Next time I do one of these, I think I’ll step down the daily updates to just key milestones. Sometimes, even if I get stuff done I don’t have much to talk about.

The good so far: I’ve got the basic cannon working. The bad: still havent got anything resembling a game. Things are moving a bit too slowly. There’s a bunch of pesky little annoyances that are taking longer than expected to sort out.

Case in point: I’ve worked on some new graphics in Inkscape. Unfortunately, Flash doesn’t import SVG files, but luckily I do have a copy of Illustrator which does. Illustrator has some strange ideas about what to do with the SVG primitives though, swapping out the colour palette for some strange muted version and completely messing up the stroke (the outline) on shapes. Grr. If I have to I’ll export as raster images, but it’s a bit of a waste to have to use raster in a vector driven tool like Flash.

The other big problem is more mental. I think I’m a bit burnt out. Strange to be burnt out before I’ve really begun, but I’m essentially doing the same thing I’ve doing for the last few months: sitting at my desk typing at my iMac. My focus is shot, which may be why I’m constantly stumbling over things and not spending my time wisely. My hunch is that I need to regulate my time a bit more, so I can spend my time at the computer focused at the task at hand and then relax guilt free. It’s the latter bit that’s important: I’ve spent the last year feeling guilty about not working when I’m away from my desk, and all it does is fuel your procrastination and make you slow down to a crawl.

I think I’ll take the pressure off myself to get this finished within a week. It’s an internal deadline after all. If I need to spend a extra few days to polish it up, then that’s okay. I can then spend significant chunks of the weekend doing other vital things without much worry, and calmly finish the game by Wednesday or so. I can take a step back for a little bit, review where I’m going wrong, then try to fix it for the finish.