Sometimes, I think I write these things to get myself in the mood to get back to work. Partly because writing these entries require I undergo a change of mindset to consider the project. Partly because it puts me in contact with the ever-supportive BYOND developer community.

BYOND has been very good to me. True, you might find more powerful IDEs out there, but it's very hard to find a free IDE that provides as much user-friendly implementation of flexible gameplay (not to mention online support) as you would in BYOND. For somebody who got his start in dabbling with programming back with the Commodore 64 some 28 years ago, BYOND introduced me to a whole new programming model. Not just the transition from procedural to object oriented language (which I already did somewhat in college) but the transition to event-driven programming structure. Wherever I go from BYOND, I think that the time I spent in it was very well invested, and I hope to be able to use BYOND for prototyping for years to come.

So anyway, about my GSDC'11...

Last Friday, mom calls up and tells me my help was vitally needed for me to travel 162 miles and help clean out a home my sister was moving out of. That ended up taking up the whole weekend, it was a harrowing adventure which had me far from home in thoroughly unfamiliar territory. A long road trip is also a humbling experience: it's easy to loose touch with how big the world is and how many millions of people are living their own lives when you spend most of your time in a tiny bedroom.

Then, Monday through Wednesday, a high school buddy of mine, who really hates to play games unless they're social experiences, got interested in Terraria. I'm not publically declaring I regret the time I spent entertaining my friends this week - I'm sure the pleasure was mutual - but the fact of the matter is that it did prolong the distraction from the shit I had to do. (But then, there's no guarantee I'd have been able to get back on track even without this distraction.)

Thursday, I was feeling run down. Couldn't commit to a thing, not even playing a game, so instead I mostly spent my time on Filly's synchtube channel. (MLP:FIM Internet fandom is really quite the remarkable thing.) Disappointingly, it seems that the Wellbutrin apparently does nothing for these listless days. I'll give it the full 6 weeks and, if I don't feel more optimistic and proactive than when I started, I think I'll start weaning myself off the stuff.

So, here we are, a week later than I intended to start working on my GSDC'11 project, and that project is a mess:

• Roughly two weeks ago, I tore it apart thinking I'd revise it to have better modular programming structure.
  
• Roughly one week ago, as of the last blog entry, I changed my mind and thought perhaps I should just revert back to my backup prior to this major change (protip: always make backups prior to changes).
  
• Now, finally able to get after work after the aforementioned major RL distractions, I'm coming back to a project in shambles. I'm thinking that, instead of reverting, I should stop going forward and make what revision I already made work. This is on account of how I think the GUI changes I made are mandatory.

I think perhaps there are few worse positions to commit to development than I am in right now. Flow thoroughly disrupted by RL drama. Returning to a somewhat alien project that happens to be mangled to worse functionality than it once had.

I'm going to see what I can get myself to do between now and the June 1st deadline.