Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace

Game Update

A little late on this update, but I’m still chugging along. This week we worked on a lot of the sounds in the game. I listened to around 1000 different beeps and boops to find something I wanted for the various spots in the game. We also started to juices up the sounds when we take over a town. We added a booing sound when the God figure “tests” your characters by lowering stats and a cheering sound when you get a “blessing” and they increase. I still feel like this should be tied to reputation or possibly a hidden deity score based on your choices in the game.

I’ve been picking up some more motivation to get things done in game as I started finally cleaning up the spreadsheets. The issue with those seems to be that I have so many at this point I have a hard time finding the latest ones. I didn’t do a good job of making sure I know which ones are being used and which ones aren’t. It’s a bit of a mess and I’ll have to look through them.

On the positive side I have started making changes to the abilities. I’m finally utilizing the new Area of Effect (AOE) attack modes that I added so long ago. Some attacks split damage among enemies while others do flat damage. I also like that I can target certain rows or columns. This allows me to tailor certain attacks a little more with higher damage to have less targets available.

Personal Update

I’m finally starting to stabilize in my new house. I have a couple more things to set up for my kids. It’s been about a 5 year journey to get here and it feels good but it also feels like something is missing. I might need some time alone, but I’m not sure. I’ve been living in this temporary state of always saying, “I’m moving so this is temporary” for so long that I may not know how to deal with settling in one place now. 20 years of moving does that to someone I suppose.

Add to that I’m sitting in a void waiting for my household good which will arrive just in time for me to not have enough time to get my household situated for before my children arrive. It’s pretty frustrating, but I can’t be to mad because all said and done God really provided for me and my family during this global crisis. Still the last year feels really bad. Like a perfect crescendo to a lot of failures in leadership over my military career. I had a couple good ones too, and some lucky things. All said and done when I talk to other friends about what they’ve been doing for the past 20 years it makes me feel a bit better. I wouldn’t say that I wouldn’t change anything, but there are worse places I could be right now.

It’s so important to stay thankful for the time we have, and the blessings afforded to us in times like this. I’m very blessed and I need to keep that in mind. I have to keep going and stick with it or else I’ll be like so many other failed projects. I need to keep in mind I’m not doing this so other people can clap for me, I’m doing this to prove to myself that I can do it.