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.

IF Comp: How do y'all do it?

Judges, I mean.  (I don't know how authors do it, either, but whatever.)

38 games?  42 days, several of which are now GONE FOREVER?

I probably won't be playing many during the comp this year - I am temporarily typing impaired, and Real Life is wreaking havoc on my free time, but I salute you all.

I am going to consider this investigative research

Update Haiku

Both wrists "maybe" broke
typing and reading hard - what
else do people do?

Sorry for typos
vicodin makes pain better
everything else worse

Anyone know some
good dictation software?
For Inform or not?

GDD Calculator

This weekend I made a neat little widget to help me calculate how many growing degree days different plants have.  (The downside of having a devblog is that you can see when you're doing *exactly* the same thing you were doing this time last year.)  It's not tuned, but it's not bad, either. Basically, you can enter a planting date, and a number of days from the planting date; it gives you the estimated GDD for that number of days for the particular game location.

It has some shortcomings - notably, the weather system remains stable, so April 1 has the same weather average as April 30.  The total GDD for the location is a bit higher than it "ought" to be, largely because there's only an average of 11 degrees Fahrenheit between day temperature and night temperature.  Again, this is one of those seasonal things - there's much less swing in temperature during winter, whereas summer evenings have a swing of closer to 20 degrees.  Also, because GDD is never negative - you don't lose growth if a day is cold - the average GDD is misleadingly low.  So it's not perfect.  It is, however, a far sight better than using strict day counts to harvest, and it's a good starting point.  It got the few crops that I have GDD numbers for in the right ballpark, so that's heartening.  I plugged about 30 of the major crops into the table.

The part that might be helpful for testing/release would be the estimates of harvest dates given a planting date and a crop.  It could be useful internally (the game shouldn't suggest planting corn in August, when it's too late in the season to get a harvest), but it's not hooked up to the current system because I needed something quick and dirty.

For the game proper, I made another stab at a crude crop model - it grabs the GDD and applies it across the growing crops, and declares them mature once they hit a threshold.  It doesn't do anything else - you can't actually harvest them or anything - but it's a start. 

Yes, I'm still working on fishing, too.  Can't find a good way to streamline the process.  Am seriously considering reducing descriptions to modifiers of the noun proper instead of descriptions of the noun - so instead of talking about a large silver fish with a hooked chin, I'm thinking about more of a "The salmon is fat and fresh." type thing.  Because, you know, pretty much all fish are vaguely shaped the same, with similar fins and things, and it's hard to differentiate them, and not particularly helpful.  If players want to know what an alewife looks like, maybe they could Google Image it?  I dunno. 
 

 

Fish Waffling

Brown Trout, looking appropriately skeptical.  Courtesy New York City Public Library.

So I just finished putting some of my notes into a spreadsheet, felt the glow of a job 10% done, and then the sinking feeling of realizing that you'd done research on a bunch more fish.  Like, where's the pike?  Any of the trout species?  The burbot, which I remember because when you pull it out of the water, it tries to wrap around your arm like a boa constrictor?  And those are the ones I can think of offhand. 

Upside: there aren't going to be just 13 species.  Yay diversity. 

Downside: someone has to do more research, and until I get an intern, that someone is going to be me.  I love research, I'm just not chuffed about re-research.

I'm also sort of leery of the way the odds for fish are going.  Right now they have a base frequency, and then bonus/penalties for the cold water, warm water, shallow water, deep water, slow water, fast water, whether it's not a prime feeding time, and whether it's winter.  And data for preferred baits. 

The result is a pretty intense table.  The advantage of having these in a table is that they can be tweaked en masse to make the difficulty easier/harder, or in response to environmental pressures.  But it's not the most helpful table, and I'm thinking of breaking these out into properties: cold-water tolerant, shallow-water feeder, active-in-winter.  (Yes, the names need work.)

I'd still need some sort of hard numbers for frequency and what those penalties actually mean, but it would make fish definitions easier.  For instance, I'm thinking cold-water fish (vs. temperature-tolerant or warm-water fish) just don't show up in warm water.  Period.  But I'm not really a fish person - they're delicious, but not something I know much about - and I don't know if that's fair.  I'm not even sure what makes fish prefer cold or warm water - is it the competition?  Thermal regulation?  Enzymatic activity?  This makes it hard to make judgment calls on mechanisms. 

I also need some measurement for bait; catfish theoretically eat anything, while sturgeon are theoretically pickier.  (I garden, so I've learned to take pronouncements on biological behavior with a grain of salt.)  I don't really know if there are categories of baits that go together: live bait includes what, exactly, and if a fish eats a minnow, does that imply it would bite on a worm?  A grub?  A crayfish?  And that's dependent on me getting bait worked out. 

I think bait needs to be pretty straightforward, so here's sort of the current experimental plan:
- Live bait: worms, grubs, minnows, and small moving things.  Includes artificial bait that looks/acts like live bait - spoons, rubber worms, etc.
- Non-live bait: usually odiferous, non-moving stuff - dead salmon, cheese, sausage, etc.
- Some sort of size mechanism - sturgeon eat non-moving stuff that's at least X g; perch have a range under Y g.  Maybe by body weight.

I wouldn't mind fly fishing (isn't that a separate thing from normal fishing?) but know NOTHING about it.  And while I have no problem with our Lone Survivor sitting around embroidering her underwear, I think tying artificial flies is just a little bit silly. 

I also need a way to spear fish in the shallows (and possibly deep areas near a bank).  I think I'm going to ban swimming out into the lake with a spear.  People do it in the tropical oceans, but I don't think a lake has the same fish density or temperature. 

Fun fact: Barnacles can't move, so they mate with these long extendable penises that look like something from Doctor Who.

In Which I Realize Something Obvious About Inform 7

Just now I realized that instead of typing "Every turn when the minutes part of the time of day is 00:" eighteen thousand times, I could just make a set of every hour rules, trigger them once, and then just specify "Every hour: do stuff!"

Makes the code easier to read and write.

In Which I Make a Rock

So I've been trying for days to make a rock.  Who would have thought that a convincing rock is so much harder than a convincing tree?

Why are the background colors weird?  I dunno.

It's still not what I would call convincing - there's something non-organic about it, despite the fact that it was more-or-less based on an actual rock.  I do like the moss, though.  And I think I like the snow shading, which looks deceptively simple but actually involved about an hour's worth of gradient tools and blur and smudging and shaping and brushes.  I tell you, I cannot wait to work on a tropical island version of this game, where there are no seasons, no snow, and all rocks have been made by aliens and are *meant* to look like those plastic rocks you can put keys in.

Trying to get the grass looking decent is . . . progressing, if by progressing one means "I have tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work, and then my brain went funny and I don't know if it's better or not."  Also, I did some stuff on the wrong layer, so it's not really reproducable the way I'd like.

Here's one experiment with flowers.  It's TOO MUCH at this point, but I think there's potential in there somewhere.  It's better if I take out a bunch of the middle-distance trees.  On the other other hand, Michiconsota summers are pretty much a froth of TOO MUCH, so . . . yeah.  I dunno.  (I moved this layer down a bunch, because it was too high, and took out a lot of extra greenery, so you're missing a bunch of the effect.)  I do like that suddenly this thing has the feel of looking over hills.  How did that happen?  I wish I knew, because I kind of like it.  And I like that there's some color at midsummer.  There should be color.  Just not sure how to add color without it being all overwhelming. 

Wait, no, that's a lie. 

Just rip the middle-ground trees out, and voila.  (Note to self: Do not think about the hours you spent crafting the middle ground trees.  Just think: better one, or better two?) 

Also that grass color is subtlely wrong.  (Green is one of those really tricky colors, where it has to be just so.  Like brown.  Orange and blue are more forgiving.)  Also tried shifting the background trees a little more blue, to give the illusion of distance, and . . . yeah, that's not working.

In other news: I procrastinated this week.  (Well, not so much procrastinated as "went outside, saw the sun, met friends, drank beer, made bread, put a new video card in my computer, played Fallout 3, searched for help on game-breaking bugs in Fallout 3, marveled at how many there were, and managed to force my game into a semi-workable condition.") 

Whenever I get a little excited about Skyrim, I go watch the video of the guy demoing it and immediately feel better.  There's just something about the presentation that dulls my excitement.  I have a history of getting super-excited about Bethesda's stuff and then having them do B-quality work - enough so that I don't feel totally outraged, but most of the fun is sapped from the game.