Design and documentation journal for my interactive fiction (text games); also reviews and other miscellaneous stuff.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Lesson: Don't Injure Yourself While Your Projects Are Stripped Apart

In late summer, I fell off the curb.  It was one of those really simple, stupid things, where I put a foot wrong and just toppled forward onto my hands and knees, but this time physics and anatomy were not working in harmony, and I broke both my wrists. 

Only one had to be put into a cast, but typing wavered between being impossible and just being awfully painful.  Regular everyday activities, like eating and getting clean, suddenly consumed huge amounts of time.  Once the cast came off, there were braces and physical therapy.  All this was on top of an unusually intense period of real-life career-related chaos. 

So I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that I feel exhausted, all the time, and when I get home, all I want to do is sit in my comfortable office chair and then drag myself to bed.  All sorts of things have fallen by the wayside - cooking and exercise and social life.  I haven't even touched my code in months.  I'm imagining the bugs have been cheerfully fornicating in there, and when I run it, the whole thing will collapse like an rotting peach. 

I am a little surprised that this feeling has lasted so long.  I still love my project, and want to work on it, but I just don't have the energy or motivation.  It's remarkably similar to being depressed, in a way - my freetime definitely has a "flat affect" because I just don't have anything to put in. 

I am feeling the first tickle of interest, and I'm taking advantage of it to gently revamp the design documentation, and start easing into it.  But I know I fell in the midst of fiddling with the graphics code, so it's all disemboweled and horrific, and half-welded onto other bits but not all the bits, and there's still big chunks dependent on the *old* graphics code, or worse, on old color values, and I think I need to go breathe into a paper bag awhile.

Sometimes code just needs to be eviscerated; I don't regret doing it, but I defnitely wish I'd left a nice clean working copy of what I had.  I've never had a totally working copy with all the parts in it, but I did have a really nice graphics shell with testing commands that was being refined for beta testers, so it was really shiny and user friendly, and it worked.  I may just set all that aside until I'm feeling brave and/or tipsy; another month isn't going to do any additional damage at this point.