Entry 009 - Doing It Again

June 12th 2026

Why do I procrastinate so much? Is it ADHD, Autism, laziness? Maybe some context
is needed here.

I started a jRPG video game project with the goal of getting a working,
shippable game done for once. That was Feb 10th 2026, four months ago. I have
most if not all of the core programming features done at this point.

* Entity Component System (ECS)
* Asset manager
* Raylib integration
* Input handling
* Camera system
* Audio playback
* Tilemap rendering
* Sprite animations
* Particle system
* Tiled integration
* Dialogue system
  - Custom Yarn Spinner parser
  - Branching dialogue
  - UI
* Scene manager
* Cutscene system
* Enemy encounters
* Turn Based Battle System
* Save/Load system
* XP/Leveling system

With all that in place, I used some free assets I found online as well as some
that were not so cleanly sourced and created an MVP build (minimum viable
product).

I was not proud of what I had made, but I put it in front of my kid, my ex-wife,
and my girlfriend. The first is a GenZ kid who plays games but only stuff like
Roblox, Minecraft, Peak, and some others I don't really get. My girlfriend
doesn't play any games so it was interesting to see her try and just figure out
what to do. I didn't get to watch my ex play in person, but I knew she wouldn't
just give me empty encouragement and would actually see what I was going for,
not what it looked like right now.

Now that I have that all out of the way and know it's a viable thing, I have
begun the actual development phase. Except I stalled out almost immediately.

The first task is to get some art that is actually usable for what I'm building.
I looked into what it would take to hire someone and I don't actually have the
budget or time to work with someone else. I'm making this in my free time, which
is super rare. If I was working with someone who ghosted me for a month at a
time, I'd quit, so why would I expect to be able to find someone who can work
with me like that?

So a couple of nights ago I opened Aseprite just to start drawing something,
anything. The first screen shows news about the app and... oh, look, there's a
new version. I had built it from source and couldn't tell what version I was
running so I started down the rabbit hole of getting the latest beta downloaded
and building and...

Wait, I'm doing it again. Damn.

I wish I could say I got right to work after that, but nope. I spent tonight
trying to figure out why vim's airline plugin was wrapping around to the next
line and then cleaning up temp files that Visual Studio, VSCode, Claude Code,
Docker, and everything else have been leaving all over my hard drive.

I also set up WeeChat again and connected to the sdf irc server. Like I said, I
don't know why I do it, but I seem to want to do ANYTHING but the thing I said I
was going to do. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.