Recovering...

I don't talk much about my personal life, so let me talk about my day-job for a little bit. It's not the most exciting job, but I've been working there for three years now. It's a clothing company named Express, they're among the more reputable clothing "brands" though, honestly, they're still on the same ethical level as American Eagle or Child's Place as far as I'm concerned. There's only so big you can get as a company before hands get dirty. That's why at Tiki Hub Games we plan on keeping very small tight-knit branches that each act as their own company but pool resources like a corporation. I love the people I work with. While there is always a revolving door of associates that just don't do their job (literally, at some point, they just don't show up to work anymore, and the rest of us are caught covering their shifts). I've had three opportunities to work in management with them, but I've asked them to hold off on that sort of promotion while I continue to work towards building a full-time career at game design. Of course, not all Plan As work out, so I'm very grateful for that resting opportunity. If push came to shove, Manifest will continue to be developed while the time I'm able to work on it goes down due to higher responsibilities at Express. The 3 full-time managers at our store work a lot of hours. It's not uncommon to work a 12-13 hours shift once or twice a week. As a more valued associate, I've had to pull those shifts with them more than once as we set the floor and do inventory with short staff. Typically I am in the back room doing shipment on a regular day. It's my preference, even though I tend to be one of the better sales associates, I've never been a big people-person. So the last few days I've been up to close one night and open the next deal, on top of a 5am floorset. It was pretty rough trying to get work done on Manifest in between it all, but I did get a few things done. Here I am with 3 days off now (Which just doesn't happen for me, I work pretty much every monday and friday, and rarely don't work a day between them) and I'm looking forward to getting plenty of work done on the game :).

So... progress! In the last post I talked about what has been hindering us for the last few weeks. A silly, yet educational experience which has greatly improved my ability to manage Unity's C# willy wonkiness. After a few days of work with little time to use my computer, I did get the old story backup installed and update TextMeshPro. Today I spent some time recovering from the issues that came with these two actions. First was the story, which I had to reinstall an older but equivalent version, as the newest one had corrupted a couple of files when working with our "memory leak". Next was TextMeshPro, which I had to modify our page GameObjects to work with it's new format, then do a little troubleshoot with Stephen Bouchard, the author of Text Mesh Pro (his support is *really* fast, it's impressive, he must be working on this asset all day long, it's almost weird lol). He suggested I turn the "Perspective Filter" he built into the debug of his tool to 0 until further notice. Here's what it looked like before that:

Next on the list tonight is to unwind and have dinner, then write some stories!! Man, talk about overdue :)