Yay some sleep :D

So finally, after a few weeks of really crappy sleep, no sleep rythm, only a few hours per night and very interrupted. I finally could sleep for 8/9 hours and could do so from around 1am in the morning. Maybe, if I can keep that up and my daughter won’t “hiccup” again, just maaaaybe I can start having normal sleep again and then have the time and brainpower to actually work properly on my projects.
I honestly felt really bad about it, that I couldn’t really do anything and that I had to accept that I just couldn’t, that it wasn’t in my control at all and that I literally was too stressed and overwhelmed with everything that happened around me, that working was practically not possible.
Knowing myself, I usually would try to just do it anyway and burn myself out with it, to an extent that’s really not healthy and I already noticed how irritated and easily I became emotional over every little bit. Not to mention the anxiety levels! Heck I started getting images of flying glass splitters, flying into my face just by putting an OPEN glass jar into the microwave, even though it was stating clearly that it is meant for that.
But for some reason my body/mind didn’t care that it’s not logical and pressed on with those images anyway….brrr…sorry for being so graphical.

However, with a little “luck” I get some time for doing again. I missed that craving feeling and I missed the problem solving. All I could do while I was so heavily sleep deprived was writing one or 2 sentences a day into my game design document or scribble down some ideas to solve problems…maybe watch another few minutes of some video tutorial. *sigh*
That said, I managed to watch a video to the end that I can only recommend to any indie dev out there who might struggle with themselves:

It’s a long video (about 1 hour) but it’s worth watching it completely and unlike alot of other videos that handle those kind of critical topics, he actually gives some tips, like actual practical examples on how to learn to “be” with your emotions. Or how to handle them, specially anger, frustration and fear.
Of course, he has alot of focus on game development, so he also talks about getting stuck in game development, why and how to solve it. (That involves team issues aswell)

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yeaaahhhpp

So much this 😀 Yeah, development is not easy and I think it’s important to know that you really want to do it, because else, it’s so easy to give up, since there is no one there to tell you that you have to go on, specially as an indie.

http://mysweetwhomp.fr/private/119228173847/tumblr_noimn4cVks1u4yjir

I feel like I should write something.

so I do.
I had some pretty rough weeks, from a weekend at a “social convention” from my husband, to slipping on ice and hitting my head horribly luckily it seems I only got some bumps from it, slight headache and well since then I have a bit concentration issues, which makes game development difficult. Then also my daughter couldn’t sleep very well (maybe because of teething and learning walking, who knows).

However, because of all this stress and my decision, that I want to start a company very probably this year, after I have finished my horror/survival/spore-like game, all my progress felt like it stalled.
I made myself extremely anxious…maybe still do, but I’m working on it. It helped though, that someone advised me to write a game document for the game, since I was also stuck with how I should progress, since it’s bigger than the ludum dare project, I just can’t get around having to plan it out properly.

And it does help! I did not only do it for “Phi”(the horror game), but also for Dragonlands and it helps me gain perspective to both of these projects and a certain confidence that mayyyybe I will be able to pull it off.
I still feel insecure though 😮 I want so badly to have procedural generation for “Phi” since it’s playing Underwater in a cave system and has no story in that sense, so it’s important for me that it has replayability through random generation of the Environment and enemies. Also since the game is about reaching the “exit” kinda, it wouldn’t be in my intention that players would just share playthroughs and ruin other players game experience with it (yeah, it’s THAT important)

So I’m hacking away at the procedural generation….I’m reading alot…alot of that is very technical and/or conceptual and I noticed that since they are so complex I need to understand them properly, so I can recreate them for my needs.
Specially since it seems, that there is not a single solution that I could find that would be exactly covering what I want. And I’m still pondering back and forth if I should work with voxels and then create a mesh over it with help of marching cubes or if I should directly generate every face by hand based on my own algorithm, based on an idea I have.
Last one is unknown territory and as far as I was thinking through it, it might turn out to be alot more complex than doing it with voxels, since I thought about using some kind of 3dimensional node system, that connects points in unity with cave meshes, interpolating the mesh sizes along splines and then double use those splines for the pathfinding aswell…O.o but meeeeeehhh
I need quiet time for that, quiet uninterrupted time, which I usually get in the evening/night, just not for 2-3 weeks now

Puh…it feels good to talk this off my chest now…

so for now, the only worthwhile progress I can show are those concepts 🙂

so practically in this one I tried to integrate my game name into my main character.
Yeah it sounds a little weird, that I’m so obsessed with that game name. I chose it, because I was dreaming about it some years ago 🙂 A dream about artificially created lifeforms, called Phi I and Phi II. It’s also seemingly fitting alot to the idea I have of that game in my head, that it’s somehow sounding artistic and foreign, but also is symbolizing some kind of beauty. I think 🙂 Well that’s what I think it means for me.
For some reason I also had immediately an idea of an intro sequence for that game, so I really felt like I HAD TO translate it into reality 🙂

these are mainly references I was drawing from google, images that I found were somehow showing, where I want to go with my creature designs and what purposes they fullfill in their Environment. Also to get a feeling for what makes creepy underwater creatures so creepy. I could say these images were drawn for the sake of getting more familiar with them 🙂 The ingame Characters will vary alot from those.

I had to somehow visualize my “node” idea I mentioned earlier and try to find out what I need to know mathematically to create what I want to have, in this case I thought about creating vertices along a curve that’s determined by an offset to a centerpoint, that can be aswell anywhere on the spline and then extrude the created vertices into one direction at first, to see if it would work that way. I still need to “relearn” Trigonometry for that, since the stuff from school didn’t really stick.
I’m already seeing some problems with this though, like as example how to connect tunnels/vertices on intersections. I should really go and just try this stuff out :O
The next thing you see here are sketches from how to create faces/vertices within unity from scratch, since it’s very hard to visualize it without actually somehow seeing it.
No matter how this turns out though, I hope I can learn alot from this project, specially about procedural generation, so that I can use it in future projects aswell 🙂