Routines and Current Plans

SAVE, then go to WAR

Alright, sometimes it happens as SAV and go to RAW, but who cares. This is based off of a concept I heard about from Puttylike, a blog I follow about being a multipotentialite (something I'll cover in its own blog entry). She called it the "Multipotentiate Morning," which is, itself based off of the Miracle Morning, The idea is to get up earlier than normal, and spend time doing the following:

• Silence
• Affirmations
• Visualizations
• Exercise
• Reading
• Scribing(Writing)

Called SAVERS, for obvious reasons. These are intended to help you be productive early, and set a precedent for being productive throughout the day. Her application was to make it so that you can work on all of your projects every day.

She modified it to fit her needs, and so have I modified it to fit mine. Coming from the small town that I do, and knowing all of my enemies for getting into the games industry: Procrastination, lack of a tech infrastructure, being overwhelmed, and a lack of knowledge; I have decided to characterize my whole thing as kind of a video game.

The first thing is to SAVE my game at the beginning of every day. This sets me a good foundation I can go to any time I start to feel like I'm losing my way. This remains unchanged. Start the day with about 30 minutes of various kinds of meditation, spend 30 minutes exercising, then I take an hour break to relax, eat breakfast, before spending 3 hours doing the next stage.

The second thing is to go to WAR. Writing(this blog), doing Art exercises, and then Reading. This allows me to do a little bit of work on one of my pet projects, specifically the part I feel like working on, without taking away from portfolio production time.

So mine is

• Silence
• Affirmations
• Visualizations
• Exercise
• Reading
• Writing
• Art
• Reading

This is further supported by a nightly routine, but there's no neat acronym for it. The general idea is to set a rhythm so I can easily get to sleep.

• Plan next day
• Hygiene
• Litter Box
• Clothes for next day

This way I am on the right track for the next day.

Current Plans

I've finally figured out exactly how I want to brand myself to employers, and what I really feel like I want to become the best at. I have a great amount of passion for real-time simulation, especially of water, and I have a great amount of passion for procedural generation. So my portfolio projects are going to focus on that. I'm trying to limit each part of this to one month "phases." I'm going to showcase three parts of my skills:

• Ocean Surface Simulation
• Phase 1: Basic Simulation
• Basic Surface Simulation
• Tiled Ocean
• Perlin Noise displacement for each tile, and LoD tesselation
• Foam and Whitecap generation
• Phase 2: Advanced Effects
• Wave Particles and Buoyancy
• Splash Particles and SPH Interaction
• Buoyancy Displacement of Surface
• Terrain Interaction: Foam and Waves
• Phase 3: Lighting
• Caustics
• God Rays
• Fog
• Diffuse
• Procedural Generation
• Phase 1: Basic Generation
• Marching Cubes
• Chunk Streaming
• Procedural Texture Generation
• Island Generation
• Phase 2: Advanced Effects
• Procedural Grass and Plants
• Procedural Trees
• Underwater Flora
• Phase 3: Coupling Terrain with Water
• Different Generation for Lakes and Rivers
• Shore Waves and Flow displacement
• 3D Rasterizer and Abstraction Layer
• Phase 1: Basic Improvements
• DirectX Rendering Abstraction Layer
• Flat Shading
• Faceted Lighting (per-vertex)
• Diffuse Shading
• Specular Shading
• Various Texture Filtering Methods
• Phase 2: Advanced Effects
• Point Lights
• Spot Lights
• Multiple types of light
• Phase 3: Engine
• Input
• Physics
• Scripting
• Shadows