Crafting, Cabin Fever and Cash!

Yes yes, I did Cs in the title last week. But I couldn’t get another letter that worked with the topics. DIY, ______ and Dollar? Fill in the blank. Hello! It’s another Friday, and another round of jibber jabber!

It’s been a really productive week! Now that the demo I’ve been working on is signed off, I’ve found myself able to sink my teeth into some meatier work. This week has been all about saving and loading. Unity has this really nice class called PlayerPrefs, that it explicitly states should not be used for saving. So naturally everyone does. Unfortunately, not all platforms support this, mine included, so I spent most of my time creating a save system that emulates the functionality of PlayerPrefs, but lets me do my own thing for unsupported platforms. And in the eleventh hour (not literally) of my last day on the project for the week, it worked!

Today is another one of those bank holiday things, so while I shall still be working, I’m probably going to be taking it easier. I’m not expecting huge advances on Horde, but I may look into the zombie select system. Or maybe I’ll throw together a save system, while it’s fresh in my head! Though it might be a bit too early in the project for that…

I also got to have some fun in my free time! I’ve been suffering through video calls for a long while now with a camera so old that it uses a 4:3 aspect ratio. Remember old TVs? The square ones? Like that. Nothing supports that these days, so I’ve been looking very… rotund on apps like Discord, that stretch the image to fit a modern aspect ratio. More so than usual I mean. Plus if the lighting was anything less than equivalent to sitting on the face of the sun with a tanning reflector, I looked moody and dark at best, and one with the background at worst. I’d had enough.

I looked at webcams. Eesh. They have… inflated somewhat in price. And delivery takes a while. Then I remembered a friend of mine mentioning IP Webcam, a way to use your phone’s camera as a wireless camera effectively. I tried it out. After tweaking the settings I got good results with minimal delay. However I could only place it below my face, in that unflattering position where my real life double chin is exacerbated to the point where I look like I have severe glandular fever. Hmm…

I had a look around my house and found some bits and pieces. Particularly useful were some old blind fittings left behind by the previous tenant of the property. A plan started to form. Half an hour later I had jury-rigged together a phone holder I can mount on the back of my monitor. Now I am in business! I can have all my important meetings, and social gatherings without everyone unfairly thinking “Wow! He’s really piled on weight!” and instead thinking “Huh, he’s certainly enjoying his food.” A significant improvement!

I had my first real moment of cabin fever a short while ago. We were out doing a shop for my family, and picking up some stuff for ourselves while we were at it, when across the veg aisle in Morrisons, Suzie, out of the blue, points out that I’m dithering. She’s quite correct. I am. I’m dumbfounded for a few seconds, then, with no conscious thought, meekly reply, “but this is… somewhere else.” It just kinda happened, it’s not something I realised I had been feeling, or was in any way cognisant of, but it was perfectly true. We carried on with the shop as normal, only now I was having a small existential crisis, as I realised how little I knew about how I was really feeling, and about how surprised I was that I was feeling any effects of the lockdown at all. I hadn’t expected it, and I am fully aware that I’ve been incredibly lucky with my situation. But still. It’s had an impact. It’s disconcerting.

I’ll wrap up a little more positively shall I? Last week I asked about doing a livestream, and the response on social media was generally positive, with a slight tilt towards art, so I’ll be looking at putting that together soon. I guess I now need to decide what to draw, how long to stream for, and contrary to earlier in the post, maybe I should spend today brushing up, as I haven’t done any drawing in a while…

Matt out.