Basically spent the entirety of this week wrestling with AS3’s 3d API. It’s not well documented and it’s not very elegant, but hopefully once I figure it out it will at least be fast. That said, after days of wrestling with it and finally getting the test-render doing approximately what I wanted it to do, I was rewarded with a 20fps drop over doing it the way I’d been doing it before. Over the next couple of days I’ll be looking into why, but yeah that’s basically been the last 3 or 4 days in a nutshell.
Coincidentally and probably not entirely unrelated, I’ve been dealing with a lot of frustration, anger, anxiety, and depression this week. There’s really not a lot more to say about that, except that now that I’ve got something up on screen to work with the worst of it will hopefully be allayed and I can satisfy myself with tinkering. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over my time in game development, it’s that visible progress is super important, particularly when it comes to keeping people invested in a project.
Other than butting my head repeatedly against stubborn programming problems, I haven’t gotten all that much concrete done this week. I have actually been doing some writing and developing the plot further, but I kind of pace myself when it comes to that stuff because I recognize that it doesn’t advance the overall state of the project that much. It is fun to do, though, and it gets me into the soul of the world I’m creating a bit.
So yeah, ugh. I guess that’s it for this week. I imagine I’ll be spending a lot more time hammering on programming problems over this coming week as well, but I will really try to get some more asset production time in, for my sake, for the project’s sake, and for the audience’s sake– because I know that this programming shit is probably tedious for most of you to listen to.
Thanks for the ongoing support, all. Wish me luck for this week!
A long time ago there was a kingdom which waged war with itself. No one knows how the war began, but once it did it raged on, day after day after day, until children were born and raised within it and had no memory of its beginning and no conception of its end. Perhaps it rages still.
Everyone in the city stood and fought together, secure in the certainty that their cause was just– almost everyone, that is. Not everyone was able to fight: The sick, the deluded, the orphans, especially the orphans, were trampled and starved and killed in the midst of the fighting and there was nothing they could do. They lived day by day in sorrow and despair
It went on like this until, one night, as these orphans clung to each other and cried, they were overheard– the night herself heard their tears and was moved to pity. For, you see, her own children were long dead, her beautiful star children suffocated and extinguished by the dust and the poisonous haze of war.
She could see the entirety of the city, she touched it everywhere lightly, so she knew where the orphans could be safe. She appeared to them that night, dark and silent, and told them of the great palace gardens, long since abandoned and overgrown, where the walls were cracked open and where no soldier ever bothered to go.
That night, there was a silent pilgrimage of orphans through the war-torn streets and into the peaceful gardens. They left the city to its ceaseless war.
Over time, the other poor souls lost in the war found their way to the gardens as well, and were welcomed, and were sheltered. For a while, things were good. Fruit grew plentiful on the garden trees, water ran through it to nurture them, and it was spacious with no dangerous animals. The children’s cares abandoned them, and they played in the trees.
But the war raged on and, day by day, crept closer to the gardens…
The night mother saw this and worried. She appeared once more to the orphans and told them they should take steps to defend themselves. The oldest and toughest children should all band together and be ready to fend off any intruders.
This they did, and sure enough some stragglers soon began to investigate the garden, and were rebuffed. Several times this happened, and each time the older children protected the garden, and it remained secure, and the younger children played.
However, the more attacks they repelled, the more restless the older children became. Why, they asked, should they have to live in fear? They had become strong, more than a match for anything out there– or so they believed. Mother night knew better, and appeared to them once more to try to warn them from this folly, to plead with them to stay safe in the gardens– but, this one time, they ignored her words, and planned their sortie with childish fervor.
They were preparing to leave when the sky went black. The gaps in the wall were filled with thick impenetrable darkness. They could not leave. The night had come to love them so, she couldn’t bear the thought of having to watch them perish even as her own children had: So she wrapped them all up together in her great black nightrobe and held them tight, so she embraced the gardens in an endless and safe and loving night.
And they were never seen or heard from again.
