If you’ve been keeping up on the blog for the past few months, you may have noticed that it’s been a while since I’ve posted any updates regarding monthly projects. What updates there have been haven’t really included any finished results. The fact is, these last few months haven’t been very conducive to getting work on these projects done – and, even when circumstances have allowed it, I have not had the motivation to pursue these projects as devotedly as I’d need to to bring them to completion. Even though I’ve been happy with how the weekly posts have been going here, that’s really only half the work I’m supposed to be doing. For March I’d wanted to collaborate with others to bring a reasonably-sized 2d platformer to life. There was less interest in the project than I’d hoped and I had less time and energy to pursue it than I’d hoped, so it eventually went on hiatus – hopefully to resume someday but, well, we’ll see. Afterwards, for May, I wanted to develop a vector graphics drawing tool for Unity. This is still an idea I have some enthusiasm for, but it turned out in the end that I needed to do a great deal of studying in order to understand the fundamentals of computer graphics that would allow me to bring this to life. It turns out that just understanding the math isn’t enough, you have to understand how the math translates into instructions that you can pass into a graphics card. And, though I eventually got a handle on these problems (I think), the next month was so busy that I ended up having to time or energy left over to work on actually programming the tool itself.
And now it’s July. I really don’t want to turn this project that I have barely any concrete work done on into a three-month project. I really don’t feel like finishing that platformer right now. So, for the time being, I’m doing something different. I need a win, here.
Five months have passed since I made Convergence Compulsion for Wizard Jam 8, and since it is a semi-annual event the next one is rolling around again. As with the last jam, it’s intended to last two weeks – but I’m going to spend the entire month on it since no one is really a stickler about these things. I don’t know what my project is going to be, but my commitment at this stage is to A) Actually finish a damn game, and B) Make it shorter and more polished than Convergence Compulsion, since I felt like a lot of players lost patience with it before the end (though I remain proud of that project).
Once the month is out, once this game is done, I’m going back to EverEnding for August. I’m currently considering ways to integrate EverEnding into my Patreon monthly work, and I’ll have more on that in a month or so. For the time being, I have to figure out what I’ll be working on for Wizard Jam 9. Wish me luck!