I’ve been procrastinating on writing this post, since it’s always galling to admit this: Very Little progress has been made on the project over the last month.
This is not to say I haven’t been working on it – though between a week-long trip and focusing on more immediate work to pay rent I have perhaps not been working as much on it as I ought to. The issue is more that most of the work I’ve been doing has involved slowly revising the code base to work in OpenFL, which really doesn’t give me a lot to show.
It can be discouraging sometimes when the project is in this state. In general I kind of enjoy the work of refactoring, streamlining, and optimizing that goes into revisiting an existing part of the code base like this. However, particularly when it comes to a major restructuring like this, it means there’s a long period of time where the game as a program that can be run and experimented with ceases to exist. Right now, when I want to work on EverEnding, there is precisely one part of the project available for me to work on, and that’s this programming work. Not even especially interesting programming work, at least for now – once the fundamentals are in place I’ll also have a job of making sure the drawing routines are optimal and testing/improving the replacement displacement map filter code I wrote (as it turns out shader programming wasn’t necessary to create it, but I may look into creating a version implemented that way once I have this version working).
For now, there’s not much to say. I don’t know, a lot of the time I feel like I might just be wasting my time here, like I don’t know how to access the kind of discipline and productivity to make a project of this scope feasible, at least not in my current living situation. I wonder a lot if a different project might be a faster or better way to achieve the expression I have been straining towards with EverEnding, or if there’s some way to scale back or streamline this game conceptually which would allow me to work on it in a more effective and productive fashion. It is always difficult to tell which doubts are warning signs to be taken seriously and which are just self-sabotage.
Regardless, I am nearing completion of the changes I’ve made to the Particle System to make multi-threading stuff entirely self-contained within the system itself so I don’t need to negotiate that in the game program, as well as I guess in any other games I hypothetically make with the same tool in the future. There’s definitely a hint of programmer-itis there, where I find myself creating a more general purpose and fool-proofed tool than is actually needed – after a certain point I just gotta accept that sometimes I take the long route just because I feel that it’s more proper, even if it’s less pragmatic. Within this week sometime I think I’ll be able to get back to more interesting work on the project. It sucks getting stalled, but it doesn’t last forever – and, regardless of my doubts about where all this will eventually go, I think I can pursue it with no regrets as long as I enjoy and believe in my process.