Bittersweet day, work went well, but I feel like i'm just crabby all the time and shitty to the few people I'm still connected to at all. It's taken a lot to get this far, hope there's some kind of payoff...

Spent most the day being frustrated by interruptions as I tried to work, sat down at the end of the day to try to maybe get 1 or 2 more hours in and ended up diving for someting like 9+ more hours on top of the prior 5 or so. I'm tempted to say this is the longest full on sprint of work I've ever had, up there for most productive. Can't really say there were any huge breakthroughs today, but I ran into a few pretty nasty bugs, and the best part of today was how easily I was able to sort them. I have nightmares from years back of bugs such as these that slowed me for days and sucked all the gamedev juice out of me, but they just don't any more, and the project is more complex than ever, just really feeling as though i've got this project fully logged in my head warts and all, and just getting better at this kind of gameplay logic type stuff. Not everything is what it seems! Getting better at coding mostly seems to involve getting better at understanding how stupid you are, and the sorts of mistakes and poor setups you coded in and getting used to imperfect environemnts, how not to throw stones in a glass house and memorizing a sprawling landscape of shit.

Had a nice dinner celebrating a B-Day to boot, so all in all a really good day once I was able to get over myself.

Some zone work, some abilities, some items, some refactorings, some polish to combat, some new item mods. It takes a lot of roughing in and back and forth, and it feels like work is often wasted, but this is the only way. You have to spin wheels in mud, you have to do stupid shit. Some people build entire careers out of destroying projects avoiding these things. I'm very proud to say I have fucked up so fucking hard, and I pray the project is better for it.

I listen to pandora and i'll hear the most mundain advertisements written to play off the social topics of the day, given by some chipper voiceover artists. Some people have it so fucking easy in this world of griftings and back scratching's and self serving emotions.

Linking to a few videos from today, going to be a while till they upload:

Usually happy to get 5+ hours in a given day these days, and was starting to get really pissed at myself for not pushing forward so this was pretty damned needed. There's so much damned more to do, but if I can keep this up a bit longer who knows where the game will be in a bit of time.

The zone feel, the enemies, the items, the combat, everything is coming together, inch by inch. I keep wanting to post the Al Pacino motivational speech from any given Sunday, specifically the part where Pacino roars, "Life is a game of inches... THE SIX INCHES IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE!!", because it makes me laugh my ass off. But I can't link videos with specific timestamps.

It feels weird watching inspirational videos these days, because all the people who made great inspirational speeches, in my expert neckbeard opinion, wouldn't make it today, nothing inspiring can stand these days, everything has to be so fucking pedestrian. Rocky would never get made, Any given Sunday would have a different angle, all the truly great things that we used to aspire to are being shat all over in this modern bullshit world where trying to do anyting of value is seen as problematic. Everything arranged to keep the boat stable and steady as it glides towards the falls. I'm so fucking sick of this shit as the years decay.

And yet there's part of me that reminds myself, that this entire project could very well be dog shit and i'm just embarrassing myself in a cold dead corner of the internet. But what else is new?  And then there's the part of my brain that thinks, "hey the game is starting to be not dog shit..."

Started this blog post wanting to post some really far reaching thoughts on design and shit, but I'm pretty spent. Just another day gone and evaporated making a game for no one.

Mixed emotions. Can't link that song again... Hmmm... Fuck it, I'm going with something simple.