What I did this week 8/4/2020: The Business Stuff

This is part two of a two part post, read the first part here.

So first, my delivery work… It was non-existent, unfortunately. I had a lot of issues with roommates, being on call to drive a friend home from the hospital, and irregular sleep, I just could not gather the willpower to go out and do any deliveries. It was only just tonight that I managed to get myself to go out and do a few deliveries before doing these update posts. How did those deliveries go? Well, I ended up accidentally not stopping at a right on red, and getting a bunch of camera flashes in my face, so I’ll be looking forward to the ticket in the mail. That’s what happens when you take far deliveries to unfamiliar areas in the middle of the night, I guess. On top of that, the deliveries that I have done have generally had lower tips than early on in the pandemic, a trend that I predicted would happen way back here, and while I was pretty pessimistic in February, it still ended up being worse than I could have imagined. The money is still pretty decent, about $15-18/hour, I just can’t seem to really get myself to go do it much. Going to try to make up for that a little bit this week by just working a lot. Rent is paid though, so the pressure isn’t too high at the moment, though I’ve got my phone bill coming up in just over a week, so I gotta work some in the meantime.

It’s also been difficult to work as the card that I usually use for paying for things like gas, and groceries, and food, has just expired, and I haven’t gotten the replacement card in the mail yet. This is also the account that the money that I do make gets deposited to, so I currently only have access to the cash tips that I stash away for such emergencies, though that is already running low.

Outside of my direct delivery work, I’ve spent most of my time doing a few things, the first is research for my roommate, who is selling a bunch of her stuff to cut down on clutter. I’ve sold a couple of things for her, so I should get a bit of money from that, and hopefully the listings will sell pretty quickly, so I can get paid for that work.

For my roommate’s business that she’s starting, I’ve spent a lot of this week helping her set up her Amazon Store, the separate accounts for the business, to make accounting easier, and helping her figure out each of the steps she needs to get her sewing business up and running. Now, there’s still a lot more to go through with her, but she’s getting closer to having a storefront where she will actually have things to sell, and hopefully it’ll be popular enough to setup a real supply chain. As such, her rapid progress means that I will also soon have wizard robes to model, and there will be pictures, you can be sure!

That brings me to my programming projects. The original project file for my marble playground game thing was becoming far too large, since I was using it also to play around with various packages. The project was in the range of taking several minutes to open, with a ton of the files imported just being a waste of space for this particular project. So, I deleted the project, started a new one, and just imported the assets I made and the couple of packages that I actually need for it. Now I just need to finish going through the Oculus Sample Framework, so I know how to use all of their wonderful, pre-built utilities without having to go far for VR assets. Do you know how long it would take me to make a basic pair of hands, let alone animations and functionalities for those hands? Too long, I’ve got too many game ideas to deal with those low-level issues. Sure, someday, if I’ve got a real game company under my belt, I will absolutely have people make custom hands for my more ambitious VR ideas. However, now is about function over form, meaning, does the game actually function? At the moment, the answer to that is, no, so this next week I’ll have to make all the objects able to be grabbed and moved, with the track pieces staying in place, and the marbles not. I’ll also need to go to a dollar store or something, and buy a bag of marbles so I can record audio so that it’s not just awkward silence. I should also consider recording a very long jam track, similar to dwarf fortress’s fortress track, so that I have background music for it.

Lastly, I think, other than the idea that I had for a pretty simple game this week, that being a giant VR maze with trippy geometry, and an interesting sky, would be the sculpt that I have been working on. Unfortunately, with people here more this week, and a lot of the floor space filled with things for my roommate’s business projects, diving into VR do work on my sculpture has been limited. Now, I have done some work on it, in fact, I colored the first couple of major segments, and now am mostly left with the detailed line coloring. It looks really good so far, but it took almost 6 hours to color what I’ve done so far, and looks like it may take another 6-10 of coloring to finish the main eye. Once I’m finished with that, I’ll do the outer eyes, which will be much smaller and much less detailed, and then finally export time, with possible renderings to come with interesting lighting and whatnot. It was quite amusing, on Facebook, someone asked me what it was for. What is art for but to be seen? Maybe I’ll sell it to a developer, or an artist who wants to use the base model for something. Maybe I’ll use it myself, who knows? But I’m definitely going to show it off.

Anyways, I think that should be just about everything for this week. I was feeling really depressed, like I hadn’t really done anything, but that was my mind tricking me because I just didn’t make much money this week, and didn’t work my traditional gig. When I look back at this post, and part one, I realize that I actually did a bunch of stuff, and that I really didn’t mess around much, so I feel better about how the week went in retrospect. Hopefully next week I’ll have a couple more books finished, a lot of podcasts listened to, some projects closer to being ready to be seen, and manage to get myself out and working more.