Yeah this isn’t working.
I mean, I’ve been making good progress here, but I can do the extrapolation myself, and going at my current rate this project will take more than a year for sure, probably at least two. This is a problem for several reasons: First, I don’t want to be locked into a single project for that long: Second, I am going to need to attend to financial matters sooner or later: Third, I made a pretty wallpaper saying it would be out in 2013.
I guess a 3 is easy to turn into an 8 though… Hmm…
Anyway. There’s not a lot I can do about it at this very moment, since I have to worry about other stuff for the next couple of weeks. However, it provides a valuable gauge to me in terms of how much work I’m going to have to put in to stay basically on schedule. 2-3 hours of actual work per day should get this thing going pretty good.
And wasn’t that really about what I’d intended to do in the first place? But life has a way of intervening, and the habits we acquire to supplement our efforts sometimes engulf our natural work ethic. A lucky pen is a lovely bit of mental magic to get the juices flowing, right up until the point you lose it, or the point where you are out and about and feel unable to create because you don’t have your magic pen.
But don’t you realize, it was you that did all those things! The magic was in you the entire time! Don’t lose that pen, though, it’s not magic but it was very expensive.
All of this is a long way of saying that I got a good bit of work done today, but doing good work one day a week isn’t going to cut it here.
Speaking of which: I refactored my level editor to make it possible to add alternate editing modes (in addition to the current tile editor). These will allow me to build a sub-editor to place background and foreground details in fairly short order, and another sub-editor to place game entities such as enemies, NPCs, and scripted events in the not-too-distant future. Additionally, for reasons which are wholly opaque to me, this reorganization seems to have completely fixed the framerate issues the level editor had before, and it now runs at a solid 60fps.
It’s things like that that make me question my general assumption that I know what the fuck is going on.
The next couple of weeks are going to be too busy to overhaul my work habits here, but by the end of the year I’d like to set up a venue for daily DevBlog updates. I sincerely doubt that anyone reading this is so invested in the project in its nascent state that they want to read that much about it, but it will help keep me on focus if, every time I fuck off on development in order to spend all day playing video games, watching youtube, and looking at porn, I have to admit as much to the internet.
Albeit not in so many words.
So, you guys can look forward to that in the near future. I will probably also be rearranging my blog schedule to target DevBlog updates for the weekends so I’m at my most motivated to get work done during a time frame where I actually have an open schedule.
Target for next week: Working form of detail editor, ability to save/load lists of details into levels.