Self-care, critical programming failure, and getting ready for the final school submission.
Self-Care
It’s a late dev diary entry, but I’m the one who decides when the diary entries get posted, so there.
Last week, I was busy with some personal issues: I went to see a counselor and made a psychiatric appointment. I haven’t had time to work on The Weight of a Soul because of that, but I think mental health takes precedence over creative output. The good news is that I’m feeling better and more hopeful, so I should be able to take on the rest of the project at my own pace.
Optimization (or the lack thereof)
Regarding the challenges I mentioned in last week’s dev diary: I had a go at optimizing The Weight of a Soul to run faster, but I must have botched some sort of cosmic skill check, because the post-optimization build actually ran slower than the pre-optimization build. Thank god for version control and rollback functionality.
It turns out I was barking up the wrong tree: the slowdowns weren’t being caused by JavaScript calls, but by DOM API calls. The game was slowing down because I was constructing complicated lists of HTML elements every turn.
I tried some quick fixes, but they didn’t meaningfully improve game speed, so the problem is far from resolved. Since the slowdown is only really noticeable in Day Two, which won’t be part of The Weight of a Soul‘s exhibition demo, I’m putting it on the back burner for the time being and focusing on other aspects of the project.
FYP Exhibition and Report
This week, I’ve also started preparing for The Weight of a Soul‘s exhibition next week, and writing the academic report for The Weight of a Soul to be submitted to my university library. It’s a lot of work so it will probably be a while before I can start working on the actually important matters of my game again.
Chin Kee Yong 