Will the flaming thing be my friend?

 For those who don't follow me on Twitter, I am still working on a Stone age game, but I dropped the RTS aspect in favour of a Survival game, which is really what I started with some time ago. The player is a human (with suspiciously long arms which may or may not change with the final models when I get to making them or getting someone else to make them) that still has a lot to learn, like what the hell that grey stone thing that fits in your hand might be used for and if that flaming thing that moves hysterically might or might not want to be friends with you (it does not, but how would you tell)?

The idea is that there'll be a very big procedurally generated world with all kinds of biomes with each their specific things. At the start of the game, this one human appears somewhere and the world says good luck.

I'm planning to make a bigger dev log on what we have right now, but there's a couple of things to pick up and eat and there's really two ways to die right now. What else does one need? Well...

I'm planning to have a crafting and building system, more dangerous things than just these two and generally more things to do. What I hope to achieve is a nice explorer sandbox game where the player can use a couple of simple systems to build an interesting experience. There'll be more options than would make sense (except if you're one of the growing group of people into eating rocks and sticks). I'm looking forward to slowly seeing this one grow. 

The Work Place and the Play Place

Right! That's been a long long time ago and it's 2020, so well, it's 2020. Last time I wrote anything on this blog, that was in February, a couple of weeks before I quit going to the office. In the bus was my time to write my blog posts about my game. Now it's half-November and I haven't seen my colleagues for over half a year now, because I've been working from home from the start of March onward. Now that saves my my bus commute, so there should be more time to work on my game and there is, but it's not been all the productive really. 

First, with working at home, something weird happens. Work is my work en game development, I do that mainly because I like to do that as a hobby. That's nice. because I'll have much more time for that, but there is this thing that I call the Problem of the Work Place and the Play Place (abbreviate it to PWPPP if you like, but it's not mandatory). What I mean here is that the place where I work is exactly the same place where I relax. I'm sitting on the same chair, looking at the same two monitors while I type on the same keyboard and drag the same mouse around. Something is odd about that. 

Vitruvian Man, by Leonardo da Vinci

What I used to do in this long forgotten pre-Covid-age (I'm a historian too, I know about old stuff) is that I went to the office, did the work stuff there, went home, listening to podcasts in the bus and on the bike, had dinner, socialised with my wife and went upstairs to the computer to work on my game or play another game while my wife was watching TV. Now that is completely out of whack and that's weird. Don't get me wrong: this is not by far the most important thing about Covid in our lives, but I want to get it out there, because it does matter in its own little way and I'm positively sure other hobbyist game developers who spend their working time staring at a computer screen can relate.

We're living in a strange time, right now where we get challenges that we're not wired for. It's not the worst thing we can have to face; I'm not in a war situation, but that's not the point. The point just is that things are weird and unreliable and that things often work in different ways than you might expect. Maybe this is also why I'm reaching back to this devlogging again. Not to make it bigger than it is, but it's something I understand. I bought a webcam today and might just try streaming some of my programming, 3D modelling and designing on Twitch or YouTube. I think I got it to work with a game of Age of Empires II which I just played.

Speaking of which, isn't it fun that I got to my highest ELO in months? Crawling out of the pits of despair into the top-40 000 of the world. As long as one loves doing it, right?