I actually managed to get myself out of the general fear and anxiety to keep working on the game. I felt like everything I did was awful and couldn’t even start doing anything without getting burnout simply thinking about all the things I would need to do to get my game to the state I want it to be in….
I’m working on getting help, also talking to friends and trying to approach everything work related very gently. As much as I would like to be that superhuman being that is always working at 100% max capacity at all times and thinking I can sustain that over long period of time, I can not.
It’s hard to accept and even harder that when I’m thinking I’m already hanging far behind of what I wanted to achieve and what I thought I could achieve and then I HAVE TO take a break, find a way to relax and rest and not think about work….it feels like I should be working, trying to catch up with my huge list of things to do, but I know it’s gonna tear me apart if I try and do that again.
I don’t want to linger in the past and in what I perceive as my past failures, but my mind tends to hold it in front of me, like a bad parent would smear bad grades into their kids face, yell at them and scold them for doing so bad and few.
No matter what the truth of that specific child is, it hurts and it is usually not fair.
Despite all that, some week ago or so, I managed to get myself into programming/developing again. I was doing a little sideproject, something I’m very interested in, in terms of procedural generation. I really want to use it in my games in the future. And it gave me a little of that spark back to why I was actually wanting to make games, the fascination with making worlds etc.
It also gave me the courage to go ahead and start trying out something new for Critters, something I was quite afraid of starting, because there are many things that are interconnecting that need to be implemented and changed in my game in order for those things to work.
In this case I started with the one thing which I call “WhiskersCollisionDetection” it is practically a system, that allows every creature in the game to find their way around obstacles. Think: a cat’s whiskers helping to find their way in dark places by telling it through collision of the whisker tips where it can’t or can go.
I have already a working prototype of it and I want it to work together with a priority system (what a creature is interested in/looking for/needing at a specific moment) and a search system (creature walks around to find what it needs, like food)
and also to be able to avoid things that might be dangerous, like keeping distance of thornbushes or cliffs, though I want to implement an awareness system aswell, that should allow for accidents to happen 😛
I also want to replace the current cubs behaviour with those systems, so that they don’t blindly follow mom around in a rather straight line, but instead if they see food and mom is nearby, they will go to it and eat it, no need for micro managing their movements, but they should still prioritize following mom when as example a storm approaches.
Though I am starting to think that it might be useful to implement a sort of “call” for the mom, to be able to control that cubs follow you and that maybe those further away that might have gotten lost, find their way to you, if not too far away to hear the call aswell.
….I’m not giving up on this….I love doing this….I just hope that with some work on my health side, that I will be able to work on it more freely.
fartoindie 