Bit of an out-of-sorts day coming up tomorrow as I’ve got the Blaydon Race in the evening, which means I won’t be doing my usual daily run in the morning. That’ll feel strange! But it means I can get stuff done first thing, which I’m not used to.
I’m very nearly done with my current game incarnation – just a few things to sort this evening and then I can send it to the next round of testers. Glad to be hitting that milestone as it’s taken a bit longer than expected.
The long weekend has confused my internal clock (something easily done) and I keep thinking it’s Tuesday today. Yesterday I kept thinking it was Saturday.
Either way it’s been a good day. I had a sports massage at the physio (and got some more advice for honing my strength training routine). After work I was also able to work on my game for a bit. Progress every day!
Global Running Day today coincided with my seventh runniversary! Seven years since I started running on 1st June 2015. I’m still very much in marathon recovery mode but I did manage my basic one-mile plod to celebrate.
I’ve mentally recovered enough now that I’m able to work on my game again and have made a start today. Looking forward to curling up with the project this weekend.
Four days to go till marathon day. Itching to get going now! My head is full of backup plans (because I’m worried about various things not going as expected) and I am looking forward to not thinking about those anymore.
I’ve got quite a bit to do on my game draft but I’m hopeful that I will at least have it in a playable enough state by tomorrow night that I can get the testing underway.
I was thrilled to hear last night that I won the TALP Jam 2022! I hadn’t expected to win as there were lots of great games in the jam this year. I learnt such a lot making Barry Basic and the Speed Daemon during April (and have been able to take those lessons into the project I’ve returned to this month), and I’m so pleased that people enjoyed it.
Legs are still doing well on my short runs so it’s just a case of counting down the days and dealing with the nerves now!
Two things to finish off this coming week:
The story part of the draft was finished today. Four days of polishing off and then the testers can have it while I concentrate on marathon weekend. Hopefully there won’t be anything major to change for draft three; by the time I’ve recovered from the marathon, there’ll only be a month left until the ParserComp deadline. (Normally my attitude would be ‘a month? I can make a whole game in a month!’ but I really don’t want to rush this one.)
The training plan, meanwhile, is more about eating and resting than running in this last week. I’ll do my short runs and strength training, but I will mostly be fuelling for next Sunday. I’m still veering between feeling almost confident and completely terrified, but such is marathoning.
Still trucking on with game-making and short runs, still going well. Been practising marathon pace and it feels nice and manageably slow. Looking forward to getting on with it and getting these nerves out of the way – the nerves are absolutely the worst part of the taper.
Booked some travel logistics for a gig in July today – nice to get some summer plans nailed down seeing as the year is barrelling along.
I’m doing a serious revamp / redraft of a game project at the moment. I did the first draft in March and intended to release it as part of the Spring Thing competition at the end of the month, but following feedback from testers decided to make a lot of changes and submit it to ParserComp at the end of June instead. It was clear what needed to be changed and planning this out was very easy, but it’s a fairly big editing job, which is something I’ve never done for a game before (only for novels). It’s been a really interesting process so far, partly because I’m simplifying a lot of things, whereas usually I’m making them more complicated. I should have done the bulk of the editing work by the time of the Edinburgh Marathon, and I’m looking forward to having any spare time I can grab in June (which is a bit busier than most months this year) for polishing.
The taper moves on, and running is still short and painless – though I am looking forward to doing a final six-miler on Thursday to test out the pacing strategy one last time.