So, here we go again with a few workdays of break in releases, go figure.
Keith has been working on a variety of time-consuming behind-the-scenes things (relating mostly to bubbling up some of the underlying sim numbers for your viewing pleasure), and I've been on a myriad of things. Today and yesterday morning I spent a lot of time experimenting with some various things I'm not ready to talk about just yet (heh), and in general working on some bigger-picture design work rather than just coding furiously on the smaller things like we have been. This afternoon I mostly worked on some performance improvemetns for the solar map when fast-forwarding, and then a huge bunch of stuff with pirate bases.
As noted last Friday, though, I'm going to try to get away from doing anything beyond emergency patches on Fridays, because then I'm not looking over my shoulder all weekend worrying that I need to do an emergency patch and not being able to ever take any proper time off.
Yesterday afternoon I also kind of hit a wall and just slept the whole time after lunch. Just kind of mentally and emotionally and physically I hit this kind of low point, which is my version of burnout. The thing that was bothering me emotionally has nothing to do with anything, really, except that my wife and I have been watching the DVDs of Burn Notice and were down to only two episodes left. I hate it when a great series ends (I felt the same after the Harry Potter books ended, or the LOTR trilogy of movies, etc), but I was really overreacting here. Just a symtom of being tired. After four or five hours of sleep, I was groggy but feeling emotionally stable again, heh.
Today I started off a bit sluggish, honestly, so it was a good time to work on other stuff relating to the game but not in the mode I've been in for a while. As the day has gone on, I've been feeling more and more energized, and now I'm pretty well back to normal. That sort of "crash" is how I tend to burn out. Whereas others go into a slump for months, I tend to hit a wall and then just collapse for a day, and then when I see that the world didn't explode without my constant attention, I calm down and recover. Anyway, I knew that was building, but it's really kind of a minor speedbump that happens at least once a year for me. Now I've got a much better work-life balance (in the last month) anyway, so things are certainly improving on that front.
You definitely don't need to worry about me getting burned out or tired of this game, though. I am absolutely still thrilled to be working on it. At the end of the Valley 1 project I was feeling pretty worn out by just the rollercoaster of that whole thing. And after thousands of hours into AI War, I was feeling kind of worn out there and ready to focus on other things while Keith took the reigns there. But with TLF I still feel like I did back in the summer of 2009 for AI War: like this is only the start of something much, much bigger and cooler. Just to put anyone's mind at ease who reads this.
I figure that some insight into the psyche of someone like myself would be interesting. I fully intend to be doing this 30 years from now, so no worries.
