Midnight Musings and Melting Mainframes

Hey hey and yo! Another week of working goes by and here we are again! We’ve had an eventful time here at #EgoProblems, some good, some bad, all part of the job!

First up, things are going well with work for SockMonkey. I delivered the demo they needed a couple of days early, complete with video, which was very satisfying. On top of that, the demo deadline then got pushed back a week so technically, I’ve delivered it even earlier! I am going to tweak it a bit though, make sure it’s as good as it can be. So yeah, going well. However, after submitting the demo I had the joy of making my first commit.

Background for non-techies: we use a central repository for our projects, that everyone frequently updates from. It’s essentially the “master” version of the project, that we copy to our computers regularly. We then make changes on those local copies and commit them to the master version, so other people working on the project can get those changes and we avoid stepping on each other’s toes. With me? Good.

Anyway, the first time you commit on a new project, you are going to break things. That’s just law. This time was no different. I committed my files and crossed everything. An hour or two later, I found out that all the colours in the level I touched have exploded, and it needs reverting. I’m confused, they’re confused, we’re all bemused, and perhaps a little irked. Turns out though, that my changes didn’t break anything, committing them did. This is good news for me because my ego is intact. It’s bad news overall though because it turns out a plugin is breaking the level when I commit changes to it. Monday Matt gets to deal with that! Monday Matt hates me…

A weird thing happened to me the other night, probably as a symptom of how much of my life is work and video games. I dreamt up a game concept! I’ve done this maybe once or twice before in my life, but not for a very long time and not as vividly as this one. It was a pretty cool experience. Like any good creative I always keep a notebook next to my bed, but it was dusty and I have long since misplaced the pen. Luckily, sleepy me remembered technology exists so I fat-thumbed it into my phone’s notebook app. It’s a somewhat sad reminder to me, looking at the dusty notepad, that I generally don’t dream (or don’t remember them at least), but hey, maybe this is where it turns around.

The game? Well OK, I’ll tell you. The concept is a frantic multiplayer madness game based around dogs that have gotten free and are living their best lives in the neighbour’s gardens. You would take control of said dogs and in each overcooked-style level, have to bounce around, dodging the neighbours, your owner and eventually maybe even dog catchers while trying to eat scraps, dig holes create madness and generally have the best time. I’ve not worked out a lot of the details yet, but I’m thinking you’ll have a “chaos meter” that, when full, will trigger the exit to open so you can move to the next garden. Working title “Every Dog has its Day” for the idiom or “Little Dog’s Day” (Maybe without the “little”) as a reference to the poem by Rupert Brooke. Feel free to hit me up with any thoughts, it’s a very early concept.

The last bit of news this week is one that is more exciting to me than anyone else… I’m going to be upgrading my workstation! Or, in less grandiose terms, I’m getting a new computer. A laptop in fact. I need to work out the nitty-gritty of how to buy it for the company, but I’m pretty psyched. The reason? My computer exploded this week… It got better, but it had a full on meltdown and tripped it’s kill switch. It’s not the first time this has happened, but it was the most dramatic.

The story behind it was pretty amazing though. I was rendering out a video while listening to a League of Legends music video (Warriors, the season 2020 cinematic, if you’re interested), when the heat warning started buzzing. I shut down everything but those two tasks (I was really into the track OK!) and crossed every finger and toe. The render hits 90%, the track reaches the drop. 95%, the crescendo is building. 98%, the final scene on the video plays. 100%! done! The video finishes within two seconds of the render job. I let out a whoop, I’m fired up by the music, the video and the success… The computer locks up. It has hard crashed. There’s nothing I can do. I collapse into a heap, internally weeping as I kill the power and start the reboot, hoping, praying that the render is safe.

It isn’t. I have to edit the whole video again from scratch. I play no music, I drop the fps to ease the burden, and I get the video sent to SockMonkey. I’m lamenting my choices, my old, old pc, and my own stupidity for not backing up the project before rendering it out. I’m contemplating a new computer, not for the first time… Then it kills itself again. I’m done. I had to fully tear it down and clean it out, and when I reassembled it, it blue screened a bunch due to unstable voltages so I had to drop the CPU clock level in the BIOS to compensate. I’ve got it stable and cool at the moment, but the pros of an upgrade are now outweighing the cons. As soon as I work out how business expenses and director loans work, I’m crashing into the modern era with something that should last a while!

Until that happens, or until next Friday,
Matt Out.