I'm trying something new starting today regarding productivity. I found that I do my best work in short bursts and when it drags out I get nothing done and am too easily distracted, so what I tried today was limit myself to 2 hours of work per day on ID, and the idea is to try to get as much done in that period as possible, and if I don't finish something then, I won't be able to work on it again until the next day; this creates a feeling of scarcity and increases motivation.

http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000pgt59

If you've played Mario Paint, that dog represents undo, just like the 'undo dog' in Mario Paint. I drew the icon and added it today. The level editor still needs quite a bit of work, but it's at least at the fairly functional stage now.

That text and such is just placeholders, that's not a real level.

Next I'll try 2 hours of SD (saturated dreamers, my next game).

EDIT: I created an interesting movement system for SD: http://pics.livejournal.com/rinku/pic/000phez5 (you can't tell much from that pic).

Let me describe it. Moving your mouse more than 75 pixels away from your character moves the character in that direction, and the further the mouse is from the character, the faster the character moves toward that location. Moving it within a 75 pixel circle around the character (shown) simply changes the character's direction, and you can use can "shoot" (use some effect like shining a light or shooting a line to hook onto things) by clicking within that circle.

The disadvantage to this system is that you can't shoot while moving. But this isn't as bad as it sounds for this game, it's not a game where the object is to kill enemies; instead it's about avoiding them and adapting to their behavior.

The advantage of this system is that you can play the game using only one mouse button and mouse movement (I may use the second mouse button for something later), and a big advantage is that unlike most games with mouse movement through a world you don't need to constantly be holding down the mouse button, simply moving it somewhere will make your character move there. One thing that bothered me about Aquaria was that you had to constantly hold down the mouse button in order to move, and to move quickly you had to continuously click it, so this system avoids that.