#12: And the Circus Carries On
“To have joy, one must share it.”
Project update
Despite sticking to my study/work split schedule that means I can only work ony my script on Saturday and Sunday, this week I managed to add another 9,000 words to my script, which I’m very happy about. I’m sticking very well to my first draft work ethic of “no looking back / editing” except to the extent where I have to go back and read the most recent work to orient myself, or maybe to cut and paste things as I write them because I remember that their flow fits better elsewhere. On the whole, I am creatig new material rather than updating what’s already been created, and it’s a methodical process that is paying dividends.
So, what am I typing away at? I’ve been writing a lot about my early childhood contemplations on life, death, power, and gods, but with additions as informed by my adult life. You could say it’s a conversation between my child and adult self, full of curious questions and wonderings. It’s spiritual without being religious, because religion itself isn't the substance of the story, and is only one specific manifestation of thought around life and death. An interest in power and making my own life choices is the substance of what I’m writing about, which was important to me from the get-go. I thought about what death night mean, and was absorbed in the different conceptions of it: as a place, a state, a person, a concept, a process, a moment, there are as many ways to conceive of it as there are people, but some are particularly resilient over time. Who are those with power, how do they get it and why, what do they do with it? Do they act in our interest? Does it matter? Can I decide what's best for me? Can I change myself any way I choose, or must I develop like everyone else around me?
These were the sorts of questions that I was interested in as a kid, when I didn't yet really understand that my feelings about myself, and my body, weren't what everyone else was feeling.
You might notice yhat these are perfectly reasonable questions for all people, and children, to ask. That shouldn't surprise anyone - questions of bodily autonomy, spirituality, development and agency are common to all people, and matters about the way we live are, at their core, matters of human dignity. Trans kids just happen to be one of the groups of children who are told that the motivation behind their questioning is wrong. In some small way, I don't actually know whether I am better or worse off, having kept more or less all of that wonder and curiosity to myself, as a kid. Maybe I could have been a force for change in the world from my earliest moments? Or maybe ridicule and cruelty would have been the end of me. Part of this process of writing through reflection is that the answer, for me, is: I will never know, and so long as I am happy in this moment, then ultimately I can choose to be content with not knowing, because of the infinities and multiplicities of the way I could turn out, this one is perfectly happy right now.
I have been feeling enormous synergy between my study and my project for the last two weeks because we have moved into the realm of rendering. What’s rendering, my loves? As I am learning, it’s essentially… everything that appears on your screen or monitor. You may or may not remember that I mused on shaders many weeks ago, when I made my own game over about a week and a half. Rendering is the application of shaders for the purpose of creating stuff on a screen for you to look at.
Let’s make that a bit less abstract: For the last two weeks I’ve been learning how to take one scene of a videogame, and make it look like something else. Imagine that you took a photo of a sunset with your camera. Now, you could apply a filter over the top of that to make it look extra bright, or blurry, or sepia, black and white, and so on. You could cut the sun out and put it somewhere else, like on a different photo, put it on the moon, or in the distance behind a separate wedding photo. Pretty cool, right? We can do the same thing in videogames, in real-time - and that’s how you get effects such as motion blur, or making a scene look especially cartoon-y, or film noir… but we can do practically anything with this. Want to make your game look like it was drawn with pen on paper? Sure. Want to make it look like it’s underwater? Done. Want to make it look like it’s an infra-red camera that detects heat, refract the screen so that you feel like you’re an 8-eyed spider hunting prey, or apply a heat-haze as if you’re in a desert? Easy. Anything you can imagine, you can do to pixels on a monitor, and this is extremely appealing to me, because I want my game to be visually immersive, and use that for emotionally evocative effects. I already have numerous ideas for how light, sound, movement, etc interact with the world, and it is really, really exciting to be learning how that works and how to use it.
Personal reflections - Perspective
This week I am comfortably reflecting on one of the benefits of project-managing this work into a series of the smallest possible pieces, so that all bodies of work are individually actionable tasks. This effectively hides the scary part of the project from my conscious brain, which is its size. That’s no bad thing, though, because it’s not a magic trick that taking 1,000 bites is easier than unhinging one’s jaw to eat the world whole. As a result I’m not really experiencing unanticipated stress about it, it would just be nice to have more days in the week to work on it, rather than other tasks.
I’ve now been back at my career job as an accountant, and I am a lot more tired than I expected to be from returning to work. I’m not doing extra hours, but the concentration and focus required is consuming more mental fuel than I would like, reducing my ability to focus on other things after my 9-5. That’s fine, ultimately, but I need to pare back my expectations about how much extracurricular work I can do in a week, as I’m currently unable to focus on my extra textbooks or online course after a day of work, which is disappointing.
Games I played
Bwomp bwomp, no games played this week >:( I hereby declare that to make up for this game-related-failure, this week I shall play two!!!
Textbook learnings
Unreal Engine 5
For a small amount of time, I’ve been reading more into Unreal Engine 5, the intended target game engine for my game. This application is simply astounding, and the communtiy around it is incredibly clever and skilled. For the last few weeks I’ve had trouble with feeling overwhelmed by learning a new way of working with Unreal, and I am still at the pre-amateur level, but after a couple of weeks of starting from the very beginning, I now have an inkling of what the engine is capable of, and how to achieve it.
What am I talking about? Douglas Adams’ once humorously quipped: “Before you bake an apple pie, you must first invent the universe” and some parts of being a programmer are like that - before you may work, you must define not only the object you wish to perform some work on, but also the world in which you want that work to occur, and then what that work is. I only now fully understand how much of this work I was doing, and re-doing, re-inventing the wheel every day, often getting it wrong without gaining mastery over anything in particular, because Unreal pre-defines so much of this undertaking.
Instead of writing 30 lines of code to perform a task that a 3-year old could describe to me, I can just… press a button, and Unreal handles it for me; I must know in advance that the task is a thing that can be performed, for example “rotate an object”, but if I know what that is, then I don’t have to perform the universe’s background role of defining what an object is, defining what rotation means, and stapling those two things together.
In summary, I’m excited to play with Unreal 5, rather than girding myself to have to endlessly re-define the universe like I feel that I have to in Unity. There is fun to be had in feeling like the architect of all creation… but boy, is that a lot of work.
