I kinda just wanna vent publicly.
I've been really exhausted this past week, and I haven't been sure why. I suspect that I'm just doing too many things (surprise surprise). I'm still working on editing together two of my dissertation chapters into papers. Meanwhile, one of the teams I'm working with has been facing data provenance issues with one of their analyses, so I've been back and forth with them trying to recover the data.
And...no offense to social science folks, but rant incoming (I'm gonna be a little vague to protect the folks and the project): I really wish social science folks had more basic programming and data knowledge. As someone with experience teaching data provenance and working with large datasets, it is really, really frustrating to me to work with people who do things like conduct analyses that includes manually modifying data entries in excel and deleting rows. Part of the whole issue that we ran into is that some other team member who left already had their documents deleted after leaving the university, but they only sent intermediate files with partially deleted rows from the dataset we were working with. We're trying to tally data counts and we're stuck scratching our heads trying to reconstuct what was deleted like it's an archeological excavation where parts of tablets are missing and have to be inferred from context. It's like I came from a world of electricity and computers and I have to put in effort making fire from soggy logs. This will be the third time that this project has required retroactively checking the data process, and it feels like such a waste of time.
I'm also applying for jobs. It's genuinely not a huge amount of manual labor because nowadays people expect job applicants to use and be familiar with AI. So at this point I have a whole workflow on how to make customized resumes for jobs while also preserving the truth of the source material.
I really just like...I can't tell if any of this is actually useful. On the one hand, I'm not manually making resumes anymore, which seems like it should be a major load off. However, I'm not actually working any less: I end up having to use a lot of cognitive effort to monitor for issues in the outputs. Because of AI, everyone expects perfectly machine-customized resumes. But that means that it's literally impossible for me not to use AI because it's not possible for me to do the labor myself to produce something that addresses all of the ATS optimization, keyword auditing, company mission matching, and screening for recruiter/hiring manager optimization myself, at the level that is expected now. But the only reason why they have the expectation that resumes should look so optimized is because AI exists. If AI didn't exist, people's expectations would be different so they would review hiring materials differently. It hasn't changed anything.
Meanwhile, I'm still working on my game. Dialogue boxes are in, characters animate when they change state. It's still really cool to be able to edit the game and watch the client reflect the changes in real time. There were also some backend things that needed to be fixed: the client now holds its world data as stale, and the server and client have contracts to determine when the client has to check in again. This way, maps that have very little going on don't refresh very often, but maps where entities move around constantly will refresh as fast as needed.
Right now I'm literally just putting birch trees into the game, and cleaning up architecture along the way. Birch trees with birch boards and birch dowels to make birch chairs. Fun.
Something that's tiring me out is that I keep losing contact with my desire to create and play with the game. After spending weeks on converting and fixing up code, it just feels like the fixes are neverending. Even though the software works better and better, the "game" doesn't feel like it's progressing. At this point I'm fixing up entities on the map so it's starting to get there, but I'm still just trying to get it to look like its old self.
Now that dialogue boxes are in, and now that I've made editor-authorable comic pages, I'm genuinely at the point where adding actual content in the game is necessary. There just isn't that much left that needs to be fixed, besides a bunch of thematic and presentational things. I can't test if authoring game data on farmable objects and craftable items is functioning if I don't have things to put into the game. I already drew assets for birch tree items as well as fishing items like guppies, smelt, anchovies, and their cooked versions. The mere act of adding them into the game would help me check and refine the code architecture to make sure stuff is working correctly.
I'm just facing...mental inertia.
I spent some time today learning about software that could help me with worldbuilding. Not worldbuilding like lore and maps, literally building the world, like what game maps exist, which ores and trees go where, how long it takes to farm, what they give, how long their cooldowns are, etc.
I ended up going with Tiled, since that seems to support object orientation, and it saves out data in a format that can be converted into my game data the way I've represented it.