slAIn

you know that feeling when you finally pay of your mortgage and you finally know that not only is your home your own from then on but you don't have to worry about making the house payments each month anymore?

of course you fucking don't because most baby boomers aren't even to that point yet and millennials barely even stand a goddamn chance at step 1 or for that matter affording their own apartment nor will we ever in our lifetimes the way things are currently going

but that's the kind of feeling i have right now.

sort of.

i think about certain aspects of making games as taking on a "development debt". I could make the game from start to finish much quicker if i disregarded everything like animations or adding new gens or rebuilding the AI, but I choose to do those things to make the game better. in return, I accept a certain amount of development debt that must be worked out of before the game can be considered finished. and that's pretty stressful. it feels bad to not be able to put time towards making the kind of progress that i care about the most-- which is of course the main gameplay and story. 

so, although i still have a significant amount of debt to pay off in the form of finishing animations and the new gen, I'm happy to say that I can at least put the AI behind me.

mostly.

i mean i know it'll still take forever to test and debug and amend and yaddayadda but making fixes to something is much easier making something from scratch (or from the ashes of a previously ineffective AI system)

and also i know that the AI is only planned and not actually implemented as of now buuuuuuuut thanks to the beautiful soul known as the cellist, that's all that i really have to worry about.

which means i am freeeeeeeee from AI.
except fixes and updates to E17's parts but again, who caressss about that i'll do it later.

so! what's next? normally i would now turn my attention to the USUM sprites so that we can get our final new-gen debt all safely tucked away too. would feel good. i prioritized that last episode as well and there are really only a handful of sprites to handle this time, so that's nice too.

alas, i am not going to do that yet.

first, i will get started on the mapping. the first main area of E18 will take a bit of time on the other mapper's parts again, so I'd like to hurry and get it set, so I can pass it off to them and then, while everyone is occupied, I can take out the sprites.

as you can see on the scoreboard i've already started that in fact, sooooooooooo really i just get to do part of the funner stuff a bit early... sweet stuff imo.