Wallitner Weekly 17

Hello everyone!

A few of productive things happened this past week.

I have been staying at my soon to be mother-in-law’s house this week. My “office” is in the garage and I have done my best to be moderately productive. I updated my resume for a potential job at the Capital Theater in Yakima. I continued to code the first game for WallitGaming. I wrote some more music. I kinda slacked on the website stuff, but overall it was a good week.

I’m taking a vacation!

Tomorrow night my fiancee and I will be flying to Orlando and relaxing for two weeks. I will be bringing my computer because I can’t let work go completely for that long, but I also imagine there will be at least one day where I am sunburnt and need to hide indoors.

When we go on vacations my fiancee wants to go and do all of the adventures and I just want to sleep, so two weeks should give us plenty of time for both. Then when we get back she will have to start school shortly thereafter.

I Have No Idea What To Talk About.

There is a part of me that wanted to say “I didn’t really do anything worth talking about this week.” And just leave it at that. But that goes against the whole purpose of this weekly thing I do. I wanted people to know what I’ve been up to and get to know me a little better, no matter how interesting or boring I am.

I feel like although I have done a lot of things this week I haven’t really done anything productive. I think that comes from not having worked on my website much this week. But I was just so excited to learn how to code and I wanted to write music and the creative part of me overrode the business man this time.

Thats something that I really struggle with as a freelance musician, the music is only about 5 percent of the work. The rest is all business and networking and paperwork and altogether not really what I thought I signed up to do when I set out to write music for a living. Thats one of the big reasons why I am so bad at social media. I want to spend all my time doing the thing, so I don’t have time to post about doing the thing.

Even today I almost didn’t sit down to write this because I wanted to make the hero in our game learn to swing his sword. I wanted to write the music that would be his theme song. I wanted to do the things, not write about them. But then my fiancee told me I had to because I would kick myself if I didn’t… And she’s right about that. so here we are!

She suggested that I write about this thing that happened while I was coding yesterday.

My brother drew up this incredible character. He looks like a samurai and has the massive sword. It looks amazing. And in the program I am using I can make this character move. So I spent a bunch of time learning how to do 2D animation and I finally made it look like he was breathing and shifting his weight when he was idle. He would rest his sword on his shoulder and it looked really good.

But when I would press play his sword would disappear. I spent probably an hour trying to troubleshoot the problem. I tried everything. Was he not holding the sword, was it hiding behind something, was it falling down out of the level. I tried everything.

Then I asked my brother for help and he sent me a whole slew of videos from a google search. One of them had the answer. The camera that I was using to view the character in the game couldn’t see the sword, so I just had to check a box and BOOM. The super cool sword my brother made was back in the hands of our hero.

I was so frustrated by the situation though. Something that took me hours to solve was fixed so simply. All I needed was a little help from someone else. Someone not so tilted by frustration.

— As a side note my “L” key still sticks and typos while coding will make the whole thing break… So i’ve had my patience tested. But it’s a fulfilling challenge and Its all worth it to play around in a world my brother and I built.

Anyways… My loving fiancee reminded me that this whole situation is a lot like my idea of hope. It’s always there, whether or not you see it. Sometimes you just need to know how to look. And sometimes you need someone else to show you where to find it. But it’s always there. So thank you to my brother for giving me hope. And thank you to my fiancee for convincing me to write about it! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a hero to animate, and music to write!