I’m streaming on Twitch right now, it’s my first day back to game development since bottom surgery 4 weeks ago.

Opening the project again, I’ve found myself unable to recall exactly what I was planning on doing next in null or what the status was when I last worked.

why am I doing a dev journal?

I want to keep a dev journal now because I want to have a clearer, more focused direction in my work. I also would like to use it to cover my frequently deficient memory, reduce context-switching costs (as I can just read the last journal to remember what I did), as well as increase the speed at which I can deal with a repeated issue.

Examples of things I could write:

• I want to document the problems I run into and what I did to try and solve them
• Definitive solutions to problems I run into
• I want to remember what I’m planning on doing and why I want to do them
• I want to remember what I’ve said to others who are working on the game with me

what am I doing in null?

There is some uncommitted and unfinished work on my computer. Reviewing it, it appears that I was working on implementing navigation agents so that NPC’s could move around. I vaguely remember this code not working for some reason, but I don’t really want to fix it now either. I’ve decided to discard the work because it doesn’t seem I had gotten very far and I’d rather start over from scratch.

I need to figure out what the next step in null would be. The game doesn’t feel like a “game” yet. I hypothesis that this is because while some systems for the game are implemented, there is no content to actually explore as a player.

I could implement the following:

• A short fetch quest for the player to do (missing inventory code)
• Blood banking mechanic (missing assets and code)
  • Also requires clock mechanic (missing assets and code)

The following do not feel like good options:

• Adding task-less dialog which the player only reads
  • The player doesn’t need to explore the world
• Add character portraits to dialog system
  • Seems like polish, doesn’t create gameplay for the player
• Contract signing sequence (missing code)
  • Important for story, but still doesn’t create gameplay
• Main Menu, intro narrative
  • Sets up the story, which is important, but there still wouldn’t be a game after the cutscene

So I think I should implement a fetch quest, since the blood banking mechanic seems like it would take a long time and I’m not quite warmed up enough to work on it and I might also need to make placeholder assets for. The other low-hanging fruit also doesn’t seem worth doing right now since I want to emphasize getting gameplay.