As I've been lazy about writing over the past few months or so I'm going to start out what might be a posting bonanza (might not actually be a bonanza) with a summary post. I've made some convenient bolded headings that are mostly indicitive of the sections so that those reading this can skip stuff they're not interested, which might be the entire post for all I know, but oh well?
New Car Smell
Starting with a follow-up from my previous post, I submitted my order for a Model 3, two years and a day after having made the reservation in the first place. Delivery is supposed to be in 4-8 weeks, so we'll see what happens! I got the long-range battery (499km range) and the premium interior, because those are mandatory at the moment, and decided to get the midnight silver paint which was the only optional upgrade I went with.
Nice and NEET
I spent the first couple months of this year, more or less, as a "NEET" which stands for "Not in Employment, Education or Training". To my knowledge, the acronym is primarily used in Japan, despite being made up of English words, and is used to refer to people who have essentially dropped out of productive society. Not entirely applicable in my case since I was actually looking for (and eventually found) full time work - I consider those two months to have been a much needed vacation as much as anything else.
So why use the acronym if I don't think it really applied to me? Partly because I think it makes for a clever section heading, but mostly because it ties into an anime I watched back in the fall as I was facing the prospect of, lets say, a "NEET"-like few months. The anime was "net-juu no susume" or "Recovery of an MMO Junkie" to use the crunchyroll title. The series is about a 30 year old woman who decided to quit a highly stressful office job and became an "elite NEET" (in her words) and play MMOs all day - and then stuff happened. I'm not going to get into any other details here (I may write another post about it) other than to say I absolutely adored the series (one of the highlights of my week while it was airing) and it really resonated with me, and not just because it had some similarity to the situation I found myself in for a couple of months.
Project Progress
One of the main things that I occupied myself with during my NEET-like period was my FR project that I've mentioned in some previous posts. As I had a lot of time on my hands I pushed forward with it and tried to make as much progress as I could. And I was at least somewhat successful! As I was musing in my final post of last year, I decided to start working towards a "demo" of the game's first area. The first part of this was to work out the plot details of the area. I started out working on an actual detailed script and got a decent amount written but eventually decided that I would be better served by doing something on the level of a flow chart to get the major points worked out before getting too lost in the fine details (I do that sometimes). This met with success and I currently have a mostly finished flow chart detailing the first area - there is one small branch that still needs to be finshed but it's not high priority for now because...
Unity
...I have started learning the Unity game engine for the purposes of putting together the eventual demo. I am currently working on creating a framework that I can use to test out ideas for the combat system. It's going along fairly well so far though now that I'm working full time again, the majority of the work is getting done on the weekends with a bit of poking at things in the evening. I may write some more posts about my experience with Unity in the future.
Anywho, that is the summary of things that might be coming to this space in the future. Please look forward to it!
Freak Out,
-TFitC
