This was not my most productive week. Between a heatwave and a charity game speedrunning marathon, I found it very easy to become distracted and very difficult to maintain focus – wait, those mean the same thing. So you see my point.
Still I achieved the main thing I wanted to get done and a fair bit besides. The entity system now supports anonymous entities (or, more accurately, anonymous templates), I have a system for quickly creating attacks with different general parameters in place, and everything seems to mostly work. I’m completely unsure whether this style of trying to work in a more focused way is working out for me: The truth is, working on art and working on programming are very different tasks. In programming, as with writing, I often need to take a break to let an idea gestate, to decide what the exact bounds of the problem are and how best to approach them. This doesn’t necessarily align well with trying to work in a focused block of time. At the same time, maybe that’s all the more reason to focus on the problem, if not over the course of a few hours at once, then over the course of a few hours spread across the duration of the day: If I must work on these problems in the back of my head, then I should be ready to enact them when they emerge from my brain, if not fully baked, then at least slightly better than half.
So the results of this first week’s experiment with different work styles are, I guess, inconclusive. Too many outside influences, too much adjustment. I’ll stick with it a while and see where it takes me.
There is the issue, however, of accountability. My previous methods of trying to get a little bit done every day had a big advantage in that my daily devblog very clearly made me accountable for any progress made or not made. When things went poorly or I was lazy, I had to maintain an idea of exactly how much I was working each day and overall. I’m worried that I don’t have that any more, and I’m not yet sure how to maintain a system of accountability like that without binding myself to a schedule that might end up being more destructive than helpful. Well, I still have these weekly devblogs at least, so that will keep me at least moderately honest for the time being. Perhaps, rather than updating every day or on a schedule, I can set myself a required certain number of daily logs each week? That might be reasonable. Something to think about, at any rate.
Anyway, now that I can quickly and easily create basic variations of melee attack, I’ll work on getting all of the player’s attacks fully implemented (currently only the standing attacks work and they’re a bit slipshod), then see about getting enemy attacks working. Once I get that stuff, I’ll see about getting the alternate versions of the test enemy entity up and running.