This outline kinda grew out of control so I'm just going to post the damned thing rather than wait till tomorrow to clean it up and make it "PC". In a weird way, little sleep deprived, fuck it, a random blurb for the void, for no one, per usual.

There’s an exponential quality growth when you layer various elements together, clever color schemes, theming, tone, story, pacing. There is a chord you have to strike, you have to drag yourself over the coals time and again trying to live up to the greats of the past, a quest to prove your worth as a creator.

When you think you’re superior out of the gate, when you think you’re fulfilling a moral mission before you create your first act, you’ve already failed. You will fall apart from a thousand and one cuts of missed opportunities. Each and every component of your project will be less than, and that magical expression of bringing together the sum of your parts will never manifest.

A thought has haunted me, or at least prevented me from understanding the world for so long. Surely among the billions and billions of people on this planet, someone with some common sense started something right? And they weren’t stupid enough to let that hting become corrupt right? The world isn’t so batshit crazy that we would allow the absolute most self absorbed, the most overly medicated, the most far removed from the ground level sensibilities that allow us to soldier on and make the world better tomorrow right? We have these incredible gadgets, rockets, computers, this insanely complex infrastructure of logistics and politics all firing off to make things better for future generation… right?

We wake up one day in a fever dream, everyone’s pointing fingers, the car is careening off a cliff and the driver is bitching and moaning about senseless drivel. It’s utter madness, and here I am trying to make this stupid fucking game about fish. My whole life i’ve always wondered how do I work hard enough, how do I show some form of value despite my awkwardness, where can I carve out some kind of pittance of a life in this crazy world?

For most all my life I’ve always felt as though i’d come up short, that i didn’t “get” this crazy complex machine, was in awe at those who were able to fit in so easily to what seemed like madness. I genuinely thought I was crazy, I thought I was mad, incompetent, incabable of fitting into this well oiled machine because there was something wrong with me. But after all these years i’ve come to realize there is no one at the wheel, there is no method to the madness. It’s pockets of madness guided by sociopaths, leaders and followers blind to the logistics around us blindly following the paths of most charisma, of the best feelings, guided by emotion and tribalism.

When I started this project I prayed some day it could sustain me as some sort of pariah disconnected from the world. But now I see the trajectory of this game as a fight for sanity and a return to sustainability. Watching the world from top to bottom become overburdened by snake oil salesmen, people who focus on semantics and concepts over tangible results. Nothing is real any more, nothing means anything, everything is empty, everything is some bullshit argument everyone is trying to win because in their mind they feel they need to be labeled as right because they want that selfish hit of superiority… all the while everything crumbles, everything deteriorates and none of this is going to matter soon. It’s all so fucking frustrating.

The years have flown by, some good, some not so much, and I wonder how many people, honest, hard working people have had their lives ruined by these fuck heads. The self fulfilling do nothings, and the cowardly sheep who follow their commands, questioning nothing, falling in line in resenting their family and neighbors, fearful to stand for anything of any value, brainwashed into petulant servitude.

I’ve lost so much faith in humanity the past decade. But also I feel a greater sense of purpose, I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t incompetent, the world is upside down. I wish this purpose translated into being able to snap my fingers and end my burnout in an instance. It doesn’t, which makes the burnout that much harder to sit through, the building is burning and my mind is paralyzed, I just sit here as the impending fire roars like a fool, 

I remind myself that the game is almost done, and may already be pretty good. Perhaps I should be spending more time trying to think of a way for me to get this in front of people with the means of helping me to reach people with the game, and help me develop it. But who? Where? Everything is gatekept, all boards are noise, infected with hive mind busy bodies. It all feels so hopeless. Every day I wake up a little older, a little more burned out, more accustomed to this decay, in a world more insane, monopolized, and cold. How the fuck does a game fix anything?

Tomorrow I’m going to try to simply optimize items a bit (if I get off my lazy ass). In my mind I feel as though I need to reinvent the entire system for some reason, which is why I freeze up getting to work, that’s not what i’m doing, I just want to simplify them a bit and make looking at their modifiers easier. It’s such a weird feeling, these tedious technical tasks feel like life or death, that perfection is the only acceptable path, that it’s all or nothing. I miss being on a team, I miss the steady paycheck, I miss the feeling that I do my job, I go home, I can stop by the bar on the way, order some appetizers, take friends out to go do something fun. Everything is different now, 9 hours a day fighting for my life grinding in an intense technically and creatively draining endeavor deep in a cave in a world that wants to see this project abjectly fail because it is insane. And all i  ever wanted was to just to end the shame, to eek out a living amidst this fucking madness.