Diary Page #10: Rebirth

Dear Scholars,

It has been a while since the last entry. Usually that means an exceptionally busy period and this was no exception! I'll give you a personal update first and then tell you about some of the progress we've made in Selenwald's development recently.

Stronger than ever

First of all, the last 3 months were an incomprehensibly busy period for me. I've always worked a lot but recently I've managed to beat any of my previous personal records, working ~90h weeks quite consistently. No worries though - I'm also physically active (cycling every single day), eat healthier, and most importantly I'm feeling great mentally, so it's all fine!

As those of you who are on the Discord server already know, all the struggles I've had for over 3 months beginning in early January have finally ended. At the end of April I started a long term job at a studio I've been freelancing for for around 1.5 years prior. Due to having accumulated debts during the job-hunting period, I've started at a full time position to first get back on my feet. However, my intention was to switch to 4/5 after 3 months. In addition, half-way through that full time period, I've taken a side gig with a friend. On top of that, I decided to focus on improving some aspects of my life during that time - getting some overdue medical tests done, buying stuff I *desperately* needed to buy for a long time and optimizing the hell out of my daily routine to waste as little time as possible.

Despite all this, I still managed to spend an impressive amount of time working on Selenwald (especially during the last month) but that was just the beginning because that transitional period is now coming to an end. I have just switched to the aforementioned 4/5 and my side gig is also ending very soon. With all the optimizations I made (along with sacrificing any entertainment), I will now able to spend more time on Selenwald on average than I ever have.

Getting closer

As I've mentioned in some earlier entries, thanks to having decided to finally cease my attempts to get a publisher or an investor for independence's sake and thus not having to constantly focus on the short term goal of polishing the publisher demo, I have started a long overdue, massive revamp of the code architecture in December. I have originally planned to have it finished by now but unfortunately those misfortunes struck me in January. However, most of the rework is done and I am very pleased with the results. Finally, almost every piece of code works in perfect harmony. The new system is very robust. Coding new systems feels like a breeze now and implementing new content is trivial. Additionally, the framework makes for a great foundation for future modding support.

Here are some new things I made during the last 3 months:

• many fixes, improvements, and optimizations to my new architecture, including pooling for event objects that all systems communicate with

• a node editor (I intend to use it for AI behaviour and dungeon generator settings authoring in the future)

• entity preset previews (a tiny but very helpful QoL feature for faster development)

And here are some old systems that I rewrote inside the new architecture during the last 3 months:

• field of view obstacle system

• fog of war system (along with massive optimizations and a dramatic increase in quality as compared to the old solution)

• a significant part of the core