We're doing it!

Today was a good day, as I had hoped.  Woke up and did a bunch of cooking, starting work on dinner straight after finishing with lunch (would take a long time for the lamb shoulder to cook in the curry I was making).  Both meals turned out well!

Lunch was a cream-based shrimp spaghetti -- I used the leftover chimichurri from last night's dinner to add a hit of parsley, garlic, olive oil/etc flavor and I chopped up the leftover red onion from the salad I made a few days ago to add in as well.  I grated in some parmesan (need to get some more, actually) but honestly most of the sauce was just based on heavy cream and nowadays even when I'm going for more of a cacio e pepe or shrimp scampi deal I prefer to use some, it just makes emulsifying everything easier, takes flavor well, and pasta + heavy cream is already a good combo to begin with.

Dinner was the curry with lamb shoulder.  I haven't actually made curry in =ages=, I was wondering whether it would even come out well, but I guess this is the kind of dish that is relatively forgiving.  I did a good job of chucking in some ingredients I normally wouldn't have to clean out some produce...I didn't have any mushrooms on hand, which I normally would have tossed in, but I added some dried shiitakes for flavor, and then tossed in some celery stalks that I don't really have a plan for, plus I diced up this turnip that's just been sitting in the fridge that I didn't even pick out in the first place (from a grocery delivery where they just gave me the wrong thing I think?).  Everything came out just fine, seems that it was well-liked!  Honestly even though I started it going right after lunch the lamb could have even used a little more time (or a pressure cook, I guess...), I guess because my housemates had dinner early while I was doing OHC.  Only thing is I should have went down to stir a little more often...luckily nothing burned.

Did some more good work on Rhythm Quest -- so far this past week I worked on dynamically loading in the tilesets for each level (and being able to change them per-checkpoint), as well as the backdrops.  The main level scene wasn't engineered to switch between different backdrops, BUT the menu scene already had a totally re-engineered system to do all of that, so I basically just copied that logic over and it's all working pretty well after tweaking some scripts and shaders to do the right thing.  My current piece of work is doing the same thing but with the different particle effects in the game, unifying them so I can just load them in on-demand instead of having separate scenes per level with them already baked in.

While I was at it I decided I may as well touch up the particle implementation as a whole, and now I'm deciding to clean up the particles so that instead of just "spawning a bunch, hopefully across a big enough area to cover the entire camera view" I'm actually moving towards an approach where I only keep the particles needed to cover the screen and dynamically wrap or spawn/despawn them appropriately, reacting to screen size changes as well.  It's nice to have something concrete to work towards.  ALTTPR coding work is kind of on pause while I deal with this big Rhythm Quest rework, but that's fine as I don't want to get too distracted by the ALTTPR coding stuff (though of course I do want to figure out the Skull Woods questions...)

Speaking of ALTTPR, I've just been idly grinding z3rsim while I can, in an attempt to hopefully kick my mind into gear regarding routing decisions.  Hopefully with enough reps I can feel a little more confident about that stuff.

I did OHC today and FINALLY I did something that I was really happy with.  I've felt pretty "eh" about a lot of my recent OHC works, which again I've noted is totally expected, but it had certainly been awhile since I really felt like I was firing on all cylinders.  I've had a few songs here and there that were kinda partway there, like I sortttt of liked them, but it wasn't quite the same, until this one.  Of course it is still OHC, there's only so much I can do in an hour and corners definitely had to be cut here and there, but damn, it's good to be back again.

I closed the night out with a bunch of skin/bodycare so I can try to look beautiful tomorrow (haha), and then another Caesar 3/Augustus Reconquered mission.  This one was Sarmizegetusa (what a mouthful):

This one had an interesting setup where they encourage you to make your primary trade with the native huts as opposed to the land caravans (though of course you still want to setup normal trade operations too).  Marble was the clear obvious resource to trade with the natives, as the only land caravan route that traded marble only traded 10 of it (natives trade an unlimited amount), and it was the raw material that sold for the highest price.

Overall I managed to finish this mission with juuust enough of everything.  Obviously there's some extra space on the map still, so I could have built an extra housing block if I really needed to, and there was a boatload of extra farmland (actually ended up tearing down a bunch of farms that I didn't end up needing, especially after building the Ceres grand temple), but with the 3 big housing blocks I was juuuust at the right population count.  The palace/villa block on the far right was a bit cramped and I wasn't actually even sure whether I could evolve to 4x4 palaces with only a colloseum and no hippodrome (also only 3 types of food) but turns out you can, so I had a weird mix of 3x3s and 4x4s.  Because it was so cramped over there I actually ended up building a last-minute grand temple to Venus in the top corner to get the desirability up, though it seems like even without that I could have just barely crossed the prosperity threshold.

Didn't have to restart the mission or anything at all though!  I was a little worried when the objective to unlock fishing came up because I had not planned for a good place to put the fishing wharves at all, but luckily since there was so much farmland to grow wheat, fish was only ever needed for the palaces/villas so we didn't need a ton of it.

I think choosing to build the grand temples in the far left plateau made a lot of sense...initially I thought we could fit a small housing block there (there's water up there in case you want to), but it really wouldn't have been able to fit that many people.  If I had to do the mission again I might have honestly tried to find an alternate space for the palace/villa block, like maybe have that take the place of the upper housing block and then shift that block down to where the unoccupied (well actually there's natives there) area?  Or maybe fit a housing block instead of one of the blocks of farms, and replace that food intake with fishing?  Eh, but the problem with that is that my clay/pottery industry really took up a good portion of the fishing space too...yeah, dunno.  The housing block on the lower plateau honestly was a bit cramped too...perhaps if I moved like the weapons / oil / stone industries down there, then the space on the top-left edge would be free for more housing.  Yeah, maybe.

Anyways, I'm looking forward to the rest of the weekend.  My nose is still a bit stuffy but I'm feeling good enough to go to Vball and do my best to have fun there.  We'll see how it goes, ha ha...since we aren't in the usual location, we may not have as much space.  I was assuming we'd be in the same crowded/small location that I remember from 2023, but I checked and that year was actually in the Hilton SF Union Square, whereas we're in the Marriot Marquis this time, so I'm not sure!

Either way, there's a Teance social the day after which should be the perfect way to unwind and relax afterward.  I missed going to Teance this week since I was sick in bed, so it'll be really nice to just go there and hang out for a while, maybe get some work or writing done, too.