Happy Veterans Day!

Game Update

Work continues on restoring the difficulty setting for the game. We have to work through a couple of problems that we have already worked on prior. We will also be building a couple of developer tools to speed up the testing process when we think we have things working again.

Honestly I wish we could just move on to working on the next items of the game to get it out of early access. Maybe that what I should really be looking at. What will it take to get us out of early access. That said I don’t feel to bad because there are plenty of games that were never fully released.

My oldest son is working on his own game project. He asked me tonight, “how do you keep from getting bored when your working on your game?” I told him that it was unavoidable. There are a lot of times when you are working on any project or passion in which you will get bored with what you are doing. I told him it’s important to establish good habits for those times. Even with this project it was important to have specific sacred time each week to work on it. Sometimes I would become more passionate and push harder to get it done, but that’s not something that happens all the time.

I suppose that it’s also important to know when to cut your losses and move on to the next project. There are a lot of times when the fundamental idea and mechanics are simply not as fun as they were when I thought it up. It’s a balance of knowing when to keep going and when to stop. I feel like a lot of people have a false assumption about being successful on the first try. That does happen from time to time, but in my experience it’s more important to fail as fast as possible so that eventually we can find success. Expecting failure and building up a good mental attitude towards it is the key to getting good at anything.

Personal Update

Still plugging away at all of the weekend festivities. I had an amazing time this weekend running around town with my kids on Veterans Day to see how many deals we could get. I beat my old personal record of 7 deals and managed to nab 10! My kids had a lot of fun keeping track and being a part of it. I hit the music store as we were running around and picked up a fog machine, a tambourine for my youngest son, some guitar pics and a launchpad controller for Ableton Live.

I felt like my youngest son would do well with the tambourine and showed him some basic sounds he could get out of it. I was hoping he would use it in church but he was to afraid to play it. He had no issues annoying his brothers in the car with it though.

I haven’t messed around with Ableton Live in a long time. I own the full version, and had aspirations of making my own music at some point. I’m not sure what came over me to buy the controller. I’m not sure that I will find time to use it. Still I love watching YouTube videos of people playing with it so maybe it’s something I can work with. There is a lot of planning and programming that has to be done to get it to do what it does. Maybe I can find a noobs tutorial for it on YouTube.

I got the chance to DJ for a party on Saturday night, and I had a blast doing it. Some of the people had their kids there and they had a good time playing with the equipment as well. I am probably to much of a romantic because my mind thinks in movie terms of this being the moment when a kid is going to be exposed to something they really like and later become a big time DJ. In reality it probably just made for some Instagram moments for them.

I’m feel less and less draw to play Magic the Gathering and have taken a couple steps towards playing Hearthstone again lately. The new expansion is being released this week, but I’m trying to grind out some experience to earn as much as I can before the reset. Maybe it’s not a great thing to feel like such an indentured servant to finishing and earning what I paid for.