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This was one of the ones I was really looking forward to but didn't get to back when I was trying to play and review every game in a month. It looks like the build you have up on the game page is a bit older and doesn't have all the new stuff you've been working on, but I won't knock you that. I am giving a low score for consistency, but don't take that personally, that's just what Mouse said we should do for games that didn't have a devlog in the jam period, so don't be discouraged.


That's actually the main thing I wanted to say. You are kicking yourself *way* too hard for not making progress consistently. At one point when you were doing the daily logs you said something like, "I'm sick but that shouldn't be an excuse." Yes, it absolutely should. This is supposed to be for fun. If you're not feeling up to it or you're not feeling inspired, by all means take a break. You said something about feeling like you're being too lazy. Having other priorities in your life and doing things for self-care is not laziness. You do not owe it to anyone else to work yourself to exhaustion for a project you're doing for *yourself.* However, you are accountable to yourself to take care of yourself. 


As for the game itself, I think it's a really clever idea to duplicate an RE style fixed camera system with a top down camera. You may need a system to track the locations of the noctis when you switch rooms and have them teleport with so that they don't disappear when the camera changes but it's still the same room. Then again, they're ghosts, so that kinda makes sense. I can empathize with the devlog issue of having one devlog say, "I've got this great idea for how to implement something!" and then the next one says, "Nope, that didn't work at all and I messed it all up." Also, there's a risk with using copy-pasted code from AI, or Github, or wherever. It's not that the code isn't good, it's just that if you don't know why it works, you won't know why it stops working, and that can make fixing it a lot harder. Don't be afraid of refactoring. It's a lot easier to fix things than you might think and it will help you understand your code a lot better.


One more thing I wanted to share, about the while loops. I might be a little off with this, but as I understand it, for loops and while loops run in-between the frames. For loops are less likely to cause a problem because they default back to the normal game state when they're done, but while loops have conditions set that can cause problems. So let's say you have a for loop to loop over every enemy and get line of sight. You get, say, 10 enemies, set them all in an array, run a for each loop to get line of sight, and it returns the information. (Not the best way to run enemy AI but not important right now.) Now, if you do this for 1000 or 10000 enemies, you might see your game pause for a second as it tries to run calculations. The problem with while loops isn't when they stop unexpectedly, it's when they *don't* stop. If you have while loop running to check the condition for, say, when the player is alive, then that's not going to change in between the frames, so it'll keep running over and over again forever. The game detects an infinite loop and crashes the program as a safety feature so your entire computer doesn't lock up. So you have to be very careful with while loops. Hope that's helpful. 


Good luck with your project if you choose to continue, and no worries if you decide to give up on it. Learning to fail faster is one of the most important skills to learn in any creative endeavor. Otherwise, you'll get hung up on something that isn't working and just getting mad at yourself. Those daily logs read like you were getting really poor sleep and just kind of rambling and mad at yourself. You don't need to do that. It's just a game, and if it's not fun doing it, don't do it anymore. It's fine.

Thank you for taking time to read my logs! you're kinda reading me like a book, because you're right I was grumpy and sleep deprived while making the 2nd half of them😅 But yeah I've been understanding that, I think I havent posted a log in like... 2 months? I did some other jams and projects, got more skilled but also know that I do gamedev because I like it, so when I get sick of it I should take a break. And not do it for the money or for the project to exist, theyre dumb reasons.

But. It's not all black and white, no one is gonna come save me and achieve my dreams for me, so I need to put in the work from time to time, just not all the time. I worked way too much and I crashed hard for late july and early august.

But I'm better and I think I'm a little more wise to take it easier for inttas, my other game (I'm not abandoning noctis, just shelving it)

Again, thank you for reading and understanding my logs, idk if you're super smart or if I'm an open book because you wrote exact thoughts I had for a few weeks😭

I've seen it before, so I know what to look for. Glad you're doing well.