ELSEWHERE

My plan for the map is for like, actual streets with names so if someone tells you 'I'll meet you on Stone Bridge way' you can go to Stone Bridge way, which will also help for NPC routing. Each 'block' on the street will need a semi-descriptive title to go with to distinguish it from other blocks on the street, so like 'A row of colourful houses on Stone Bridge way' or 'In front of the Red Dragon Pub on Stone Bridge way' or 'A school crossing on Stone Bridge way', etc. Titles need to be unique, again for pathfinding reasons but also to help players navigate. I want to go over the map layout image I have with some highlighter to map out where streets start and end, and then I can mess with all that

I still have the Snowtown character generator and I'm looking forward to using it to really flesh out the population of NPCs. I'm excited to actually make like, real characters with real lives that will just go about their business until a player interrupts them. You can follow them around and watch them do their thing. Fuck it, maybe I will make it so their schedules can vary by day of the week, or even day of the year. This NPC goes shopping on sundays. This NPC goes to the graveyard on the 12th.

I love emergent gameplay. This is gonna create so much emergent gameplay.

Another vet appointment for Oz. This one was primarily a followup to check her thyroid after her meds were adjusted last month, which meant it needed to happen within a certain window of time and that made scheduling it difficult, with Lee's work. We also put off scheduling it for longer than we should have, which limited the available options. And then, after we had everything sorted, Lee's work changed the time today's meeting was going to be at and the vet that was supposed to see Oz had his schedule changed and so she was going to get seen by someone else, which is exactly the sort of shuffling around that I was trying to avoid

Anyway, so the appointment was at 9 and with everything else + drive time we needed to leave at 8, and I also needed to get a fecal sample from Oz and she's been pretty reliably pooping at 6 AM, so my plan was to go to sleep Thursday afternoon, sleep as long as I could, and then be up all night before the appointment. 'As long as I could' turned out to be a couple hours, though, so.

And I actually did get a fecal sample that afternoon anyway, so that was good.

When I got up again I did some programming on NPC stuff and then i went to play Valheim with Jake until about 2 AM, which was fun. We're further cementing ourselves into the bronze age, which unfortunately means a lot of trekking out to find tin and copper, there is never enough. Next week we're thinking we might take on the next boss and see how that goes

After that I watched some more Higurashi videos and generally hung out on the internet, until 7-ish when I started getting ready to go. Oz had a real rough morning and I'm hoping it's just being off the appetite medication for a few weeks. I do am suspicious that the dose of the pepcid she's on isn't enough, and if being back on the appetite stimulant doesn't resolve things I'm going to ask about increasing it.

We got to the vet about half an hour early, which seems reasonable to me but really seemed to confuse the receptionist, possibly just because she felt bad about making me wait in a room with no air conditioning because all three air conditioners in the building were broken. It was perfectly comfortable, though, so I chilled until the tech came in to get Oz's vitals and take the fecal sample. He asked me where I got Oz's name from and I said 'Uhh, I think Watchmen?' because like, she's not named after Ozymandias from Watchmen but Watchmen is the reason the name was in my head, so. And he goes "I knew it! Everyone back there was saying I was crazy but I was right!"

Oz has gained weight, the vet said her teeth don't look great, he could tell her colon/intestines are enlarged, and he kept saying she looks better than the last time she was there, which confused me a little because we saw a different vet but I guess maybe he was in the back while she was getting her blood drawn last month or something. The appointment felt a little rushed, not in like a he wasn't paying attention way but just in like he was kind of tunnel-visioning on getting her blood tests done as the core of the appointment. I did speak up about my concerns with her diet and he sent me home with a couple cans of kidney-health canned food to see if she'll eat it. The emergency vet had said something about getting her on a protein-light diet and this vet also said things in that direction, so that's what to look for I suppose. I will probably see if we can get a bag of the Hills kidney dry food or something, see if we can't get her eating that. This and the emergency vet also talked about the kindey-health diet foods being less palatable, and I think that's why I've needed to push on it myself, because the vets are more focused on getting her eating enough, first

I did also bring up how part of my concern is how badly she reacted to the Nulo, when we had to take her to the emergency vet, but that didn't seem to come up in the treatment plan. I will be cross-referencing ingredients, I think, see if anything between the three of the Nulo, the Temptations, and the Hills jumps out at me as a problem

Of course also waiting for the fecal sample to tell us if anything needs to change with her diet, probably

That basically wrapped up the appointment -- they took Oz back to take some of her blood and then brought her back to me to take home. Lee was in his meeting in the truck, so I went to go sit quietly while he did that. Halfway through the meeting went on break so he drove to a different parking lot to try to steal Starbucks' wifi, but ended up continuing to use his cell signal. I continued to sit in the passenger seat and dozed off a little. I brought Oz's pepcid medicine to give her during the meeting because I knew it would run past when she should have it done, but did not end up doing it because I didn't want to accidentally interrupt the meeting or anything. And then the meeting ended up going long, which Lee had been assured it wouldn't, I believe, so we ended up getting out of there at like 11:15 (it was supposed to end at 11) and the meeting continued while Lee drove.

We are home now! Me and Oz, that is, Lee had some errands to run so continued on his own journey. She's had her ear medicine and her pill, and now I'm not sure what I'm going to do with myself. I'm predictably a little braindead so probably not anything productive.

Even having had to go to the vet today, two days back on the mirtazapine and she's already doing so much better. She's more active, showing real signs of hunger, she's playing a little. She's following me around. She's stealing my food

She needs to be eating more of her food but she's trending in that direction anyway. To be honest with you, I think the anti-anxiety effects of the drug are as good for her as the appetite stimulating effects

My back is going to be killing me tomorrow. It already wasn't happy with me but now I just do not have the energy for good posture

I'm exhausted, have barely been able to stay awake all evening, and planned on going to bed as early as cat schedules would allow

So of course of course the second I'm about to get into bed the assholes who like to park right outside my room in the middle of the night and blare their music showed up

 
Made the map a little more readable with a little more contrast between the different colours

Now to put some streets on this

Fun fact I named the areas of Snowtown by popping open a world atlas one morning and picking placenames off of random pages

 
Each area here is on a different layer (and a different layer than the map grid), so it's not as chaotic or unreadable as it looks, but here's all the streets! Gotta name 'em and then put them in the map generator program and then the city should be A Lot more navigable

 
eg this is more like what I'll be working off of as I'm putting the actual streets down