Into the New Year

Edit: (January 12, 2013) Heads up. There probably won't be any other posts for January. Still making the game though. :]

No bird news this time and this is going to be a short post.

There hasn't been a screenshot for a long time, so let's open up the new year post with one.

As you can see, everyone's love/hate obstacle makes a return in DT3, this time half way through the game. They don't show up for very long and aren't used in the same way as the other two games as much. Most of the rough stuff will only be showing up in an optional level, one which is a counterpart to 'Think and Act Fast', cause I just love my players. Other than a fake screenshot in Hadriex' interview with me, this will be the only shot shown of this place. The new HUD element in the top-right corner displays all the info you'll ever need on which color zone the game wants you to be in next. It counts down and once the countdown reaches a certain threshold, the color which is already highlighted as shown above, will begin to spin and let you know that you need to be somewhere. Base damage is 16 (4 hearts) for not being where you need to be and like the previous games, it ignores your current damage state. Brown has been replaced with yellow due to feedback on previous renditions of this. The colors in this game don't matter, but to keep it consistent with past encounters of this, I decided to keep the colors and sequence the way it was. As said in a post sometime back, I'll be much more careful with the level design when this gimmick is present. I'm aware that not many liked the color zones, but I'd like to try my hand at the concept once more.

For just a moment, I thought of having only 3 colors. (red, yellow, blue) Since in DT3, the color zones can move, the colors would overlap and show a secondary color. I'm sure you see where this was heading. For obvious reasons, this never made it past the 'Oh that's an idea' phase.

Ponies
This week's pony episode prominently featured Applejack and Spike. It was nice to see the show focus on some of the background characters for once.

End of the World

Edit: (December 27, 2012) Thought I forgot about the patch to DT1? ... ... ... I did. Anyway, all the patch does is correct the bug with the S Rank. The title screen will now display something new if any of your save files have been completed with an S Rank. (You don't need to beat the final level again, it will remember.)

It's rather underwhelming. I was expecting better, but maybe it's good that it didn't end considering the weekend just started. Would be a cruel joke for the world to end at the end of a work week. Oh wait, I work on the weekends too...

Flocks come and go a lot this time of year, so not many up close bird moments have occured lately. There was one that was nifty the other day though. I passed out some food to a random bird and out from around the corner comes another. She looked over to me and curiously tilted her head. From that distance, I wasn't sure if it was a bird I had seen before. She took a step forward and did another curious head tilt, then tilted the other way. She then repeated the process. I spoke (can't remember what I said) and suddenly she comes running over to me. At that distance, I saw that it was the bird that I had hand fed a few weeks back. I hadn't seen the bird for quite some time, so I figured her flock had moved on. It was interesting seeing her look at me knowing she knew who I was, but just couldn't quite remember. It could have also been that I had a big jacket on, some gloves, and part of my face was concealed.

MLP Hate
Don't let the section title fool you. There's something I noticed after watching the season 3 premiere. In every episode that Cadence shows up in, (only 2, technically 4) she is always beaten and battered, or tired and overworked. The first shot is from the season 2 finale, the next is from the season 3 premiere. In almost every moment she's around, she's overwhelmed and just feels so pathetic and sad. I've decided the writers must hate her.

Borderlands Thing
In both Borderlands games, I noticed a nifty thing. Every human character that you can shoot; Their face is concealed or partially so. The bandits have hockey masks, (or that's what I call them) the Crimson Lance had full on helmets that hid all of their facial features. This is consistent throughout the series thus far except for very specific characters, who I won't name for spoiler purposes. To me, I feel like it's a way to disconnect the player from what they're shooting at. We have tons of war games and other violent massacre games that don't do this and mowing down dude after dude is ingrained in our mind that a disconnect wouldn't be necessary, but the design choice is an interesting one to me. It was definitely something that didn't happen in the series by accident seeing how consistent it always is with it. Considering the subject matter and how the game goes about making death and killing comical, it's a good choice I feel. While the second game's plot got a bit more on the dramatic side at times, the face covering of humanoid enemies can keep that sense of "wtf am I doing" at bay and help keep things on a light-hearted comical scale. Just an observation and opinion.

DT3 Progress
Holy dang is it slow lately. I have a schedule of when I wanted content playable. Even with the content cut a few months back, I'm about 1 1/2 months behind my projected schedule. I'm in the middle of fleshing out chapter 10 content right now and I was supposed to be finishing up chapter 11. I'll be remaking that schedule sometime, especially now that plans have changed. As said in the previous post, the full release date will probably be early 2014. We're currently in chapter 10 out of 19. Two of those chapters are fairly short and one being kinda lengthy. I'm thinking I'll be done with the content by earl 2014, but a lot of work will still need to be done. That's when all the polish and minor details will make their way in as well as squashing all the bugs. The last 10% can take awhile. Of course, if I had tons of time to work on the game and never ever played other games, I'd be easily done by summer's end... that's not gonna happen. I just need to win the lottery that I don't play so I can do away with my day job. Luckily working on DT is fun and enjoyable and full of zany learning experiences.

Lots of Views

I saw the bird in the store do something that I probably shouldn't find funny, but meh. I was around the produce section late at night when I spotted her above it, which is fairly normal. A moment later, she flew down into the lettace and sat in it. So I did what any good employee should do... I watched her. At first I thought she was going to eat some of it, but she was drinking the water that was on it. After she had a few drinks, she flew up for a few seconds and then came back down, sat in the lettace again, and made herself comfortable. She got another drink, gave herself a quick bath in it, and then flew back up.

The blog has over 50,000 views now. (It had reached it earlier this month, I just missed it.)

Planetside 2... Again
There are certain games that, instead of having a set story you play through, it lets you craft your own story through your experiences. Planetside allows you to do this on many occasions. In one instance when my faction was defending the Crown, I had noticed the base next to us had turrets bombing us, and at times my faction would pointlessly fire back over to them. I was busy sniping people trying to get across the bridge or sniping their snipers and this was starting to bother me. I figured my little mission would fail, but I decided I was going to sneak over and hack the turret and turn it on whatever I could, which would also cause them to have to turn their own guns on it. So I made my way over to it, foiling a poor sniper who had an unfortunate position on top of a hill. He should have had cover when he shot at me. I then successfully made it to the base and recharged my cloak, then snuck to the turret and hacked it while someone was in it. A moment later, I was in. Success! Immediately I scanned for targets and blew someone away, then something even more interesting caught my attention. I took out an active Sunderer and bailed out of the turret just before they destroyed it. I didn't make it far before I had a few hundred bullets in my back. It took them awhile to get that turret back for some reason, but I decided to wrecklessly try it again. Same result, I blew up another Sunderer of theirs, and bailed before they blew up the turret. This time however, I managed to make it away successfully. If you know the area around the Crown, then you probably know about the bridge to the south-west that leads up to it. While the opposing faction had occupied this bridge and were busy with my team at the front, I found a vantage point that left their team with nearly zero cover.

Overall, I don't know how much of an impact this had in that fight, a lot of times it's hard to gauge just how helpful your actions are, but that end result is not my concern. The actions themselves were satisfying and it left a fun story. Playing with friends also makes this game much better. On another note, I've changed my faction to VS.

DT3 Progression
Development has been really slow the past few months due to work (which will die down in January) and my more active social life. Development is not going to stop though, the project is getting better all the time. The target release date, if the pace keeps at what it is now, will not be met though. It's looking to be early 2014 now.

Boss Fight Video in DT3
NegativeZeroZ has a video of a duel in DT3. A very late Demo_2.1 boss fight, so if you haven't played the demo... it spoils a later boss fight. It's so weird to see the old damage colors now.

Lots of Video Games

I went on twitter for the first time in forever and figured out there was the @Connect button at the top. Yep.
Also I watched a bird stretch her legs, and then stretch her wings. I don't know why it looked interesting to me. I'd get a picture, but I can't just ask her to do it again.

DT3 Thingie
On an unrelated topic, I've found the hardest thing for me when making complex things in DT is just starting them. The Death encounter, for example, I knew what I wanted to do and all the elements that would need to go into it, but where to start had me puzzled. Thinking about the end result when starting from almost nothing is a headache. At the start of things like that, I usually take baby steps with it, setting up very simple things. The process isn't always the same.

For example, with Death, his sprite wasn't his hitbox, (it was for damaging you) so making sure that was where it needed to be was first. Next up was his animation speeds and zoning. After that, I kept him stationary and made sure each of his attacks were positioned right. The telegraph before each swing was part of that step. Next up, his 3 consecutive swings were implemented and his movement was given back. The swing size increase as the fight goes on was made after that. His projectile deflect was added in just after. This without anything else was tested for awhile so all the minor adjustments could be made to make sure it was perfect. This aspect of the encounter was the most important part, so most of my attention was on that. His periodic scythes were added in after that. This was actually where it was originally going to stop, but it felt like there needed to be one other interruption to the player. That's when I added the multiple scythe summons. (Not the mid-battle sequence, that was always planned, but those are done last.) After the timing and adjustments were made to those, it was time for all the finishing touches, like figuring out what was a fair HP count. It needed to be enough that kept the player from brute forcing in any scenario, but not so much that the fight would drag on. I wanted the fight no longer than roughly 90 seconds. The outcome needed to be fairly quick, it would either be you or him going very fast.

Not really sure of what my original point was, other than I'm currently making something puzzling on my end for Chapter 10. It's pretty nifty to see this sequence in action though, probably the most cinematic DT has ever gotten.

DT3 Changes
DT3 has had lots of changes after the demo (2.1) release and it will continue to do so, some minor and some very big. The biggest change that isn't in the game yet is Gate 6 and 7 being merged into one and its ability not able to be moved outside of it. (Not completely anyway, there are certain passive elements taken from it that will apply to both characters.) Here's a list of some of changes in the game now, some based on feedback. (That would be visible to anyone that played the demo, a few have been mentioned before.)
- The max bottles is 2 instead of 3. (Technically not in the game, but a 3rd will not be available later.)
- Ammo, such as arrows and heart energy, will be set to 20% if it was below that when respawning after choosing 'Retry from checkpoint'.
- Movement speed is no longer affected when charging attacks.
- Inactive abilities recover energy at 1/4 their normal speed.
- Claire's control was tightened up to match Jerry, but her dash has remained the same. DT3 is going to require more precision and Claire's floaty control didn't work for it.
- Everything causes knockback, including stationary traps like spikes. No more sliding around everywhere uncontrollably. There are a few non-knockback damage objects in the game, they do not interupt your attack state, but you do not get invincibility frames. Like the undashables (red outline), these are also clearly marked.
- Wolf Heads don't shoot through walls and Tektiles don't glitch through walls.
- Jerry's Sword Master skill and Claire's Cool Whip skill no longer affect attack speed. That is now static and set to the equivalent of Lv.3. The skills instead boost the stun time of their respective abilities.
- Jerry's Bomb can be remotely set off. (To its flashing point.)
- Claire's Holy Water loses 25% of its power when entering its Explosion state.
- There is a limit on the amount of projectiles you can fire from one ability at a time. Example, Jerry can only have 2 arrows on screen at a time, same with Claire's Dagger and Holy Water.
- Salem Witches deactivate sooner and a witch's projeciles are destroyed when the witch that fired them is defeated.
- In Gate 4, Jerry can fire off walls at any time instead of when only having downward velocity.

AP and item costs probably won't be finalized till just before the game goes beta.

Something under the hood changed that made particles about 3x more efficient when spawning in. It had the side affect of breaking some of the places that particles spawned, but most of those have been fixed. Maybe all of them by now. One tester found quite a few places in Gate 4 that I had missed.

Video Games
So many games. The first is this little game called Skrillex Quest. I don't really care for dupstep much, but this still got my attention. Some dust gets into an NES cartridge and messes up a game world and it's up to P1 (You) to fight through the glitches... and playing along with Skrillex' song, "Summit". I found the music enjoyable for this little game and I forgot I was listening to dubstep, in fact, I like the song.

Slaix showed me this one (and a friend posted it to me on Facebook) called Old Spice Saves the World. Sound ridiculous? It is, and its got some fun humor along with it involving current political silliness. The rest I won't spoil.

If you like stealth games, check out Mark of the Ninja on either Xbox Live or Steam. This game has no combat at all. If you're caught, you're probably dead. It respects the gun beats sword logic well. I actually got Jerry into it as it matches his view of ninjas. He doesn't like Ryu Hyabusa for that reason, which I like to call the action ninja. There's a demo available and I recommend playing if you love stealth games.

On the subject of stealth games, if you've been around my blog awhile, you might remember when I recommended Stealth Bastard, a game which Slaix had shown me. It was made in Game Maker and featured leaderboards and the works. This game is now on Steam with improvements. The old version was pretty sweet and while I haven't played the new one, I'm sure it's even better. Dust Force started as a Game Maker game as well before coming to Steam and saw many improvements for its final market version.

Games and Music

No big bird info today, though that bird mentioned in the last post is still around and happy to say hi when she sees me. She's always with the same small group of birds. (This post is a wall of text with no pictures.)

Planetside 2
I've been looking forward to Planetside 2 ever since the first one sadly died. Seeing the second go free to play was quite a nifty thing, so I picked it up for Steam. I started the game and dropped in immediately, took 3 steps, and was shot to death. Planetside 2 is an amazing game and I really think you should play it.

There's no sarcasm there, the game is actually tons of fun. There's a bit of a learning curve I found, even knowing the first game. My first hour was full of mistakes and deaths, but each time, I learned something that I should do, and usually, something I shouldn't do. The best way to learn the ins and outs is just to jump in and see how it all plays out. It's rough at first, but the end result is worth it... even if my KDR is always 0.6 or lower.

Out of my many deaths, I've found that I can be my own worst enemy. I decided to try a vehicle out after about an hour of running about and sniping... usually failing to do so. (3 headshots out of 7 deaths isn't TOO bad right?) So I spawned one and was immediately teleported in where it was already in flight. I realized I hadn't reviewed the controls at all. The mouse and WASD all seemed to be doing various things. By the time I figured out what I was actually doing, I was upside down and heading straight into a mountain. Lesson learned, review the flight controls before getting into aircraft.
I skimmed over them afterwards, then tried my hand at it again. This time, I was able to kinda sorta fly. I came out of an aerial battle alive and they didn't so I think I did something right. I did take some damage during the struggle however. I started to think what would happen if the vehicle hull was almost destroyed and I would need to bail out. I realized I hadn't looked at the controls closely. So I tried a button to see if I would jump out with landing gear. My assumption was correct as I dived face first from my craft, but I quickly realized I was missing something. I quickly pressed P, but all that did was bring up a menu that had nothing to do with parachutes. Lesson learned, don't jump out of vehicles that are 100+ meters in the air.
Running in the game is kinda weird and I wish it was like Borderlands. We're stuck with either hold to run, or toggle run on and off. I go with toggle. This sometimes leads to problems though. I ran up to an edge and saw that I could snipe. I thought I had turned run off when I wanted to get a bit closer to the edge, instead, I sprinted right off. Another lesson learned, press buttons better. On that same note, and different occasion, don't run off bridges when your health is low. Also look both ways...

Despite my bad playing, I've had a lot of fun with the game. I'm usually playing as an Infiltrator. The server I play on is Soldeck and I'm with the New Conglomerate. You know the name I go by. (ZephyrBurst) My roommates also play it on occasion. All of us are playing on the same server on different factions. (I shot Jerry at one point.) There's a lot to the game and it doesn't have a tutorial before throwing you in the game. The first hour of it can feel daunting, but if you look at it from an angle of you're learning how the game works, it goes much better. Take it slow, check the menu out when you get the chance, and see where everything is located. The site does have videos that may help you out if needed though.

Music from People
I like to browse the newgrounds audio portal from time to time. Stay there long enough and you'll come across some very skilled people. I recently came across one by the name of Fictionalhead. His music is a blend of instrumental and electronic and I think he's hit that very well. Out of the 29 tracks he has on his bandcamp, it was maybe 2 that I didn't really care for, but the rest were great. Check him out and give him some support if you can. I've been trying to keep in the habit of contacting everyone whose music I use, which I haven't been doing well on. I haven't used any of Fictionalhead's music, but I have contacted him about possibly using one of his tracks later. He said it would be fine and would like it if I did. That goes into the other reason I want to keep up with contacting the music creators is if they would rather their stuff not be used. Usually I try to go for the tracks that have 'Can be used in freeware' in the info.

Oh man, 10 Days Later

There's actually stuff to talk about, and again, I'm going to split it up between 2 posts. Oh yeah, I'm finally back into my normal routine, had a busy 2 weeks.

Of course the first thing to mention is birds. Last week was an interesting one with a particular bird. All throughout the week she approached like many have in the past, but she never shy'd away from anything I did like a lot of them do. Every day she would come just a bit closer till she was at the edge of my hand. They'll come over to my feet, but when I kneel down, they typically back off a bit. I noticed they look at faces a lot and always look directly into your eyes. So I thought, I'll try keeping the food in my hand instead of putting some on the ground in front of me. She waited maybe 3 seconds before making the choice to come over and eat it straight out of my hand. This happened on multiple occasions throughout the day. She took less time to approach and was less apprehensive on each following encounter. On another moment, she had no problems being nearly eye level with me at close proximity when she was on a tree. The next day I tried to get a picture of her in action, but one thing she shared in common with the others birds was she didn't like the camera. She'll get close, but won't eat from my hand if the camera is out. Maybe I'll find a way to keep the lense unblocked while the rest of the camera is hidden, though if it's the lense that they don't like, that won't work. I've thought about setting the camera down and backing away a bit to see if they'll inspect the camera then.

Here she is looking straight into the camera. This is about as close as she'll come to it.

You can see her poofy feathers pretty well here.

She was turning her head right as I got this picture. That string on her feet is now mostly off. She had less and less of it every day. The easy way I tell her apart from the others is that bit of fluff on her feathers. There's also a certain marking on her head. Though an even easier way to tell is that she's the one that wastes no time running/flying over to me.






Different birds here. It was interesting that the far back one laid down so close to me. No worries, she's not hurt. A bit after this pic was taken, she did the same thing and every time the wind picked up, she brought her wings up.




Slit08's DT2 LP
Slit08 has an LP of DT2 up and completed in 5 videos. First one here. He doesn't go for 100%, but the play-through is done well. I enjoyed his fight with Harpuia quite a bit and it shows he has a very good grasp on the game's dodging mechanics. He also beasts right through the final level, even with the nerf it got, that's still pretty good. The only map he has trouble with is Sector 4. That's another thing where I'd like to showcase hilariously easy ways through hard looking obstacles. You can get through that cluster of red rings unscathed in about 3 seconds.

NegativeZeroZ's DT1 S Rank LP
For anyone that doesn't know. An overall S rank is when you A rank all categories on the Distorted setting. The reward, which isn't there in any release, is it will tell you on the title screen how to unlock the debug mode for the game. (Or at least some of its functionality.) That will be patched soon. No big rush as I don't think there's a lot of demand for that. :P

Anyway, Zero has done the S rank. I don't know why anyone would ever attempt such a thing, let alone succeed at it. Hats off to you. He makes good use of every spell the game has as well as any exploits that would benefit him. As I've said in the past, if you find an exploit, use it.

A Voice Interview
Hadriex (gamerzsnark) caught me some months ago and forced me to do an audio interview with him as he's converting all his text interviews over to that. Since he forced me to, I had no choice. He had a spoon and I didn't know how to react to that other than give in to his demands. It can be found here in this sentence. So yeah, you'll hear me. Don't remember that voice or I shall have to hunt you down. We're not sure if it was on his end or mine, but my voice is choppy in places. No amount of tweaking settings seemed to fix this, but most of the time, I'm understandable. On the good side, Hadriex was awesome enough to subtitle everything. If you thought my writing was unfocused and all over the place at times, my speaking will go beyond that. I had my answers to his text interview on hand, but I kinda just tossed that to the side and went with an unscripted mess of words. Which is... more my style. We did do a second take on I think 3 questions and only a part of each of them.

Making Games is Hard, Act. 2

Edit: (November 23, 2012) A new post will come in a few days. Its been a busy week and DT3's latest changes were taking up my free time... that and Borderlands 2. There's actually plenty of stuff to mention and talk about at least. :]

Continuing on from the previous post regarding DT3's changes to later chapters. This post is also long.

I get very attached to my projects. I want DT3 to be great and my best so far. The game has had a lot of time put into it, and I'm always afraid to make major decisions for it, since I don't want to do anything that could harm it. I'm afraid to change it from my first view and design of it. I detached myself emotionally from the project and took another look at the project as a whole to see what was really best for the game. Then I needed other opinions from those with an unbiased view of the project and presented what was currently there and where it was heading. It wasn't hard to see the superfluous content in the game, especially considering I already knew what that was.

It was pretty clear what needed to be done, so I immediately began rewriting that portion of the game. Gate 7 had a somewhat solid set, but Gate 6 wasn't clicking. Even then, I was looking for a reason to keep those 2 Gates, specifically the 3rd set they would bring. I asked the available testers what they would like the Gate 6 theme to be and got some decent suggestions. Then made a decision based on that, which was shot down with a better alternative. I thought about going with that. Still, this didn't fix the real issue. The rewrite was finished and really, things were better from all sides with the change.

More specifics on the change that won't spoil anything. There are now 6 Gates with their 1 McGuffin each. That number is arbitrary anyway, the Gates mostly serve as a spring board and training ground for the ability sets. Like the first Gate, the final one utilizes both characters and does give a unique ability to both of them, but only for this Gate. It does break the sequence the game had, however it gives the benefit of not having to keep that set balanced with the other sets and works very much in favor of the narrative at that point in the game.

It does have pickups associated with it, but they won't be around except for inside that Gate, so it's identity is kept hidden unlike what happened with the previous Gate 6. Which was the idea anyway. On those 2 removed levels. The first is one that you've all figured out if you looked around much in some of the later parts of the DT3 demo. That was Ninja Gaiden with a bit of Shinobi mixed in. The final Gate for Claire is one that had a joke applied to it that anyone will get if they've played the games. Sad to see it go, but a single laugh is not worth keeping it. Its theme was Ghoul's n' Ghosts.

There was a very special event that would happen around Central City between Gates 6 and 7. It wasn't removed, in fact it stays right where it was after Gate 6. It actually works much better as a bridge to what has been called the 'End Game' chapters of the game, which are just the chapters after all the Gates are completed. While it's called 'end game', it makes up quite a large chunk of the story.

Encouragement
Something that seems to happen with every major project I've had is discouragement. Not from external sources like negative feedback or lack of interest, but from myself. There are times during the process that my motivation runs out and I think that the project is going nowhere or that it's terrible. That I just can't do it or I'm inept at what I'm doing. I think this is something that hits many people for anything they put a lot of time and themselves emotionally into. This seems to hit me at least once for any big project whether it sucks or is great. Feeling burned out is part of this, but discouragement can stem from anywhere.

There are many ways I've found people combat this problem. One of my methods is simply to think back to why I'm creating what I am and what my goals for it are. This has nothing to do with the game's concept or gameplay structure, it's more personal than that. It's all reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing. These are two things I write down at the beginning of a project and occasionally look back on. The act of writing these two things down is fairly recent. DT3 was the first to have this done and its been considerable help in the process. The Bird Game has also had this done for it, and oddly enough, I often think on that when thinking up how I want the Bird Game to play out. I reference it just as much as the high concept when talking about the game and discussing potential ideas.

The DT series has been one of my stress relievers. It's what I do when I want to relax. Often times, instead of playing video games, watching a movie, or any other activity used to assist in stress reduction, I'll further the DT project. Sometimes though, I'll simply spend a few minutes with it and code something small. Those are the moments when something like the birds make it in. Or in the most recent area of the game, the dancing/cuddling flowers, which goes along with the more upbeat vibe to the area. That area also produced something that filtered into the rest of the mainland areas, which are respawning birds. These birds fly in from the sides and land in a set place and are given a slight randomize color blend. Seeing the birds simply fly by periodically was the major reason behind putting them in, rather than the more practical use behind them with their dive bombing nearby bad guys. The thought that the bird lands and becomes a bigger part of the scene makes them that much better. That was a fun side tangent.

There are external things that can assist with keeping motivation of course. Feedback of any kind has always been great, it's a big indicator that there is interest. My unexpected fanbase, while small, is amazing to me. The tropes page being completely fan made is super nifty. Seeing people discuss the game and strategies that worked for them and the LPs are equally as nifty. After seeing interest in the game pick up, I figured it would get a Lets Play or two, but not 9 or 10. I didn't realize the game was that Lets Playable. (We're going to pretend that's a thing for that sentence... I am anyway.) Something else that's always been great has been when people point out something in the game that they found neat that was intentional on my part. One specific off the top of my head was when raocow noticed that the fight with the Artist felt more like a battle between Jeremy and Hexor rather than one between Jerry and the Artist.

Okay, I gotta wrap this up, this is all ready longer than the Act 1 post. So what are ways that you guys keep yourself motivated or help pick that motivation back up?