Hi. Wanted to give a check in. My last time working on Hatchet was about august this year, but my last formal update was March of this year. During march of this year, I got put in a nightmare job IRL, and it repeatedly totalled me both physically and mentally, and really put everything I was doing in my spare time on hold.
After this, I decided I wanted to work on things in a healthy way, but we're supposed to be shifting gears towards mapping some time soon. Problem being, of course, that my mapping experience is limited, so I wanted to play catchup. So my broad update points are:
-Did a bunch of mapping practice, on throwaway projects to grind up my mapping skills.
-Solved a potential memory leak (and sped up update code speed) for quest tracking HUD elements.
-Gustbow is still 1 animation sequence away from being done, so I'm looking forward to that, but it's a very complicated animation sequence that's hard for me to deliver on properly, so it keeps getting held up.
So unfortunately, the first bullet point is really ambiguous and can't be posted here because it's not immediately Hatchet related, but I've learned a lot practicing mapping. Practicing procedural ways of connecting large maps together, ways to alleviate BSP strain, trying out new tools to convert meshes to brushes and brushes to meshes, both of which have theoretical uses. And of course, trying to learn better ways of making geometry and to take in more practical concerns where I can (It's still not great). These things ultimately take time.
The next thing that's largely held me up is that my physical health has significantly declined in the wake of previously mentioned nightmare job, so I'm losing a couple hours a day trying to improve my physical condition despite a medical condition that makes it harder all around. Yay. Lastly, I recently took in a Husky dog from a family member, and she's lovely, but they're a lot of work, so I'm losing about another hour a day to taking care of her, but she's totally worth it.
And of course, my biggest problem has been that I try to avoid working on Hatchet when I'm in a bad mental state, for fear of putting water on the flame I've been trying to re-light in the past year or two. And, sadly, that's been a lot of it. I've also been hung out to dry on economic conditions, so my time in the next few months will be further reduced as I look for work and try to make adjustments to save money on a month-to-month basis.
I don't think any one of these things could be called what's stopped me, but the delicate state of trying to reignite my passion against a typhoon of random shit that's gone awry is just never giving me very long to get set up again. I've postponed this news post repeatedly because I hate giving excuses, I try to keep my IRL shit out of this space, and quite frankly I've always told myself "this month I'll get back into it for sure", but I think until I find consistent work for myself again, I'll probably be in such a complex array of conditions as to not have all the time I want to spend on projects. Even work on VMD is highly spotty at this point, but I've popped in for short bursts to chisel at it, because it's the easier project for me to work on. Anyways, that's all for now. I hope to have more to report in the future. The project is not dead, just on hiatus for the time being, trying to find a good angle to make a comeback from. Thank you all for your support over the years, and in the past few months.
