Sickness (August 15 2025)

The family visiting is gone, which is a relief since they are really loud (especially at night). But on wednesday I got really sick. I feel like I get sick pretty rarely (since I've been doing these blog posts I know this is the first time I got sick in 2025), but when I do I tend to get hit pretty hard.

This time I didn't experience any sore throat or anything, but I did have a pretty bad headache. It's gotten better after some medication, but on wednesday and thursday it was hard to walk around, and I slept for a large portion of the day. And I was so low energy that I barely had the energy to chew food, and spent most of the day hungry.

This sickness was especially bad. I haven't vomited in years, and yet at one point it got so bad I vomited 3 times in 24 hours (and one of those times was at 4-5am). It's stopped now, but vomiting is very unpleasant for me.

With this, plus the family thing, basically no progress has been made. I think I've mostly recovered from this sickness, but I'm still not at full strength yet.

Family Visiting (August 08 2025)

Progress has once again slowed down because I have family visiting. Now the expected release date for the platformer is September. It feels bad to go this long without having released anything due to various factors, and also this game doesn't feel especially content-heavy (it'll be 6 short levels at most). Many things have happened in the summer that have made things much busier than before, and I feel like I've lost some of my creative energy because of it.

The secret online game has continued to take up time. I thought I'd get the chance to play it with my cousin in-person but they constantly have to leave the house with their dad for many hours at a time, which ruins that plan. I never go with them because it doesn't sound fun. Having to accompany 2 kids who I can't communicate with in any language also doesn't make me want to go along. I would just be spending 99% of the time on my phone, with no audio, and I'd rather than just do that at home with a computer instead.

I also never understood the point of going on vacation. It costs a lot of money (both for flights and getting a place to stay) and time (all the traveling), and all of that is just for 1-2 weeks of going somewhere and then probably never going back again. It just doesn't seem worth it to me. I don't really care about sightseeing or taking pictures, and most of time still seems to be on your phone (again you don't need to go outside to use your phone). I also never understood how people could get bored staying at home during covid; most people have computers/phones with wifi, finding things to do is easy.

There's still another week before the other family members leave. It's been less than a week and I'm already tired of their existence. Even small things like losing one of the bathrooms has been very disruptive. It makes me wish to never have long-term guests at this place ever again.

Code Rewrites (August 01 2025)

I kept working on the tower level, and I'm a bit stuck at the ending right now. For the ending I wanted you to unlock a way to make it easier (but still with a few restrictions) to get boxes past the tower. I tried several things, but decided on having bounce blocks that will send the box to the top of the tower (where it will get bounced away again). Now the question is, what unlocks those new bounce blocks, and then what to do with all the boxes you get access too.

Another thing I did was change how switches work. The tower level really wanted it where multiple switches had to be activated at the same time in order to deactivate/activate a platform. The problem is this was basically impossible to do with the switches as is. I instead rewrote the game where the player object would first find every switch in the level, and keep a list of what objects those switches interact with. Then for each object, it checks whether any switches that interact with that object are on or off.

Anyways, I've been working on this one level for a while now, and I think maybe it'd be better if I take a bit of time away from it. Instead maybe I can try to make a level based around the bullets I programmed earlier. It's possible I have to change the way the player holds boxes in order to more effectively use boxes as a shield against the bullets.

Finally I discovered a new innovation. Originally when you're given text buttons in my digital card games, that's that, they were just text. When you click one of those buttons, the player receives a number and then figures out what to do from there. It mostly worked, except there were some tricky cases that could happen when some buttons need a condition in order to show up. I now changed that system where when a button is created, it gets sent both text and also what will happen when the button is clicked. It's more direct and accurate this way.