Burnout

For the last week or so I've done absolutely no work on the game at all. Why? Because I burnt out on it.

For the last month or so I've been doing almost nothing but coding, drawing and designing, and it had begun to take its toll on me. I'm not a professional; I have other commitments, and, to be honest, I'm an innately lazy person.

The straw that broke my idling, sloth-like back was the realisation (hardly a shocking one) that I have absolutely no artistic ability, talent or potential of any form, and that making background artwork was much harder than I thought it was going to be. To be honest, I still don't know exactly how I'm going to deal with it, but hey, that's a problem for future me, and I hate that guy. If the worst comes to the worst I'll have to go and stand outside the arts building and "persuade" the least irritating person there to do some art for me. That's a sign of my near-negative artistic talent: I don't even know what the verb for making art is: is it "making"? "Creating"? "Doing"? Who knows. I don't even own a beret. Or a Macbook. And I don't smoke, and prefer to be clean-shaven. Terrible.

Anyway, so I took a week off. I wrote an essay on the complexity of Gothic villains, a translation of The Tale of Balin from Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, and a commentary on the recursive microcosms present in Balin. I also learnt a new card trick, discovered a secret passage in the university, and played a lot of Starcraft II. A lot. I went from Bronze league to Platinum, and then fell back down to Silver, all the space of three or four days. It was fun, but now I'm fed up with it and so am ready to return to the game.

Because I'm making so little progress on the art front, I decided to implement something that I had intended to save for much later in the development cycle: multiplayer. At the moment I'm working on getting support for up to four characters - while more could probably be added without causing too much lag, it's a bit of a balance issue. There's full friendly fire, so it will be sort of self balancing, but that doesn't scale perfectly by any stretch. Once it's done and all the artwork is original (even if it's atrocious: at the moment I'm just using sprites from Realm of the Mad God) I'll start releasing videos.