Doing is Redoing

I've started using a time management app, Hours. The effect has been unclear. I've definitely worked a lot this week, put in 36 hrs of Flock of Dogs time, including two hours of what I'm calling "promotional" work. I spent 28 hrs on my day job and 2 hrs on a board game I'm helping design. That's all I'm tracking currently. Now, I'm not super strict about turning on and off the timer, so there's probably a few hours or so of dog walks being counted as programming time, but, you know, I think about the game while walking the dog? Although I don't have any records, this was an abnormally large amount of time spenet this week working in Unity. I think the factors that contributed to this were (a) I have the looming deadline of the Made in MA event, (b) I was sick the previous week and I had done a lot of brainstorming, caught up on work reports for my normal job, and (c) probably felt a mixture of guilt from not working more and a bit of wanting a 'high score' on my new app. Anyway, it felt good to spend a lot of time on the game, but I think about what I all I did and I feel a little disappointed. 36 hours and I finished what? I redid building spawning, I redid the layout of some buildings/designed some new ones, I redid the level loading, I redid monster spawning, redid how the whale "lands" at a building, and I redid the special item system. Those were the big items. I guess when I list it there I feel better, because if I had been adding all that, which would have been approximately the same amount of work, I'd feel great about myself. This is in agreement with most of the general design process I read about. Just keep throwing pasta at the wall. If it doesn't stick, get back to work. If it sticks, cool. Writing is rewriting.

Anyway, a new thing I did add is that when in the river, there is now whale-autopilot. I like this a lot. It's still a little buggy, I think, with some geometry issues with the whale rotating the wrong way, sometimes. Maybe it makes the whale feel more alive? Anyway, narrative-wise, I'm describing this as the whale's instinct for getting home. The whale knows to follow the river, bceause the whale knows that's the way home. When the whale isn't in the river, it doesn't know which way to go. This also makes the decision to go off river more distinct. It also makes 2-player FoD more viable. And it mixes up the pacing with, basically, an on rails shooter experience when you let the whale autopilot in the river. You can manually override the autopilot in the river, of course. That's the only way to get out of the river, but you could also go along the river while piloting as a player.