At this point it’s time for a nearly-full rewrite. I don’t know how to do this other than to just break the main update loop, and let all the fixes trickle down from there. Well, here goes.

Getting to this point has been a bit of a pain in the ass of my own making. Till now I had been tracking the front wheel as the main object of interaction for the game, but now that I need to add the rest of the car, it raises a lot of annoying questions. Does the car belong to the wheel, or does the wheel belong to the car? Should I only need to update one object and have it propagate down, or just update everything directly from the main loop?

Currently I’m stuck with a mix of both. The wheel is still the main object, and the rest of the car is just a giant sprite that gets dragged along with it whenever it moves. It works alright for now but I’m going to need to reckon with this when it comes time to add the animation to jack the car up and down.

There, I did it. I drew the rest of the car.

So I’ve picked up coding again. This time, I’m hoping to make a game for the Playdate from title to credits. You always hear that game programming is extremely difficult, but I always figured it was because the problems that come up were advanced in nature.

I mean, they are, but on top of that they’re also diverse, annoying, and many. If I’m to do this all on my own, I’m going to need to wrap my mind around aysnchonrous programming and all its moving parts. Not to mention, I’ll need to figure out my own art, sfx, and music.

I am a bit of a creative by nature.

This is by no means saying that I am necessarily good at creating things, or even prone to it. What I mean is that things feel right when I make things, whether they be photography, writing, woodworking, or code. Recently, I’ve done very little of that, falling into my more consumptive hobbies like movies and video games, and everything feels wrong.

I’ve been in this creative rut for the past few months. This does coincide with me finding employment again, which is a bit ironic considering that now I have so much more mental space to myself to create things now that I’m free of the anxiety of finding a job and dread of being stuck forever without one.

The problem is, the wave of relief brought a wave of complacency. I like my job and I believe myself to be quite decent at it, and it’d be nice to stay this way for a while. I don’t know how that mentality has bled into my creative process, but I think I need to sit down and pick things apart to see if I can jumpstart myself. It’s a spiral of needing inspiration to do things, but needing to do things to inspire myself to do more.

I had a bit of a spark today though. My son was out in the front yard while I was cleaning up, and he asked me for my mallet so that he could smash some acorns he had found. Instead of handing him mine, I pulled out the lathe and spent half an hour turning a kid-size one for him.

It’s not quite the right shape and I didn’t bother finishing the ends, but he was very happy with it and got to smashing, and I had forgotten how good it feels to have your work appreciated.