The 2nd saw the addition of nebulas and a few other minor things to Sun Escapes Me. Yesterday was far less productive. My mental health decided to show up and inform me it was not a “getting things done” day. It was an information processing day.
In fact the most engaging thing I did all day was deciding to make my first Doom 2 map. Ever since I started taking game dev more seriously, I’ve been delving into the past of first person shooters like Wolfenstien 3D, Doom, and Duke Nukem 3D. I’ve had the various level editors sitting on my hard drive for months but yesterday I was avoiding working on the Shmup, I was avoiding working on Sun Escapes me, and I was avoiding basically all other real world things.
The only thing that made me feel a little bit better was just being a beginner inside of the GZDoom Builder interface. It brought back strong memories of playing in the Duke Nukem 3D build engine editor in the 90s. I created so many levels that nobody ever saw and I learned so much about level design that I never did anything with. This was something I did a lot as a teenager – messing with complicated interfaces and figuring them out with little use of a manual.
In this exact same way I ended up creating Star Trek vs Star Wars videos using 3DS Max, even putting in sound effects. Being able to play and create things that have basically zero productive purpose is something that teenager Chaz is still craving. He’s still in there and needs enrichment.
Today’s agenda should be a bit more improved. Going to try to focus on finishing the last two episodes of the LazyDevs’ Shmup tutorial. One episode today and another episode tomorrow. On the tail end of today, I’m most likely to be working with Cat on Sun Escapes Me for the LOWREZJAM. I’m SO glad it is a two week game jam because I’m too non-linear and slow at game dev to pump things out much faster. Will focus on adding bullets and cool collision effects.
P.S. It is nice to have a journal that I basically never advertise. It is on my Twitter profile but most people won’t give a shit. I kinda like it like that. We aren’t here to increase pressure, ya know?