Game Prototype & Sabbatical Recap

Today is the last day of my 16-week unpaid sabbatical. In less than 12 hours, I will be awake and working again. It's kind of surreal. But at the end of the day (no pun intended), I like getting paid (I do have two cats to provide for) and I like having lunch provided for me in the office.

In my last week, I finally got my life together and made an extremely basic prototype of a game. It's not the story-based incremental game I originally envisioned (truthfully, my vision was much too large and convoluted), but it is a game that I had an idea for almost a decade ago and I actually still like the idea.

I also aggregated some stats on how I spent my time and money in the last four months.

Cat Whisperer

In July, I bought a NAS. (I had planned to write a dedicated post about my mini server and NAS setups while I was not making much progress on painting and sewing projects, but after I wrote the intro paragraph, I suddenly became very productive.)

It has been an ongoing effort to figure out what random stuff I haven't been "backing up". I don't have true backups; I just have my files duplicated on multiple devices, which I think is sufficient for my purposes. I already had most of my main PC files (pictures, documents, content, etc.) synced to OneDrive. Pictures from my phone were also one-way synced to OneDrive; although I have now replaced OneDrive's photo sync functionality with Syncthing so I have have two-way sync to my NAS (i.e. if I delete the picture on my phone or my NAS, it will also be deleted from the other device).

One thing I had never backed up was my Google Drive files. I briefly considered replacing Google Drive entirely with self-hosted NextCloud or ONLYOFFICE, but that requires a little more thought in how I will use it in conjunction with my file storage system. For the time being, I only care that I have a copy of the contents. I ended up using Rclone and a cron job to do this. Although I don't think that's a complete solution (if Google somehow deletes a single document without my consent, I think it would get deleted from my NAS too), it's a start.

Anyway, that was a long tangent to say that while I was looking through my Google Drive to assess what kinds of documents I do have and to clean up any that I don't want anymore before doing a backup, I found a document titled "Cat Whisperer game" created in June 2016. My idea is that you go on walks and attempt to earn the affection of cats that pass by.

I think one of my problems with trying to start developing a game was implementing gameplay without assets. I guess I forgot that I'm a frontend developer and I love to see visual results quickly. So this time, I started with drawing the art. At least with this game idea, I knew the main things I needed: a human and a cat.

I charged up my iPad and used Pixquare to draw these characters in a 16x16 canvas. Of course, I started while sitting in bed at like midnight, and it got me excited and I had trouble sleeping lol. But by the next day, I had a human walking animation and a cat walking animation! I had dabbled in pixel art back in the late 2000's when making pixel graphics sites and customizing your Neopets, MySpace, etc. profiles with graphics was popular, so there was some familiarity and I guess I'm not terrible at it.

The next step was to display animations in Love2D. I used the anim8 library for this. And despite the last update being 3 years ago, it still worked fine, and I got my cute characters to render.

I also did a cat standing and stretching animation. I think the cat walking animation needs a little work, but it was enough to move forward with the prototype.

The next thing I wanted to accomplish was user interaction. The player and the cat walk towards each other automatically. When the cat is close enough, the player can crouch down to pet the cat. The cat enjoys the good scritches. Then the player and cat continue walking.

I did the petting part first. You can't see in this this gif, but I am holding down the mouse (or spacebar) to start the animation and letting to to end the animation.

ou might notice that the player character here has a different outfit than the one above. Part of the gameplay will be upgrading your shoes and bag. In the first gif, the player has a backpack and boots. In the next gif, the player has no bag and slippers. I also changed the shirt color because of personal preference. (I actually have most of these variations drawn but not exported to sprite sheets yet.)

Then I combined the petting with the walking and got it working last night! I also added a pet count and time to demonstrate that I can track those metrics (and to make the prototype feel more like a game).

I can't believe it took me so long to get to this point, but all of the proof-of-concept work I did earlier helped me get here too. So I definitely don't feel like I had wasted my time before. I just had other projects that I wanted to work on and didn't have the game idea figured out yet.

Sabbatical Recap

Time Spent

Now the fun part. At least for me haha. Throughout my sabbatical, I have been tracking days spent on projects/tasks in a spreadsheet so I could see how productive I was (or wasn't).

This is a list of all the projects I worked on and how many days I spent on them. The days do not sum up to the number of days I had because I frequently worked on multiple things on one day.

As far as non-project activities, I also tracked (or retroactively tracked) days that I worked out, did an activity outside of the house, or spent time with friends or family. The remaining days are considered "potato" days. It doesn't mean I literally did nothing (although sometimes I really did just scroll on my phone in bed most of the day), but I just didn't do anything of particular interest, maybe some house chores or cleaning or binge reading books/comics.

• Workout (46 days)
• Friends & Activities (35 days)
• Family (8 days)
• Potato (5 days)

I think having only 16 days of "doing nothing" is pretty reasonable. That's one day per week on average, which just sounds like normal life tbh. Apparently I only had 5 days of "doing nothing", which sounds more impressive than it is. It doesn't mean I was very productive on all the other days; I just wasn't an absolute degenerate most of the time. While I feel like I could have been more productive on days I did do something, I was still productive. And I got to accomplish things at my own pace, resting as much or as little as I felt like that day.

Money Spent

And finally, did I spend a lot during the last four months? The short answer is no. I spent a little more than usual (on average an extra $270/month), and I feel like all of it was expected.

I pulled the numbers from the reports on YNAB, the app I use for budgeting and expense tracking.

• I spent more on Groceries/Home and Restaurants because I had to feed myself for lunch during the week (five extra meals).
  • The "Home" in "Groceries/Home" is for consumable home products like toilet paper, toothpaste, etc.
• For Transportation, I'm sure I spent less on gas because I stayed at home most of the time, but I did pay for six months of car insurance in July, so that's why it shows that my spending increased.
• I did expect to spend more on Extra (everything else that isn't a necessity)
  • General is just any uncategorized spending, usually on a physical thing
  • Hobbies: Crafts/Stationery increased a lot because I bought a sewing machine. I also hadn't bought any craft supplies or stationery in the past year.
  • Hobbies: DIY increased as expected, since I worked on the closet and painting.
  • Home was less. I think in reality it was pretty average because last year I bought a new induction stove and that sure was expensive.
  • Recreation increased because I bought workout equipment. The latest addition is a pair of Rep Fitness QuickDraw adjustable dumbbells, which I used for the first time today!
  • Travel... well, I didn't, so...

My summary does not include things I had to pay for regardless (mortgage, utilities, personal/cat medical bills, cat food, etc.) and wouldn't change due to the fact that I wasn't working full-time.

Workout Update

I did finish Caroline Girvan's IRON series. I enjoyed most of it. There's some exercises I didn't like, but by the end of the series, I could at least do them.

There wasn't another series of hers that I was particularly interested in. The rest seem to have more cardio/HIIT, which I am very much not into. And I don't want to invest in the CGX app right now.

I had done some research prior to finishing to decide what to do next. I narrowed it down to:

1. Lift with Cee's 30min full body workouts
2. Heather Robertson's HR12WEEK 2.0

I went with Lift with Cee because the workouts are shorter and the series is shorter. And I think it was what I would've liked more too. Her workouts are typically 7 dumbbell exercises and 1 bodyweight to target abs.

• It's definitely less "lux" than Caroline's videos, but heck this 50-year-old lady is so fit and so sweet, and the fact that she is literally in her home makes it feel so down-to-earth. She's also barefoot, so I feel like I can trust her to choose exercises that can be done barefoot. I don't like to wear shoes if I don't have to.
• I thought the lack of music and timer would be demotivating, but it actually helps the time pass quicker haha. I just count my reps and try to keep up with her, but sometimes I'm 1-2 reps behind and I finish a little later, but there's usually still enough time to finish and prep for the next exercise.
• I like that there's a warmup included because when left to my own devices, I don't do a good warmup, and it's a hassle to load up a warmup video.
• The exercises are also done in sets of 2, which felt boring at first, but I came to like it compared to switching between different variations and the constant context-switching.
• They're all full body workouts instead of splitting upper and lower. So that means I'm not stuck doing ten variations of lunges for the entire workout because I hate lunges hahaha.

I also bought a Shark FlexBreeze fan from Costco and it has been game-changing. It can be used cordlessly without the pedestal, so I can easily move it around the house to wherever I am without crawling under things to find an empty outlet. I have been getting pretty hot during my workouts, but I feel like it usually doesn't warrant turning on the AC; I just need to feel a little breeze and I'll be fine. And this has been so perfect!

I don't think I have any visible gains yet, but I do feel stronger, and progress is progress. The next challenge is staying consistent while also having a full-time job.

Anyway, I must continue to mentally prepare myself to be a productive working member of society again tomorrow. Farewell for now. I do intend to continue blogging about my projects, but expect the frequency of posts to decrease significantly.