I got back to this side project last week! Now I'm planning to focus it around an 'evil' council not unlike MARDEK's Governance de Magi. Also, Unity bug and counselling-related awkwardness.
Bleh, I meant to write this yesterday, but ended up feeling lousy and just playing Tomb Raider II all day instead. Which wasn't even fun! I assumed the original trilogy might have followed a similar pattern to others (eg Crash Bandicoot), where the first was ludicrously difficult and the devs learned afterwards how to make the difficulty more reasonable for the sequels. But no! I only died a few times during the first, but the sequel is what TVTropes calls ∞ Nintendo Hard ∞, just one death and reload after another. Though half the difficulty is just figuring out where I'm even supposed to go! Pfff!
Also, I already wrote ∞ a couple of posts on my Patreon ∞ last week about what I've been working on. Rather than just repeating all the details here, here's a 'summary' (or at least what counts as such for overly verbose me):
∞ I wrote a post a couple of months ago ∞ talking about some ideas for this project - Dreamons - where you'd help six characters travel through their minds to overcome their inner demons. I felt like it could work, maybe, though I can't say my heart was in it. I didn't care about the characters I'd sketched, and the whole point of this project is to make something quicker than Atonal Dreams (though I've been buggering around for so long that that's a bit of a joke now), which that plan probably wouldn't have been.
Now, though, I'm imagining the game taking place in the player's own mind, which is ruled over by an evil council (or whatever) of elemental dreamons, each embodying some common negative belief (eg "I'm ugly and unlovable", "I'm weird and unaccepted").
I like MARDEK's Governance de Magi - as did others, it seemed - and the council of villains is a not-uncommon trope. I wish I'd got further along with MARDEK's development and explored things like members of the GdM (eg Melchior) joining your party, as I intended at some point.
This game's mechanics are about taming your foes to your side, to your beliefs, so I'd be able to scratch that particular itch in a maybe more interesting way.
Essentially, you'd travel through the realms of each of these dreamons in a linear, fixed order (which is much, much easier to write and balance than to give the player free choice about the order). The dreamon would be a boss at the end. When tamed, though, they'd join as a permanent ally, and work with you to convert the remaining dreamons.
All of the dreamons would be made using the pixel faced human models I've written about in this blog before; these are some mockups using mostly pieces I already had (I need to model each piece of hair, clothing, etc separately, and haven't done so for the parts these would actually need to match their concept art).
The player would start as a kind of blank slate, and you'd be able to modify your own appearance - as in, you could change your colours, draw your own face, pixel by pixel - at any time outside of battle. It's your own mind, after all, so why not!
I have other plans for gameplay mechanics, which I talked about somewhat on Patreon, but I feel it'd be a better idea to make a demo to show them off more easily, so I'll likely spend this week trying to do that.
But...
I've written about this Unity bug at least a couple of times before. Essentially, at random (not while doing anything particularly graphically intensive), while working on a Unity project, my screen goes black for a few seconds - or maybe flashes between black and a glitched display - then this error pops up and Unity closes. That'd just be a mild inconvenience if that's all it was, but it seems to leave some lingering issue I don't understand where attempting to shut down the PC just doesn't work- or it's extremely delayed - and I have to do a forced shut down by holding the power button.
It doesn't happen constantly - maybe once a day? - but if it does, it means I have to shut everything down and I'm completely thrown off. It's changed a lot and become a whole lot less severe since I first encountered it - updating things like the graphics driver (which is probably what's crashing) and Windows generally seemed to help - but rather concerningly, the couple of times I experienced it last week didn't cause the freezing issue immediately afterwards, but instead I did a full shut down, turned my PC back on, and then several minutes later the locking issue happened and I had to shut everything down again, after which it was completely fine.
And since I'm not a techy-minded computer guy - despite spending my life in front of one - I don't understand enough about them to make sense of what's happening, how, or what I can do about it.
I've googled it, of course, to no avail. Other people have reported the same issue and the same lack of apparent cause, without any clear solutions.
I thought maybe it might be related to one of my two additional displays (one's an old monitor, the other's a cheapish Chinese (Huion) drawing tablet), and tried disconnecting those, though it made no difference.
Importantly, though, I took time away from games dev for the couple of weeks before the last, but used Unity almost constantly during that time to work on a couple of personal side projects. And I didn't get the issue a single time then, which leads me to believe it's probably related to the project file in some way (though annoyingly none of the error logs I've found give any indication of exactly which bit could be to blame).
The project is a bit of a mess anyway due to all the iterations this project's been through (Belief Battles, Frayth, Beliefrayth, now Dreamons...), and cleaning it up will probably be a good thing all round. So I'll probably just create a fresh project and import all the stuff I need from the old/current one, leaving the stuff I don't need behind. Maybe it'll solve the bug in the process, too.
Annoying having to spend time on that when I'd rather just be making better forward progress, but oh well.
(Oh, and Unity seems to have backpedalled regarding the pricing changes stuff that people in games dev communities were up in arms about; now I think it's not as evil?? But I'm going to continue using Unity either way so I'll just hope it's safe to do so for the immediate future.)
I had another session of counselling (the fifth...? Fourth? Don't know) last Friday, and since I've written about the previous ones in this blog, I might as well include a bit about that here too.
I still felt a lot of anxiety about the trip there, mostly about my body failing me in some embarrassing way while on the bus. This seems to be almost the definition of agoraphobia. I didn't have any anxiety about the session itself.
Well, not at first at least, but it turned awkward! I think I've written previously that this counsellor is a young woman, and of a type of person I'd like to be friends with. She reminds me a LOT of a friend I made while getting my own Psychology degree. My previous counsellors had been older than me, and I was quite naive when I saw them. I'm probably older than this woman, and I've been talking to her as I would a peer rather than an authority figure, partly because I do have my own degree, partly because most conversations I've had in the past few years have been one-on-one essentially mutual counselling sessions with a couple of graduates of the same Psychology course I did, who are also women. I suppose I've been behaving in a way that's become familiar to me.
She's acted uncomfortable when I've asked her questions, though, which I immediately pick up on and back up... only to do the same again minutes later because I ramble without planning, and I'm used to not wanting to dominate the conversation and wanting to give the other person a chance to share. Plus I'm genuinely curious about how a background similar to mine led her to where she is now, in case I want to follow the path myself.
I can't even remember which bit of my blathering led us in this direction, but during the last session, she asked me if I had any interest in her, which from the context I assumed she meant "are you flirting with me, lusting over me, or seeing me as a potential partner?", maybe because she's had clients in the past who have? To which I had to awkwardly stumble out some explanation about how she reminds me of an old friend and I feel we could have got along had we met in another context, but I understand that's not what I'm seeing her for, there's a professional distance between us, if you strip down for a doctor you don't expect them to strip for you too, etc.
She probably understood, but it just left me feeling miserable afterwards, like she'd turned me down before I even made a move (not that I was even intending to). Because I'm just that repulsive. And it made me doubt my own communication style, which I thought was friendly and easy to work with but which maybe came across as creepy and even predatory instead (which I worry about a lot since Reddit's full of posts by women portraying men that way, and men upset about being seen that way by women).
When I got home, I googled something like "attraction to therapist reddit", and found a bunch of people talking about how it's common to develop feelings for someone during what are really rather intimate sessions; a lot of people reported having admitted to their own therapist that they were interested in them. But so many of the comments were about sexual interest, talking about how they masturbated to their therapist or found them sexually attractive or the crass acts they'd dreamed of doing with or to them.
I can honestly say I haven't thought about my counsellor in that way at all!
But then it made me wonder (as someone with an interest in Psychology) what she's like outside her professional role. My one uni friend who calls me every week or so is training to become a counsellor, and she slept around in uni and talks a lot about sex and attraction. The person this counsellor reminds me of had sex-related trauma from before I knew her, and talked about sex all the time.
Maybe my counsellor was disappointed that I didn't say I wanted to bend her over a-
Urgh, the whole idea of sex at all - and especially me, unfit troglodyte that I am, taking part in it - just fills me with disgust these days though. A coping mechanism for not getting any, I suppose.
...Wasn't I talking about the silly game I'm making? How many other indie devs go on about their sex lives - or lack thereof - in their dev posts and videos?? All of them, I bet, and it's completely normal, because if there's one thing I definitely am, it's completely normal.
Anyway, I was going to counselling to try and address some of the anxiety and depression issues, and I didn't really want to have to be thinking about things like this!
I feel like I need to work through it next time I see her, now, but annoyingly I won't be able to next week because I'll be going for a yearly brain scan instead. Which will be fun. Maybe they'll find that the cancer's back and my life is over. It's always a possibility, otherwise they wouldn't do the scans. Ugh.
But for now I'll try to remake this project and hope it doesn't crash!!
6 COMMENTS
purplerabbits147~12M
In terms of Unity, it seems that for the short term you are safe as long as you don't pass the million download threshold. Though the long term effects are to be seen since people are taking into consideration what engine the game is being built on and deciding whether to buy a game or not. Some have even suggested that people market specifically whether they use Unity or not to make the game.
I wonder if the attatchment you feel to your councilor is similar to how Healthy Gamer GG describes how the "suspended bridge effect" highlights a pattern in behavior. [LINK] Even though the vid is about getting out of the friendzone, it is an interesting watch to see how love is a chemical reaction. Jumping off from the Suspended Bridge effect, he explains that if 2 groups of men walk across a bridge, where one is stable and the other is not as stable. The men on the unstable bridge are more likely to report romantic feelings regardless of the interaction. He further explains that that feeling of vulnerability tends to lead to romantic feelings in those men. In a way would this type of interaction play a part in how you are feeling towards you councilor?
A bit late, but when you described how trying to get to the building was "a bit of a disaster" I find it an interesting moment how things almost always tend to go disastrously when it's the first time doing something. Then the second time nothing outstanding happens afterwards. My own experience was when driving to work for the first day, and some how I encountered 5 crashed cars on the way over. Traffic was just awful. It's been a few years and I have never encountered that many crashed on one day since the first day of work.
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Tobias 1115~12M
I suspect that things like wariness about which engine a game's made in might fade as the whole Unity debacle thing stops being 'trendy', since a big part of things like that is essentially a kind of (subconscious) virtue signalling; "people care about this issue a lot currently, so showing I care too will signal that I belong". I suspect even the indie devs will calm down about it within a couple of months. Though I think one of the changes Unity made is allowing devs to disable the splash screen even if they publish using the free version of Unity? Makes me wonder if that was to disguise that games are made using it to get around any lingering bad reputation there might be. (Though having the Unity splash screen has been the mark of low-quality shovelware for a while.)
Unfortunately I don't have time to watch a 20+ minute video - though I'll add that to my Watch Later - but my point was that I don't really have feelings for my counsellor, and it got awkward because it seemed like she was asking me if I did, and I worried I'd given the wrong impression. At most, I have some sadness that we didn't meet in different circumstances, in which case I would have liked to have built a friendship over a long time and then maybe that could develop into something; the idea of going from strangers to romance with anyone feels ridiculous to me. I just wish I had any opportunities to meet similar people in contexts where connections could potentially develop (though I strongly doubt any of them would actually be single).
I forgot to add to the blog post that she mentioned some groups the charity she's a part of is intending to host, for mentally ill people, which I expressed interest in... though it sounds like they're mostly going to be in the 40-60 age range, which fits with how they were the last time I went through all this several years ago. It's frustrating, since the barriers to me meeting people are external and circumstantial rather than due entirely to internal insecurities.
The first time is definitely the hardest, and I avoid a lot of things because I know that first time awkwardness is unavoidable and I don't feel able to push through it. Funnily enough, I agreed with the counsellor last Friday that over the next couple of weeks I should look into learning how to drive, but making the initial choice of and interaction with a driving instructor is the main barrier. That's a fascinatingly strange example of a bad first time though if the disastrous bits were external and unrelated to you - crashed cars - rather than something internal like anxiety! Or maybe it was a matter of perception, noticing things you otherwise wouldn't have due to being on unusually high alert?
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purplerabbits147~12M
Seeing how differently the situations with the Api changes with Reddit and Hasbro with the Open Game License (OGL) debacle concluded, I am fascinated to see how Unity fares.
With Reddit, the protest against the API change failed, and so the mods lost access to their party software that made things easier for them .
Contrastly, Wizards of the Coast(WotC) tried to make changes to a perpetual unrevokable OGL , that protected 3rd party creators, so that 3d party developers have give WotC a cut of their revenue, note not profit, directly to WotC. If WotC succeeded, then people would actually lose money by making dnd content. In this case, the backlash was so great that the executives walked back everything and more in the hopes that the number of subscribers would stop bleeding and to get back enough good will to save the dnd movie. It was a bit too late, and the movie is considered a financial flop even though it was a very good dnd movie. So far, the long effects of the OGL debacle show that 3rd party develops have made Pathfinder (a competitor of WotC that they ironically created with a similar stunt to the OGL back in the day of 4th Edition of dnd) a huge success, that some aspects of dnd are now in Creative Commons as a gesture of good will from WotC, and that the Virtual Table Top (VTT) WotC has been developing is not getting very good traction since people are in the process of making mods of Baulder's Gate 3 as a substitute for Hasbro's VTT. Note Baulder's Gate 3 is produced by a 3rd party developer who licenced the dnd lore, but are not associated with Hasbro.
So I am very curious if Unity is going the way of Reddit where people are worse off because they have no adiquite substiture for Reddit or if they are going to struggle with keeping their core base like WotC where people are jumping ship to Pathfinder and other 3rd party systems.
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GrayNine35~12M
Hopefully the new project file fixes your issues! If not, googling it made a few results pop up; have you tried rolling back to 527.56 drivers (if you're using an NVidia graphics card), changing project settings -> quality to low, and making sure D3Dcompiler_47.dll is present? It seems like these fixed the issue for other people, but since the fixes are so different, it sounds like the error is a common symptom of multiple potential problems...
I'd love to try out a demo! Game mechanics are best tested firsthand, theorycrafting can only go so far.
I'm sure you've heard this before, but your personal life updates are what make your blog so interesting to read. Even when they come from a single author, "normal" indie dev blogs come across as sterile. This isn't a blog about game development, it's a blog about your life (which includes game development), and that's what makes it so personal and genuine. Mental demons, everyday hurdles, and unspoken fears are much more relatable than patch notes and content previews.
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Tobias 1115~12M
I checked, and I do have the D3Dcompiler_47.dll file in the correct place. I saw things like changing your quality settings when googling this myself, or rolling back drivers, but nothing obviously helped (though the issue is unpredictable and infrequent anyway so it's hard to know whether anything's had an impact). Since I didn't have the issue with another project over the course of two weeks, but did have it with this other project on consecutive days, it seems fairly clear that it's a project issue. Hopefully remaking the project will address it!
Oh, by 'demo' I meant something like a short video, similar to what I've shown in other recent-ish posts. I'd like to get a playable demo too, but there's a lot to do before I could get to that point, especially with remaking the project and everything.
I'm glad you at least appreciate the insight into the human side of things! I do too - of course, which is why I include it - but I've definitely encountered a lot of people in the past who'd prefer to just have game updates and for me to be a distant, more professional sort of non-presence. I get value out of writing things out in my blog, though, so if there are benefits to any readers too, great!
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PierceWickstorm29~12M
It really is common for it to happen, so they probably thought they should ask you. It doesn't make you feel any better, but I think that's all it was.
I, for one, also appreciate that you share your personal life with us. I always look up to you anyway, and I always thought of you as down-to-earth. And I find it worthy of respect that you aren't afraid to bear your thoughts, whether they are secure or not.
As for the game, it looks neat so far. Everyone loves the Governance de Magi, so it's bound to work well!
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