Day 98
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." - Jean-Luc Picard, played by Sir Patrick Stewart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TCX90yALsI
That sums things up extremely well. Back when I was in high school, at the time I had the ideal where all you need to succeed was hard work and effort. With my enthusiasm at the time, it felt like an ascension to greatness was inevitable. Now, reality hit *HARD!* For a what-if, say Amanda were real, in this depressing timeline...with that hypothetical, she'd probably be one of those 4.0 students who still couldn't get into medical school, so she'd be as broken in spirit as I am.
So now, with rejection at every turn, all I've got are my video games, including this baby I'm crafting with my own two hands and all the free time I can wield.
(Friday...)
Talk about a day of rest; I truly meant it when I say it's getting harder and harder to get out of bed. And the backwards thinking at home isn't helping. I find rejection at every turn, as though merely functioning is hopeless. Everyone else is just as helpless, with the unending excuses.
I just wish there were someone in my trusted sphere who'd go "Here, I'll help you" then actually do the things I can't bring myself to.
(Saturday...)
I've been kept on my ear for days now. No idea why, it's not from medicine and I haven't had any vertigo. Maybe it's just all the sadness. I really don't know. All I know is, it's like a nonstop drowsiness where all I can be bothered to do is crawl into bed and go to sleep. But today, I want to at least try and focus on getting something done, even if I have to crawl the whole way there.
5:30 PM, I am slowly starting to get my brain back into the right gear for working on this. I know it's a holiday weekend, but that doesn't matter when you're unemployable.
(And I just realized that for the new enemies, that means new Codex pages are back on the to-do list!)
5:45 PM, started drawing the first bad guy, a tiny "Brain Bug" as it's known. I wanted a visual sputtering effect. Just remember, when animating, inconsistency is a GOOD thing because that makes the characters seem less rigid.
When I say school is "incredibly powerful", that means, "HOW powerful?" Honestly, in this very specific chapter, the knife won't do the gory kills, because that's school's job. THAT is how powerful it is. And I want the death sound to be a distinctly chilling cry of alien pain!
Now remember, I'm still at a CRAWLING pace, so if things take a while, you know why.
6:15 PM, got 4 frames of animation for a hexagon with a bunch of moving triangles. That's 1 new bad guy. Took about half an hour just to make a bunch of TRIANGLES?! Yeah, like I said, I'm CRAWLING. Next is the Codex entry, and later we need 2 different deaths (one normal, and the "gory kill" from school).
6:40 PM, the CODEX page is done. And we are at about 1 hour on the clock, particularly after subtracting a couple toilet breaks.
Although...staring at the Harpie is giving me ideas for THAT "gory kill" as well, and it involves Scarlet chopping the wings and carving out that god-forsaken tattoo in the arm.
7:15 PM, file conversion and time to implement in-game.
7:45 PM, got distracted, but I'm starting the code for these little guys. There's no Duke check, so that makes damaging simpler.
8:15 PM, I got distracted, and I'm "almost done" putting this little guy into the game, after which point I'll take a lunch break (after dark) and see how I feel when I come back.
So it looks like 1) they're a PINCH too fast, and 2) I forgot to make them hurt Scarlet. Oh and 3) the test sound effects don't stop when they die. I also notice that weapons don't disappear when hitting them, like the COVID needle, and honestly, I'm tempted to keep that as a feature to show how "differently" things behave inside this strange new dimension.
8:25 PM, either way, I'm going for a meal break. Still need to actually implement the Codex page, now that it's been drawn out.
8:50 PM, after a small meal, I hope you don't mind the sound of Donald Trump's voice, because you'd be hearing that noticeably often around the house. If you ask me, none of those old men can care about my game, so I have no reason to care about them.
9:10 PM, considering "gory kills" are supposed to heal Scarlet while she's out in the field and the implementation of healing items are extremely limited at this time, I added one such event at the "Create" phase of the "cruelty dead" for the new enemy to add more health to Scarlet, and if it goes over 100, then set it to 100.
All I know is, I really can't focus. Back to Youtube and other video games.
9:30 PM, My brain is trying to tell me to make something bigger, stronger, and scarier inside the alien's brain. Or, just make more backgrounds and enlarge the maze that is the alien brain ITSELF! Because either way, I'm not feeling all "THE POWER" this weekend, but I still want to have SOMETHING to show for the time.
11:20 PM, while going for my extended break by enjoying Youtube videos discussing video games, I got another idea for an abstract bad guy: "phantoms". Now, I know what you're thinking, "Jay, that's such a generic name for a minion." Just, hear me out. I want some kind of visual distortion, its telling audio being creepy heavy breathing, it's the sort of thing that would add another layer of "unnerving" to the already surreal premise. Maybe that could be a boss design, having several phases with each one getting weirder or creepier, up to like 3 or 5 different iterations until the brain finally capitulates.
If the whole Chapter 3 is off-putting, that's by design. Given how xenophobic the Kingdom of Badass narratively seems to be, how much farther outside of "comfort zone" can you go than "LITERALLY inside your enemy's MIND"?! I said a few Dev Diaries back that Chapter 3 was going to be a trip, and boy did I mean it.
Short of it, it's another layer of horror, albeit with the caveat that a savvy player should understand, "*I'M* the badass here, not this stupid alien scum! *THEY* should be afraid of *ME!*" And if possible, I want dialogue and/or even cutscenes to reaffirm that.
(Sunday...)
12:15 AM, then an idea hit me. Have one of the alien rooms just be a giant background that's effectively a mural which doubles as explaining its "memories".
Scarlet: "If I had to guess, this looks like one of the memory banks."
Duke: "That means we're on the right track! Try to find something useful, like where the important dudes are."
Then for one of the optional ones (or just a glorified way of telling the player "wrong way"), there's a comment on, "Look at this, we've got some kind of weird timeline."
"Dude, that's their LORE! It's no jackpot, but still, we've got ourselves a bonus."
And a specific portion of a specific room would have a collision check so when Scarlet gets there, she'd be like "I found it", and the plot can continue. OR, she could comment on said LORE from the bad guys' point of view.
So while I have the cool ideas, the hard part is actually putting that down onto digital paper, and seeing it through to the game engine. And that's where the momentum stops: how SPECIFICALLY am I going to pull this off! I only super vaguely see it in my head, but nothing's crystalized enough to draw it out.
6:10 PM, then I got the perfect idea. Thinking about how Chapter 3 is all about probing an alien's brain, Amanda's bonus dialogue between Chapters 2 and 3 would consist of explaining the benefits and dangers of the "intrusive psychoanalysis", which makes a lot of sense in the context that Amanda's a certified psychiatrist. I also want to try and highlight the fact that Amanda IS Scarlet's MOM. (It's something you won't see without the "All Companions" cheat since Amanda does not narratively join the party until after Violet, and Violet's in the midway point. Speaking of Violet, I can always do more sisterly bonding for bonus dialogue, too.)
All I know is, I usually describe Amanda as having orange armor, but in her older form, that armor lost its shine and thus became more of a dull bronze color. It's still no less awesome than it functioned back in World War 3, however. But, like I did with the cColonel, for Amanda both her body and her armor, I wanted to visibly show the AGE. This is a middle-aged woman who's had a decade of combat and a good decade or so focused on practicing her medical trade. (That's canon, in the timeline, she stopped being a true combatant at 2023, with the end of the 10-year contract, but stayed in the armed forces in the non-combat role of doctor.)
6:45 PM, after a lot of sputtering around in my own ideas and distractions, and I'm starting to try and draw those dialogue boxes now.
7:55 PM, this is definitely a crawling pace. It shouldn't take a whole hour just to do 4 or 5 dialogue boxes! But if you wanted efficiency, you'd be paying me for my time and effort here. Because when left to my own devices with nothing to push me but my own enthusiasm, all that "inefficiency" and "distraction" is simply "part of the creative process".
(Speaking of inefficiency, I wanted to try and at least show a piece of what the family lifes are like for the main Special Ed students. We see plenty of that through Scarlet's eyes, with everyone smart, cute, and tough. Tom's is the saddest, since his parents DO care, they're just powerless to fix Down Syndrome. Earnest has a super overbearing perfectionist household, so stress is through the roof. And Austin is the opposite, where his Uncle Rob can be summed up by the rapper catchphrase, "SMOKE WEED EVERY DAY!" Which leaves the boy to fend for himself as the closest thing to a caregiver is too busy getting high off "pot brownies" to be bothered. What these four collectively show is a decent contrast between "common" and "noble" classes of society in this phase of the fictional, alternate timeline. You'll notice that "common" folk tend to be a lot more "flawed" and "limited" than anyone "noble", though SOME of the "nobles" can be a bit snobbish or uppity, which is fair given their higher expectations for the human race - and the correlation for disappointment with the shortcomings of the rest of the species that reality consistently demonstrates. I'm mentiong this here and now because I wish that sometime in the future I can better show these nuances in the game, because lore is important. Like, the phrase "Get a job" is only spoken by the last of the Baby Boomers, a fossil of a bygone mindset that only fits in a museum touted by the few that did not yet die of old age or COVID. With that in mind, digressions lead to digressions where I could write a whole episode titled "OK, Boomer" to point out all the different points of how the "old world" simply does not fit in the 2040s inherited by "The Short Bus Generation". Basically, the bodies, the minds, the attitudes, they are all complete DINOSAURS! Again, creative process, it's not so easy to draw those boxes when my brain wants to spew these kinds of background details.)
9 PM, Scarlet's just too cute. I made a waving image into a Discord exclusive emote. Go there to use it, or just enjoy this one-time feature in the Dev Diary. Because if you ask me, this is peak cuteness.
One other writing note, when I looked up the word "Psychonaut", what I learned according to rudimentary search engine is that the word actually originated with hippie drug contexts, based on their hallucinations. The word's meaning morphed when it was used for the cult classic video game titled "Psychonauts", and that direction is furthered in Short Bus lore to refer to anyone using the machine of "intrusive psychoanalysis" since you're almost literally inside someone's mind (similar to the old video game, but with technology instead of magic or psychic power). Thus, the term "psychonaut" is actually - in lore terms - a branch from the study of psychiatry, particularly in the context to diagnose more intensively and decisively, which once the right consent is given, cuts a lot of the "bullshit" with a doctor interviewing a patient (and getting potentially misleading results from the old-fashioned Q&A approach). IN THEORY, this can be used to treat (or even CURE) mental illness, but sadly, such stories are merely "myths and legends"...not "myth" as in a falsehood, but "myth" as in mythology, meaning you'd have to be GOD-tier levels of badass to make it real.
9:40 PM, finally done drawing. And I almost forgot, the Codex page is not actually implemented; we just put the sprite into the engine, but didn't weave it into the book yet. All I know is, I'm done drawing for this weekend, so now it's time to give instructions for the computer to OBEY!
10:05 PM, got the rudimentary variables checked, for 1 codex page plus a dialogue string of 6 boxes. I even got a debug key if I wanted to repeatedly try this out; it's F7. Time for testing.
And once again, the chain is broken, and loading with F9 doesn't seem to fix that. The song's familiar, but I don't remember all the steps by rote yet. (Why does it take TWO presses of F to move dialogue along and NOT one?! And why is it skipping all of Scarlet's lines?!)
10:15 PM, so NOW it works as intended. Instead of the "Create and Delete" structure I had for previous dialogue chains in recent memory (Super Hobo, I believe), NOW it behaves as intended with the "Change Instance". Computers, they are so consistently inconsistent, but as long as it works the way you want it to, it's all good in the end.
I've also shrunk the Rifle Start so that it won't occur when she's halfway across the Armory. QUALITY OF LIFE! :P
On that note, I've shrunken the "start" dialogue objects to try and lessen the risk of overlap, in the preparation for a hypothetical where Scarlet would try to talk to BOTH parents at the same time in a way the script had not intended. Computers are so absolute with their rules, which would be great for a dictator like myself if they weren't so inconsistent about them. Computers are absolute when they're functioning properly, is all I know. There are advanced tricks (like "machine learning") that aim to make such rigid mechanisms more "flexible", but that's well beyond my education level.
10:25 PM, it still feels like the variable check for the dialogue is being saved too hard, like F9 right after conversation should set it to 0, but it's staying at 1. The debug key flips the variable, but I shouldn't need a debug.
Let's see what happens when we make the last dialogue box talk to the .ini file everything gets saved into.
...Wait, the way I have it set up specifically prevents the repeat no matter what, instantly saving the conversation. So there's no repeating past that point. That's another thing for the debug key to do, write 0 to the location in the .ini file.
At least the Codex mostly works.
10:30 PM, with hours of work and days of crawling (plus struggling to just get out of bed and stop playing games when I *DO* get out of bed), at this point, with the enemy and Amanda's tiny chat, I just can't take it anymore. I have GOT to push SOMETHING out to you guys!
10:40 PM, everything looks good with the video. Time to go to the online backend to present the video and the written Dev Diary.
10:45 PM, here's today's video:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11PDn5wSRCEa0__wCRJpPAAISAoy35amh/view?usp=sharing
The 1 year milestone still holds the Steam Record for most views of all my entries there, at 56.
For later, I want to build more lore for the ALIENS and PUSSIES! Plus, maybe have a multi-stage "phantom" that "persists" between brain rooms.
Semper Bellum!
Jay