The more I work, the more I respect people in this line of work. Things you think are easy as a novice, are so much harder after some expertise.

...

That's right! Another thing I thought would take hours took days! Wheeeee!

Had a very nice design breakthrough yesterday, doing input visualizations. Most people don't actually know what "pitch", "yaw" and roll mean. So I made our icons spin with controller movement!

After that, I made one little change to calibration code and immediately broke a tonne of stuff.

So close yet so far!

Haven't taken much time off at Christmas because I find everything I'm doing takes way longer than I expect, and I only have until February to get the majority right. At the same time, trying to pace myself. But I feel on track as a result.

Dry January is helping, I think. There's a bottle of gin in my cupboard which has survived longer than any single bit of booze in my flat for the entire last year.

Last year was regular impostor syndrome, concentrated by not really having much chance to talk to new people at work, and thus feel more solidarity.

Starting to get to know people better, and understand their struggles, and realize that struggling is pretty darn normal. If I think back, it was ever thus.

But if you don't hear about the struggle, it's easy to presume others are just flying.

Excited. Trying to pace myself. But lots to do.

A few features that I requested are making it into the public, and I've been studiously implementing them in our own games.

I've so much left to do and a lot of it has been left up to me to get on with. But I'm starting to ask for more help because it's really snowballed.

I know that if i pull a late one it'll only result in wrecking the next day. Thinking about swearing off booze until I'm more comfortable with what's left.

Haven't had a blank slate in years. Just a series of tasks that involve reading stale code for a while, assessing that the code is not future proof/won't do what I need, then deciding whether to tear it up and start over, but then realizing the code is used by about 5-10other systems, then deciding to add hacks upon hacks and let the next person to use it suffer.

I mean, that's most gamedev in a nutshell, I guess. Just feels like I haven't done game design in a decade. What happened?