Biweekly Blog: Stress Under Duress

Yay, I followed through! These past two weeks have been an unexpected maelstrom of work and stress, but the result is I got a lot of work done. Life keeps throwing wrenches at me, and I’m still catching them before they hit me, but damn that’s a lot of wrenches…

• General: Last week for me consisted of an endless cycle of classes, meetings, interviewing people and crunching for homework, while not having much time to eat in between. It’s not quite the same thing, but I think I have a newfound respect for people doing 80 hour workweeks. All work and no play makes Jack a husk of his former self in a very short time, and Jack should really dial back a bit.

• School: For a class of mine, I had created another small game in a team. I would have gotten this project done in a day or two, but I had been paired up with two individuals who, well… they’re still learning, nothing wrong with that (up until they removed my work with a bad Git merge job). We made Space Invaders, ‘nuff said.

• Capstone: After talking with Tim Ford from Blizzard (oh my lord what an opportunity), our team had a talk about what the hell we want to do with this lukewarm FPS that we had created over the course of the last few months. There’s nothing glaringly wrong with it, but during development no one put their foot down and said “THIS is our game,” nor did we make a rigid game design document (GDD), so we ended up with the interactive manifestation of middle-road compromises. For the next four weeks, our team’s main focus is on making this game fun. I’ll get back to you on how our efforts went at some point.

• Miscellaneous: Like last week, this encompasses all of my side project and tertiary goings-on. And also, like last week, I haven’t done much of anything. It’s a bit hard to grind on side stuff when you have a lot of stuff to do; sometimes it feels like there’s not enough hours in the day! Three projects in particular that I really want to work on are Mega Man Maker, my PkMn Mystery Dungeon clone, and Portal rendering + physics in Unity (something I’ll post a tutorial on when I get the chance).

I won’t lie, I feel pretty weak and tired from school and assignments. I do not find joy in constantly shifting back and forth between things, even if those things are interesting to me. I would much rather be focusing on at most 4 things, and doing well on those things, giving me the mental room to breathe. But hey, gotta deal with what life gives you. Sometimes it’s lemons, sometimes it’s a suffocating panic attack – no biggie.