my life for the past two weeksThis past fortnight has been a bit rough. It all started on the Sunday before last when my kid came down with a fever. They've been having issues with regular infections for the past year and a bit, and every time they get one it means theyre sick for one or two days, and bored for the following three while they go through their course of antibiotics. Last week was no different. The doctors couldn't find a cause for the fever, they gave my kid antibiotics and then I spent most of the week dealing with a bored cranky kid.
This week however is proving to be more testing. To try and figure out the root cause for the fevers we took my kid in for some tests at the local hospital. They weren't easy tests for kiddo, but they needed to be done. Turns out everything came up fine, aside from the fact that kiddo came down with yet another fever between them, and away the cycle starts again.
Im relaying all of this because it has directly affected my work over the past three years. I mentioned this on Mastodon earlier in the week, but this year alone I've had seventeen weeks with at least one day off, a majority of those have four days off. If I were working at either of my previous gamedev companies I'd have been fired by now.
It's especially difficult as it makes sense for me to take the time off, I earn less and my pay comes in regardless of whether Im actively spending hours on the work (thank you people who buy Interloper! Really!) So it means that while my partner does take time off, I end up taking the majority of the time.
This past two weeks Ive been able to work a total of four completely disconnected days. The biggest effect this has is that I have trouble keeping momentum on my work. So for instance with the current UI tasks, the way I'd plough through these kinds of tasks in the past is to plan out my weeks worth of work, starting with complex tasks on Monday, and using the high from completing those to check off the easier tasks later on in the week as my motivation wanes. Having to stop, and in particular having to change modes of daytime work from thinking to constant conflict resolution just breaks any momentum I might've gained.
I love my kiddo to the moon and back, I love spending time with them, but also I struggle when I don't get time to work, to build these dinky little games I love building so much.
my life for the past two weeks
On the Exoloper front, I've put together the Roster and Edit Exo pages, including layouts for all screen sizes, from phone to desktop to iPad and tv. This is gruelling work (as far as software design can be gruelling) it involves running the UI to that page, testing it against the various screen sizes, checking for flow issues in each screen size (as the flow slightly changes per page based on the screen) and then going back, fixing those issues, checking them again, so on and so forth.
I'm almost certian there's gonna be bugs with this. The hope is that most of these bugs will be on platforms that see less use, and that the core platform, iPhone portrait and landscape is absolutely spotless. Time will tell.