Heya friendos! I’ve been taking it slow the past week, so this edition is going to be on the short side. We’ll talk about what I do in my downtime and some tooling for Rumorweaver.

How Am I Doing?

Good, good, good. I took it slow last week because I needed more rest before getting back to work. I’ve been going pretty hard on Rumorweaver the past few months and it seems my fervor has come to its natural conclusion at last. That’s a good thing! Now I can treat the project as work, professional and strategic, as opposed to the fever dream of a crazed artist.

What Am I Doing?

So what do I do when I take it easy from work? For one, I played some new games, like Monster Train. It’s… a mixed bag. I’ve enjoyed it for a few hours, but it’s not very challenging, so you don’t have to be all that strategic or smart about deck building to win. I also played Root for the first time, as well as some other social and board games. Root has been on my to-play list ever since it came out and it didn’t disappoint, but I definitely need a few more sessions to figure it out properly.

Other than that, I tend to spend more energy on homemaking. My partner’s been hard at work too these days, so I took some extra time to cook nice dishes. I was especially pleased with the dakdoritang (a spicy Korean chicken stew) I managed to throw together.

Tooling

What I did work on was tooling for Rumorweaver. Audio functionality is a bit underbaked in Godot, the engine we’re using, so we had to extend it for our own benefit. We designed a way to mix buses dynamically through zones, monitor the current state of the audio server while playing and create audio settings for different game states.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

I’ve been really enjoying making tools as well as doing chores around the house. I wonder if there’s some sort of personal overlap between those two things.

I’d hesitate to call myself a people pleaser, I’m too individualistic for that, but I do enjoy when people find the stuff I do helpful. I think it’s just a sort of shared joy: I do it for me, but then I’m glad if I can help someone along the way. Or if helping someone makes things easier for me in the future as well, it entices me more.

Maybe I just like streamlining processes because seeing the results is satisfying. Not sure how that applies to scrubbing the bathtub, but…