more substantial and encouraging.