I'm taking a vacation
I wasn't sure how much vacation I had taken this year, so I had to look through chat logs with friends and my programming/work logs to try and piece together when I had taken time off. it turns out that I took 1 day off work back in March after I finished fixing bugs with Chessplosion's dungeon mode, and I haven't taken any other vacation this year. At various points during the year, I thought I had good reasons for not taking a vacation:
- Back in March, I wanted to add a map screen to Dungeon Mode and then I wanted to immediately start prototyping an interesting idea for my next game
- From June to August, we were in the middle of a heatwave and the pandemic was pretty bad around here, so I wouldn't have been able to go outside or visit anywhere during my vacation
- For the last couple of months, I thought it would be nice to publicly announce the new game before taking time off work
As valid as these reasons are, I'm human and I need to rest. So I'm taking most of this month off work, with the exception of a small amount of character design and animation work that I'll do in a week or two. Next year I'll track my vacation days so I don't make this mistake again.
Cool things I've seen while on vacation this week
- This YouTube video by Jasper about a bug in Breath of the Wild's cel shading is an impressively fun and accessible explanation of modern 3D game rendering. Jasper is one of the nicest and most helpful programmers I have ever worked with, and I highly recommend all of their videos if you're even slightly curious about how 3D games are programmed.
- Rabbit and Steel just got announced! It's an arena shmup boss rush game with online co-op and roguelike-style powerups, by the creator of Maiden and Spell. All of the MMORPG comparisons in the trailer and the marketing text put me off at first, but once I understood what the game actually was, it looked great! It reminds me of how I completely avoided the Yakuza games in the PS2 days because I only ever saw them described as "the Japanese Grand Theft Auto", but I loved them once I saw how they actually worked.
- It appears that the domain name of a game that I worked on (Indivisible) was not renewed, and it was bought by people who filled it up with generic AI-generated text and art to try and get clicks for casino game ads. I love everyone on this list of characters, especially the AI-generated Lanshi art. Truly incredible character designs.
- I'm not sure if this counts as a cool thing I've seen, but I've been trying to clear Metal Slug 2 in a single credit and I want to try playing a bunch of other other arcade shooting games afterwards. I started doing this because I wanted to get some ideas on how to turn my old propeller shooting prototype into a full game, but at this point I'm just playing them for fun. Arcade games are great! Maybe I'll try to get back into fighting games after this?
Thanks to everyone who bought Chessplosion last week!
I almost forgot to mention this, but I'm sneaking it in at the end. Last week I mentioned that Chessplosion was in a Steam sale for games made in the town where I live. That sale has now ended, and Chessplosion ended up selling more copies in that sale than in any other Steam sale so far! It's great to know that people are still interested in Chessplosion, all this time after its initial launch. Thank you so much to everyone who supported the game or told other people about the sale. It helps a lot!
That's all I have time for this week. I'm exhausted, so I'm going to get back to playing games and sleeping and trying to recharge. If you want to yell at me for going so long without taking a vacation, or if you have any suggestions for games I should play during my time off work, reply to this email and let me know!