Woahhhh, he’s fucking around with the title & subject line…
Okay let’s address that big phat elephant standing over there in the corner.
“but as long as it’s just this one time, and not a weekly occurrence, I’ll be fine…”
– past randy
I may or may not have had caffeine for the last 4 days straight.
…
Yeah I don’t really have any good excuses for this one.
I reckon it happened because I’m trying to cut out too many things in my life at once and caffeine was the weakest link. I wasn’t convinced 100% that I needed it out of my life just yet.
I’ve still got 100% conviction on everything else though and am just gonna focus (by trying my best not to focus) on yeeeeting those once and for all, first and foremost.
outta sight, outta mind, alcohol who?
The reason I caved this week is also because I didn’t have a good substitute for it, next time when I quit for good I’ll be sure to have some nice non-caffeinated drink alternatives.
No point giving this dumb little fucking plant anymore screen time though, I’m just gonna move on with my life and just take the L for the time being.
stupid, dumb, little, fucking bitch ass plant lookin fuck
Now I could tell you a bunch of mundane yet still semi-interesting stories about my week,
…like how after checking directions on my phone while driving my scooter, I confidently dropped it back into the “front storage pocket” of my vehicle, only to realise that I had completely missed the pocket and sent my phone clattering onto the road and under the wheel of the bike behind me.
(luckily only the very corner of the phone went under and it’s only got a lil scratch on it, thank fuck for that)
…or how after arriving at the immigration office to get my visa extended, I sat there waiting for 3 hours, the TV was playing some really serious Indonesian military training videos, and rounding them out with episodes of Mr Bean.
…but we both know that’s not what we’re here for.
/dev
WE’RE HERE FOR THE PROGRESS.
What brilliant problems have I been wrestling with this week?
Well, towards the start of it, truth be told – not a lot.
The only brilliant problem I wrestled with was one I like to call “How do I not shit myself?” – after getting a nice dose of the illustrious Bali belly.
So it wasn’t off to the best start…
But I picked up the slack towards the end of it and I’m back in the game baybee (with the help of an almost placebo-like invincibility provided by a certain molecule that shall not be named).
During my visit to the immigration office, amidst my 3-hour wait in line, I took the time to catch up on Ryan’s brilliant UI blog series he’s been putting out recently on his Substack.
I’d highly recommend the read if you’re into the more programming-heavy side of things.
It’s articles like these that really get me pumped up to boot open my code editor and tackle some difficult problems.
I also discovered this absolutely BANGER article about the idea of writing a game design log.
It’s like a living, breathing version of a game design doc – one that evolves as the project evolves.
I’ll be documenting all of my daily progress in this doc here going forward which’ll dive deeper into the things I’m working on each day.
The initial concept segment down the bottom of the doc has forced me to have a more clear definition of this project, so it’s scoped out pretty nicely now as a result.
I’ve allowed you to write comments on it, at the risk of completely flooding this Google doc with nonsense (don’t be that guy pls). So if you’ve got any useful ideas/suggestions that come up when giving it a read, just chuck it in the side comments.
All that’s left to do is chip away at this marble slab of a project until I’ve got something resembling a shippable demo.
Here’s what I’ve been up to this week…
You might notice that this sand is falling a lot faster. I added in velocity-based falling which just steps the falling pixel further depending on how fast it’s going (instead of it just being confined to moving 1 pixel per frame).
Kinda like what I did with water spreading out faster horizontally, except it’s vertical and derived from velocity (accelerated each frame by a gravity constant).
The next thing I did was a little hack that just transfers the velocity in the Y to the X when it hits the ground, so that pixels slide out in random directions once they hit the ground.
man these red platforms are really hurting my eyes, I should defs change the colour
This makes the piles feel a bit more natural, even despite the fact I still have a very uniform square brush.
All of this progress so far is just loosely following some ideas I found in this really great pixel sim video by the way.
That’s about it for this week’s progress, like I said – was busy trying to not shit myself for the majority of it, so I didn’t get a massive amount done.
I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve for making the sand pile up even better diagonally, so I’ll be working on that next. After that I might try and tackle getting those fluids to feel nice, which’ll be a bit of a daunting undertaking, but I’m all for it.
As always, best of luck with the week ahead chief, have a bloody brilliant one.
– randy