Life Will Not Take a Back Seat
Despite all my good intentions to get restarted on my hobbies and interests after the move, I started way too early, lol. We moved at the end of April and even now at the start of September I'm still finding myself getting adjusted to my new environment. Work stress, on both my partner and I, is also greatly affecting our ability to really get started on anything we've wanted to start by now. And we're still too tired to really feel like we're getting anywhere. But this is just the way life is. New challenges and problems will occur every day. And even still, we have to find a way to continue doing the things we were already doing. It's just wild to think about.
I'm not going to do a recap of everything that's gone on. That's way too much, and a lot of it too personal. Let's just see how far I get with my three objectives today.
Programming
Despite everything, I'm still interested in Pico8. I got restarted on a tutorial series I was doing. I have new ideas for small games I could eventually make. I'm going to be moving slower than ever before. But I'm still excited. The games industry may be on fire, but I am still optimistic at making the things I want to make. Maybe I'm just insane, lol. But maybe some insanity is needed for living.
I got a little derailed after accidentally full screening the application, but apparently ALT+Enter is what causes that to happen. Thankfully search engines still work well enough for me to have found the answer.
Something I also learned is that when coding in colors for functions in Pico8, if I make a new function that could have a color set but I don't set it, Pico8 will use the last color you set for the new function. I could see this leading to some weird issues in the future so I should try and set every color whenever I have the option, I think.
Nothing to show for with what I learned today. It was mainly refreshing my memory as I work towards getting back to where I left off with my knowledge of the app. I plan to spend some time on the website and forums to get ideas and see what other games are being made, though. I'd also like to spend some time in the community and see if there's other people like me that I might vibe with. We'll see.
Painting
Although I'd like to have stopped painting so that I could focus more on Tekken and Game Dev, I seem unable to. I lost my reason for painting a while ago, because I no longer agreed with it, and so now that I don't have a point with painting it feels like I shouldn't want to do it. But I'm still attached to it. I'd even say I'm enjoying it more now.
I've started going through my library of courses that I've bought because of course I went through a crazy course buying phase. I'm glad I was able to put that to almost a complete stop because I was just burning money for knowledge and then never really learning. I'm hoping to actually finish some of the courses I've bought now and see where my painting skills end up then.
Strangely enough, I'm also feeling like getting back into Blender just to help me with setting up scenes that would help me with painting. There's so much I need to learn and understand about light, and a 3D program like Blender would be invaluable to me for that reason. I can't just set up still lifes with proper lighting of everything my imagination comes up with. I know this is a thought I've had before, but it's silly I stopped believing in it. It's odd how this phase of my life feels a lot like revisiting past ideas and giving them legitimate love again.
All that said, I made more progress in a painting course I bought. I've made lineart that I plan to paint over later, and even experiment more with painting that doesn't use lines. It looks very hard, but fun. An important lesson from today that I want to make sure I don't forget is, "Shapes are made from forms being hit by light." It makes perfect sense. I need to remember that always.
Tekken
Given how stressful the past few days have been, I've gotten no Tekken time in. That said, it's looking good that I'll have time tomorrow. I've gone all in on Feng. Lili is being left behind for the time being. So I'm excited to go further with a character I previously considered too hard for me to play.