Past couple months have been pretty trying, just lurching forward doing all sorts of random things, pushing forward for a complete demo and maintaining a lot of in game ramblings.

This was going to be the do or die. Either the game generated interest or I would abandon it. I barely crossed the finish line totally exhausted and I hit release... and nothing.

It's funny how your brain can brace for success and then in the face of failure everything lines up and makes sense, "well of course it wasn't going to be successful the core game isn't there yet." Everything always becomes crystal clear a couple days after you find out the build isn't good enough.

And here's the funny thing... the brain always fills up with ideas and a bit of energy to make your game better after coming to terms that in its current form it isn't up to snuff.

Kinda blown away by how much work I got done today, it's really motivating, it feels about 1.5x as much fun as the old build, and I took a bunch of worthless crap out that was weighing me down. It's time to stop worrying about "a finished compact demo" and to build up the foundations so the game is actually fun and easily built upon. No more spinning wheels in mud.

A lot of the ideas were low hanging fruit I was putting off while trying to cross the finish line, but a lot of these ideas came about after I gutted a bunch of unnecessary crap. Time and again I do this, I leave things in the game that are "good enough", but anything that's not better than "good enough" is just taking up space, so get rid of it. Once all that baggage is out of your game there will be extra space for good stuff to go. Even if you don't know what that good stuff is going to be just take that junk out and it will reveal itself.

Also did a massive revamp on the graphics. 5 years ago when i started this project performance was a lot more important so I spent a lot of time on shaders that didn't require in game lights and because of that I lost out on the built in "physically based rendering" and shadows and real-time lights, so I'm kind of indulging in those right now, pretty happy with how everything is quickly coming together, lots of years using these tools and setups prior to this, so lots of graphical floodgates opening up.

Got the web build up and working, there were a couple random bugs that were causing the build to crash VERY frequently as well as massive sound issues. Builds for web take a few minutes to build and you can't check it out of the engine, so this was a real pain. Luckily the issues weren't as buried as I thought they'd be. A pesky null reference exception was causing half the crashes, and having a single, but commonly used sound file set to "streaming" was causing the other half of the crashes. Now it runs fine, crisis averted, I almost didn't take the time to try to fix it because there's so much other crap to do, but i'm really glad I did, because this makes the game REALLY easy for onlookers to try, which is really important right now.

About as optimistic as you can be moving forward after another big letdown, but so it goes! Things really feel like they're fitting in to place, so more than feeling as though I failed, I feel as though I fell face first half a mile from the finish line, but I'm getting up and going to see if I can keep trudging on. I still have no idea if the project will be successful, but I'm making solid positive progress and i have a lot of thoughts in my head ot make it better and they're most all low hanging fruit. Time to mix and match this Hodge podge of gameplay and systems.