This but unironically.

Started today with 2 steps back, had some performance issues with projectiles, so I finally bit the bullet (see what I did there?) and migrated away from rigid bodies to simply translating projectile position without physics, ran into some bugs, finally got it sorted. "Ugh this will never end," I thought, "time for the next boring task"...

But something unexpected happened. Sometimes on rare occasions on a project there comes a moment when your game "comes together" and you weren't expecting it to. You boot it up to test some random thing and you think "holy fuck, is this actually becoming a fucking game?"

When I started SeaCrit, I felt like I would be good at coming up with fun item mods, and adjusting the level up values for various skills and skill trees to make them compelling. I'd never made a character controller, never coded the logic for transitioning attacks and shit. Paid coders till I was broke and now i've fenagled an imperfect system to sorta work, and there are certain areas I try not to think about because i'm worried if I think about them too hard the entire damned game will explode so I just leave them "as is".

But today, I think all that core shit is finally in a decent enough state that they're not holding me back from finally creating the crap I always thought I'd be good at.

I really can't believe this, I'd honestly been putting off making a new zone because I knew once I threw in ranged fish and started feeling out higher end difficulty and bullet hell scenarios that there would be glaring issues and that I would have to dive in and sort core systems until I found the fun. But holy fuck, I throw the enemies in, and it's just fucking working. All the endless adjusting and prototyping feels like it's paying off. 

There's a period where when you're trying new shit, and it can be a LONG FUCKING TRYING PERIOD where all the extra work and your expectations can really make your game shit for a long time. The more you're trying to improve upon standard formulas, the more that's up in teh air, the more you have to try things until they finally work, and sometimes you have to scrap it when you know it's not working. It's a fine line between keeping something you thought would be awesome by smashing your head against the keyboard for months until it's finally worth keeping and cutting your losses and saying fuck it.

Just a cuople months ago I was blathering about how I would never have item drops in the game, that I wouldn't be able to do environment revamps because I was just getting too burned out, but sometimes a burst of energy hits you that you weren't planning on, usually when your game unexpectedly starts coming together, or when you figure out how to tie up the loose ends and your brains unlocks from writers block and thinks, "ok, we can do this shit.".

Feel silly writing this motivated crap per usual as always there's a chance i'm just crazy and viewing this with rose colored glasses and this is all dog shits till. But I whatever, I'm already an idiot to be in this position moving forward so there's nothing to lose really. Time will tell... Not much further to go till this new demo is worth putting out. I'll know if I'm crazy soon enough.