Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Too Sick to Indie?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 14, 2015

I get this crazy idea that if I’m too sick to sleep, too sick to go to work, I’ll be able to take advantage of that sick time and get some indie dev time in (or at least write some blog posts).

It almost never works out that way. While I try to be paranoid and not infect my coworkers, in general if I’m too sick to drag my sorry butt into the office, I’m too sick to do anything but sleep and do some low-impact reading, video-watching, or gaming… all three of which activities may terminate in the middle with sleep.

This is why turn-based games rock. If you nod off in the middle from all the cold meds, when you wake up again staring at the same map or same dungeon corridor, you don’t need to worry about how long you were out. So long as you didn’t make any bogus moves while half-conscious, you just save the game and go to bed. Again. For the third time that day.

Sadly, that doesn’t make for productive development time.  I managed to finish a white-boxed level and upgrade to Unity 5.3 before getting hit full-force with this cold. After that, I’ve only been able to scrape out a trickle of design work. You’d think with my weird medication-induced bizarro dreams I’d have tons of interesting creative work done for me, but… no. Not so much.

Fortunately, after a bit of crunch at the day job this week, I’m on break for a while for Christmas, and I hope it will be an awesome time with a lot of work done on FK2. I don’t think I’ll hit my goal of getting all of the levels completely navigable by the end of the month, but I won’t be too far off.


Filed Under: Game Development - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



  • Rubes said,

    Did you find any issues with upgrading to Unity 5.3? Hope you feel better.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    I’m feeling a bit better. More functional. But man… this weekend felt like a waste.

    The upgrade to 5.3 went without a hitch. I was extremely pleased. 5.5 is going to be the scary one. I may ignore that one, as we will (hopefully) be too close to release. We’re far enough along that I don’t see what “killer feature” they might offer… unless they fix some of the serious lighting problems we’ve been dealing with.

  • Rubes said,

    Good to know. Thanks!

  • McTeddy said,

    As a fellow sick person I admire your attempts to accomplish something. I was entirely useless until today.

    Even worse, my union is trying to trade off my Christmas vacation, so I might not get much of one.

  • Maklak said,

    Eh, I’m too sick to get any serious work done and too healthy to not go to work. My head hurts and I can’t seem to get enough sleep, but when I read a book I’m almost fine. I don’t like my work, but I can use the money, so I don’t want to quit or take sick leave. So I get how you feel.

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Ouch! Man, crap’s going around I guess.

    Yeah, last week – the days I did go in – I was definitely not running at 100% efficiency. Not even 50% most of the days. It was better than nothing, and the project deadline isn’t going to delay itself in response to our sick days, but … man. It sucked.

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