Usually when I make a post I have some gamedev concept I felt like blathering about, or some really annoying issue I want to vent about, but I don't really have any specific thing and just felt like making a blog entry for some reason, sometimes I hope that if i write something up and say, "I'm going to get some work done tommorow" that somehow blathering about it in a blog entry somehow means it's going to happen.

There were a few things I thought maybe I could write a blog post on, but once I started making a brief outline it all just sorta became stuff i've blathered about before, about how working on a game solo is hard and all that crap. I was going to write something specifically about revamping and refactoring play over and over again and I had this unique angle about why that was a pertinent topic that I hadn't explored in prior blog posts, but whatever that unique angle was totally escapes me right now, and all i can think about now regarding that subject is:

"When you start doing something, it's fresh and fun, then you do it over and over and it gets really fucking tedious."

And that just doesn't seem very insightful or even mildly exciting and it's more like, "duh" why would you bother writing that obvious universal fact that everyone knows out? So yeah i'm not going to bother whining about that for the 50th time. I don't know why i'm blathering, but my mind was on the game and i'm trying to psych myself to get right into work tomorrow.

Ok, I just remembered a topic I've thought of a few times and it just popped into my head so i'm goign to blather about that instead, maybe this was the intention from the start, it doesn't matter. When we're wanting to make something new, we often have this delusional thinking of, "I'm going to put a new spin on this, and it'll be better". I'm going to make a first person shooter, but it'll have CHIPMONKS, and those CHIPMONKS WILL BE WEARING MOTHER F*CKING JEP PACKS AND SH*T.  I'm going to make an MMO, but it'll have MOTHER F*CKIN' DRAGONS AND SHIT, AND THOSE DRAGONS CAN F*CK CARS AND THERE'LL BE TRANSFORMER DRAGONS N' SH*T.

Radiohead had that song "Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there." And I think these lyrics succinctly touch on a lot of the ill fated gaming ventures that are out there. With games, the devil's really in the details, the timings between animations, well setup cues for animation tells before attacks, AI setups that provide the player with a fighting chance against their enemies, without making the engagement's too predictable as to be trivial. The "fun" is actually under the hood, it's a bunch of technical crap that isn't sexy or cool. Layered conditional checks and timings that link to various animations and collision checks.

Random edit at 1 AM: I think I remember now what i was going to post. I DID make seacrit what I thought would be fun. And it wasn't that fun. Making a fun game isn't about piecing together a few threads and thinking "VOILA!" i put those thoughts in my head that I knew would be fun into a cohesive thing! The only way you make a fun game is making that game, realizing it's not fun, then piecing together a Frankenstein's monster of new shit that was tried and true from the happy accidents you didn't even expect to make in the first place, and gutting the crappy ideas you thought were going to define your game. It's sorta like that expression, "Life is what happens when you're busy making plans".

Ah shit, I just remembered what I wanted to actually blather about, and it was about how we often poorly estimate how long we think something is going to create so i'll just throw it in here at the end:

About 2 months ago, I was thinking to myself, “Ugh, I don’t want to play this game, test spawn rates, set AI settings, NPC health, tweak damage values of enemies and the player, that could take like 4 whole hours!

This nagging thing has sat in my head for months, i’ve created entire item systems, I’ve created the modifiers, the new camp spawns, and done massive refactoring of msc things to make creating the game easier and making play more fun.

Every day I’ve thought about working on the project, the immediate thing that pops in my head is, “Ugh, I still need to try to tweak values so this damned game is actually fun.” I was going to try to finish up items today, but I’ve decided, fuck it, I’m just going to finally try this damned game a little bit and tune things up before I go too far down rabbit holes blindly creating crap for a game I haven’t even played yet.

I’m going to write the rest of this blog after I’m done playing the game and setting up some core settings for spawns and level design that I've put off for too long. I’m really, really hoping this goes better than I'm expecting it to.

Kind of a weird feeling, and I know i repeat myself, but many years into working on this project, and having absolutely no idea what my fate will be. It feels so all or nothing, terrifying really. This is my one shot at accomplishing anything noteworthy with my life, if not it's back to the rat race with 5 years of decay on my resume, back to a song and dance i'm not particularly good at. It's a very strange state of mind, astronauts probably feel this way right before lift off: 

"My whole life leading up to this, maybe I'll be the first person to walk on Mars.... 

Or maybe I just catch space debris in my cranium."

It's easy to overthink. I've learned a few things though. It does absolutely no good to think things through you know you're capable of solving in the moment, save your energy, better to have your IDE open and be able to smash out code and design solutions on the fly and have that positive energy move you forward to positive progress, rather than to overthink ahead of time and having no fun discoveries or solutions along the way.  Be positive, know you're going to handle shit when you get to work, and make the game better as you execute. Get some music ready, and instead of imagining yourself doing tedious things over and over again, think back on the times you did things the right way and made solid progress, THAT is the work you're going to do tomorrow. If you run into nasty shit, fix it and fix it right so you never have to deal with that crap again. 

Positive progress towards a positive game, that's all you can do. Then toss the dice and lets things fall as they may. Might be working towards a great game that makes a splash, or could be working towards a spectacular failure, does it really matter in the end? I can work hard tomorrow and accomplish something or I can sit around stuck in my own head. Fuck it, I'm going to get work done.

This song is in no way pertinent to the topic at hand, I just really like it.