Work has it's rhythms. Some days you may find yourself bursting with ideas and other days, well you just are sick and tired of it and want to go for a bike ride or play zelda or something. Anyhow.
@p
Because I've been sooo preoccupied with getting vex done and meeting a deadline (April!) I have tried to mitigate any unknowns by finishing things up piecewise. Like, I want to 100% finish this thing or that, get it totally out of the way. Unfortunately, this isn't a good way to work at all. Your creativity drains. You can only do so much of a certain thing before you just feel a lack of ideas and don't enjoy it. You can still force on but it's very unpleasant and draining.
@p
So you need to syncopate your work rhythms. You need to work on one thing or another until you are starting to get sick of it. Then, go and work something else. While you are working on task A, chances are you are fondly remembering more and more task B and having ideas. So by the time you start to get drained on task A, you can easily bump yourself over to B becuase you have lots of ideas and it feels fresh.
@p
I keep forgetting this! Anyhow, the moral of the story is that I'm now working on graphics again =) I implemented yesterday lens glow, fixed the cloud engine (there were still bugs when I left it last, and just this second I think I finally killed the last one! hoorj!) I also vastly improved the way ships work. Today will bring either particle effects, upgraded building architecture/textures, and/or both. I also need to put a little "flag" thing in the texture loader, mainly to flag certain textures to NOT be compressed (since like, you don't want your lensflares or water map to look chunky...)
2005-01-25