Have been working hard on You Say Jump I Say How High (thinking of dropping the comma! Big news!) and seem to be at least a bit more on track. At the very least it no longer feels like the world is going to end and I am going to be fired from my unpaid, unsolicited, unreal job as a game maker. One of the oddities of getting (most of) the pseudo physics of the game working is that I’ve had to turn my attention a little more toward the “outward facing” aspect of the physics of the game – that is, how will the player deal with what I’ve done. As someone who once boldly proclaimed “fuck the player!” at GameJam last year, I’m surprised by how much I’ve been thinking about this issue.

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Just a short note to say that the sea is kicking my ass. Well, not the sea, just the virtual water in this current game I’m working on. It’s kind of derailing the entire process of making the game, even, since a couple of the levels I have in mind rely on their being water with some particular “realistic” qualities (notably reaction to density and some idea of equilibrium). This is one of the reasons I wanted to use Box2D, of course, for its water stuff, but then Box2D had other problems that were equally damning. At present I just don’t see a way forward beyond building my own far-too-sophisticated physics engine, which just seems insane for a small game idea I wanted to make quickly and move on from. I’m painfully aware that the more time I spend on this, the more “important” I feel like it’s meant to be, even though it was just a throw-away idea. Darn. That’s all. Just the usual “darkness” period of game making. They say that it’s darkest just before the dawn or something, but that’s bullshit.

I’ve finally managed to get myself back into the coding of my next game You Say Jump, I Say How High after a lot of sadness and angst and despondency. It’s only a couple of hours of solid work today, but I feel like my head is back in the… game. Ha. One thing that has been amusing me today is writing the code for the water because of the strangeness of how the water isn’t water until you say it is…

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Just finished reading Bright Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich. It’s a book about the history of positive thinking in the United States, essentially, more or less starting with positioning “Positive Thought” movement as a reaction to Calvinism and going from there to its various resurrections in the 90s (think Tony Robbins) and most recently in the form of positive psychology (think Martin Seligman).

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For one reason and another I’ve ended up doing heaps of interviews lately, mostly via email, some on the phone/radio, and one actually for a TV show in Norway! It is a supreme weirdness to have someone asking you questions, particularly when they are specifically questions about you and what you think is important, interesting, and the like. Partly this might feel extra strange to me because I’m from New Zealand where we pretty much don’t talk about ourselves, but I imagine that everyone must feel it to some extent.

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