Building modular chunks to craft an evil science lair from. Progress is slower than I’d like, but should improve toward the weekend, I hope.

And then the six year old struck and this is all I got done for the rest of the day… LOL:

Well, I paid a 2D environment artist what I’d consider pretty good money… and he screwed me. I don’t even think it was intentional, he just sucks. Despite his portfolio not containing specific examples of what I wanted, he showed a good skill level over all and I’ve worked with him before, so I went for it.

Well, next time I’ll insist on specific examples. Fuck.

That said, now that I’m forced to produce my own assets, I’m changing to a voxel format, which is not only easy but pretty popular and is already making the game look better. I’m just on a crash course marathon for the next couple of weeks to keep the campaign on schedule. Woo!

The new and improved protagonist, still a work in progress:

My bear person doing the things. Bare bones dynamic lighting at 0:30!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g31i_Gi9MwM

Just working on my silly indie game and hoping to launch a Steam Greenlight and a Kickstarter campaign in the next 2-3 weeks.

Or I will be as of tomorrow.

Long long story which I don’t want to recount right now, but the gist is, I’m 38, IT is not a kind industry to men of my age. Especially not corporate IT, which is all I know how to do at the level that I can be paid for it by an employer. My nerves are shot, I have no hope of finding another job and even if I did I’d just prolong this slow burning nervous breakdown I’ve been having for two years. I mean there’s professional frustration, and stress, and anxiety, and then there’s cardiac arrests and back breaking seizures.

Sooooo we may be selling our house, since Chris’ pay can’t possibly cover our basic expenses, forget about cutting the budget. Maybe moving south to saner markets (housing and food, not employment, because I am burned out. I am beyond burned out. This probably sounds ridiculous but my nerves are not just shot, it’s like I’ve got shell shock.)

I’ve been kicking around an indie game for 2 years now and I’m using some of our small savings to commission level and promotional art to give it a ride on KickStarter and see how that goes. I mean, I may as well. What I’m spending won’t even make one mortgage payment, and even if it did that would be one month longer to pull off the bandaid and not really much help. Maybe it’ll take off. Self employment I can do if I can get somebody to pay me for my talents. Sadly, taking in wookiee costume commissions won’t cover.

Sorry for sucking at updating this page and such like, and not being into Diablo clones and such well enough to converse. I’m glad that you few have stuck around, I like seeing your posts.

I’m off to finish learning the Unity engine libraries (I’ve got a pretty good start on them already) and diagram some level layouts for my artist.

We’ve been wanting to move out of Connecticut for awhile now, so maybe this will turn out to be an opportunity and everything will fall together. Fingers crossed.

My basement is flooded. We got a new washing machine because our old one was about 12 years old and the lid didn’t work right and it smelled funny.

The new one has a computer in it and makes little soft computer noises. It was that or some economy thing that looked like it would fall apart on the truck.

So Day 1, it wouldn’t work at all. The white haired repair guy showed up in his NRA ball cap and plaid shirt and PLUGGED A FREAKING LAPTOP INTO IT to run some diagnostics. Turned out a molex connector had come undone… on the truck. He had to carefully remove the front plastic bezel without destroying the clips (no mean feat) and undo about 14 pan screws to get to it. All better.

Until it started pouring water all over the floor.

Turns out that when I hooked it up, filled with pride and hubris and feeling invincible in my righteous superiority, I didn’t replace any of the rubber washers and just hooked it up with the same ones that had been in there for ten years.

Yeah, when I took the lines back off to replace them today, they were utterly shredded to pieces. Good times.

That’s uhh.. all. Chewbacca did not get wet, although his feet were mere.. err.. feet from the flood site.

I’m really looking forward to being called a sexist on all my social media for saying that I’m totally uninspired by this movie. The prop design sucks, the all female cast is transparently pandering, the sassy black stereotype is tedious, the comedic timing is bad in the trailer, which one would assume is their best shot at representing the thing… Ugh. This is all marketing. Pandering and marketing and none of the soul of the original is apparent here whatsoever.

The effects are pretty, though.

This is why Bill Murray never wanted to do GB 3. He knew the formula had played out. GB 2 proved that, and even GB 2 had some charm. This is just a trope-fest laid over with embarrassing stereotypes and a bad new gen SNL routine. 🙁