EverEnding DevBlog 164: New Ways

I went to New York and back, which is why I didn’t have an update last week. I had a real nice time, but it was also super exhausting. I took the opportunity, however, to do some thinking. About how I work, about what I want to change in my daily routine, about how my current projects are going. And I came to a few realizations.

First, I think I need to both be more aggressive about scheduling work for myself and scheduling breaks. I want to have established days off of each of my projects as well as days on. For that reason, I’m going to be specifically avoiding working on commissions on weekends (days when I write Problem Machine and post the dev blog) and probably taking the day after that, Sunday or Monday, to take a break from EverEnding work. You might notice that the days kind of slide around a bit there and, yeah, that’s just kind of how my schedule seems to work out and it seems more feasible to work around that than to fix it.

I’m also going to start working on two parallel projects, with the goal of getting a bit done on both of them each day. One of these projects will be EverEnding, pretty much for the foreseeable future into perpetuity. The other I’ll refer to as my floating project and will be a bunch of different things, but for now it will be AnxEdit. That means I’ll be trying to get a bit done each day (except for break days) on AnxEdit and on the core EverEnding project. I haven’t quite gotten here yet, so I haven’t decided what part of EverEnding I’ll be working on concurrently – likely either building the levels out or doing some special effects programming. Actually, to start with I’ll probably do some production work, look at what needs to be done and build out a task list.

Since I achieved my goal of writing a music track each month last year (new album coming soon!) I’m going to be trying to build out from that this year, trying to do something a bit less ambitious in pure scope but a lot more ambitious in terms of pushing my comfort zone, and trying to create a new track with lyrics every other month. I have basically no experience with creating lyrics or with writing music to them, so this promises to be a whole new and incredible unnerving venture, given especially how uncomfortable I tend to be with my own voice. Still, that’s just another reason that’s an envelope worth pushing. I’ll probably be starting on that next month since I need to use the rest of this one to wrap up the album.

Anyway! Even though most of that stuff doesn’t strictly have to do with EverEnding, this seemed as good a place as any to talk about these plans. In regard to the specific activities of the last week, since I got back I’ve mostly been working on mastering the album (and coming up with a title for it) and doing more work on AnxEdit. AnxEdit is really coming along, though I realized today that I’d made some fairly massive oversights in the realm of tools necessary for adding new frames and mapping them to their graphics data. This will require a bit of rethinking the interface for sure. But I have the offset editor component pretty much 100% working now, and the registration point editor is very close to done as well, so overall the progress is encouraging.

It’s like real ugly, I know, but it doesn’t have to look nice. It just has to work.