Been REALLY under the weather this week, last night I was forcing myself to at least walk a bit and getting really light headed and I was thinking "Am I going to be six feet under before I finish this stupid fucking video game?"

I put some beans on the stove on low thinking i'd fight for a quick 3 hour nap and when I woke up they'd be perfect, but instead I overslept big time, and woke up feeling GREAT. The beans were overcooked, and soft and I almost threw them out, BUT INSTEAD I SOLDIERED ON AND THE STEW CAME OUT KICK ASS. 

Let's hope SeaCrit follows a similar trajectory.

I've said it before but this time I mean it, this will be my last blog post wallowing in any sort of self pity.

SeaCrit is starting to kick ass, I've been kicking ass, it's time to act the part and get this shit show on the winning track. Clear sky's ahead as the world and various progression systems come online. The web build bug is out of my hands so no point losing sleep or dev hours on it any more.

Random dev story time: several years back when I had a little paltry nest egg to contract outside help on SeaCrit, my best collaborator who did GREAT work, super fast, on time and at a great value was finishing up the 5th unique fish for me, and it game out really damned good and back then early on running the project, I was a bit of a pushover. I was here trying to make the ultimate wholesome video game, every corner sanded down! Nothing abrasive or smutty. But he would always come come out of nowhere and be like "Dude, if you had big tittied mermaids, this game would be SO much better." To which I would respond, "Noted, but I'm trying to make this for a different audience, I don't want seacrit to succeed because of big tittied mermaids, I want it to succeed because it is fun." But he did such consistently great work on time that I was like, fuck it, you want to make a big tittied mermaid, i'll throw you a little $$ for a big tittied mermaid, you've earned it. I wasn't sure I was going to use the thing but who the hell knows.

Not only did he do a busty mermaid, but he also created this monstrosity of a fish with no arms, just 2 massive honkers spilling over in the front. It was the weirdest fucking thing I've ever seen... It's probably still existing in some back pages of my skype discussion history, but I kind of just want it to die. The mermaids came out pretty good though, and with my mind wandering back onto what sort of old art I could use to spruce up the game, the old noggin' in thinking, maybe some well endowed mermaids could help fill in the empty backgrounds, because I know when you're button mashing and beating the crap out of things, everyone wants a bunch of sexualized content in the background. Do I motorboat the backgrounds of SeaCrit?

My headspace has changed a lot over the years. I used to be the mind of, let's stay sane, so we can contribute to this, not perfect, but somewhat sane society and keep the ball rolling on forward progress towards a more perfect union or some shit. These days I'm just like, "who gives a fuck anymore let's come at this crazed insanity any which way because nothing means anything anymore, there are no rules, no standards, nothing. Maybe it'll make a conversation piece. But there's a nagging voice in my head, "don't let one of your contributors' saucy contribution mire what would be a perfectly wholesome, great game."

Said Mermaid:

It's moments like this I wish I had a little more engagement here, so i could be like, what do you guys think? Inaprporiate? To which people could be like, "OMG, I'm not letting my kids anywhere near this, you pervert fucks." And then I could just take them out in shame knowing I had dodged a bullet.

But then I get to thinking, none of this matters, nothing matters. We live in this world where there's this closed system, they recruit kids right out of school taking the top of the class in a weighing system based on absolute horse shit, then they put their sophomoric, immature creations on closed markets and just print money with rehashed garbage and quality falls off a cliff year after year, thinking they are the avant gaurde of culture, that they are following in the lineage of great producers pushing the envelope in the must self aggrandized and cringe means imaginable. They've created a culture of false economic moralism where their lies feed into one another forming a machine that feeds itself, they dictate what to watch, what to buy, what to think. It's always their own refuse, where you look beyond the quality of production, and see only that it is of your faction, created by those you do not scorn and revile, who you do not destroy. It's no longer who can consistently create the better product as it was in the past, that's not very tenable, hard to maintain for the delicate elite of today. Much better to form monopoly and destroy all opposition with petty character attacks as you carelessly burn through all good will to maintain self serving lies.

I'm always revisiting this in my head trying to figure out in my head the best way of phasing it without sounding like a bitter neckbeard, but to be fair, I am a bitter neckbeard.

I'm tired of sounding like a bitter neckbeard so this will be the last blog post I harp on this divisive shit, and I MEAN IT this time.

It's time to play the game, time to be optimistic, time to be more marketable and produce something of value because lord knows that's what everyone else is doing and if I ever want out of this hellhole I gotta start keeping my damned mouth shut. I should probably just nuke all my blog posts at this point but I can't bring myself to do it. I'm not going to feed the beast for a chance at some ill-gotten crumbs.

It's been so long since I blogged my mind is scatered with all the things to blather about! Even when i'm out of commision I kind of obsess over the project, and the trials of it all, and what to blather about.

I spoke in an earlier entry how much I wanted inspiration to strike me in my brain like  a bolt with some incredible, lofty idea for what to make the game better with, some transcended idea that would redefine the project and how we think of video games. I shit you not I had a dream a few days ago and the game was FUCKIGN AMAZING. It was fully 3d with total motion and it was taking place in a frozen area, with snow and ice floating at the top of the water, and you could see the snow covered shore and there was mist flowing over and all i remember was diving down into the water with this amazing splash, and i swam down and there was this chasm that you could enter below down into the sea floor.

I woke up in a daze and my brain was like, HOLY SHIT THAT WAS AMAZING! And it was one of those days where you're half asleep for a minute or two and you're holding onto that dream and trying to dissect it and retain it so when you wake up you don't lose that critically important insight.

Slowly as I came back to conciousness I started to pick it apart. "wait the control system would have to be totally different", "I don't have the art assets", "I'd have to totally revamp EVERYTHING my level builds, my shaders, etc.", "Combat would SUCK in full 3d, the entirity of the gameplay would be rendered worthless". It would have essentially have to become an entirely different game, based on exploration, and that game already exists and it's called Subnautica!

In that moment of having no technical knowledge, of having no idea what the fuck I was doing, and being driven mad by delusion, I had become the average creative director at most studios. And in a weird way it made me feel a lot better at where I'm at right now with my little shit show of a few free assets to build up my game on a dip shit budget.

IT'S BACK TO MAKING A MURDER FISH GAME IN 2D MOTHER FUCKERS!

While going through old assets... I did find some older unused things that i'm looking forward to getting back in the game. I have some cactus assets that are going to make for a humorous zone, and underwater "western" area, I got a kick out of the idea of cactuses underwater and I can make some six shooter having NPC's to fight against.

I keep beating myself up about how the game has to be so perfect that even in this crazy world, some company HAS to take a chance on this project, but I'm not even sure that's true, for all I know the game is already good enough for a one man band that a company should take a chance on it and I'm just doomed to be born into this era of madness. But you see hints that maybe the world is waking up from this dumb fuck nightmare, and that's really encouraging.

I have nothing better to do but make the fish game better in the meantime, and who the fuck knows, maybe I can make the game good enough that i'm able to find success without the help of neurotic, self absorbed do nothing studios who with every advantage and dollar in the world, can't figure out how to make a game worth a damn, because they keep populating their studios with people as delusional and incompetent as they are.

Look at this embarrassing art by comity dog shit, semi competent graduates churned out of the meat grinder dumping their repurposed art and story from past creations that had soul like the uninspired cultural vandals they are. Paint by numbers all the way down top to bottom of this soulless machine. Fucking sad what's become of our this world we've created devoid of any aspiration or excellence:

So long as this is my competition, the dream lives.

I'm getting off topic and going FULL FUCKING NECKBEARD. One last indulgence! Back to the tangible...

So I'm coming to the conclusion there is no magic bullet, there is no big idea to fix the minimal art and world building assets I have. That's fine, I'm going to treat the current world building as more of a white box and not sweat things too much. These are things that can be inserted at a later time easy peasy.

I'm making a demo on a shoestring budget as a one man band, and all that considered I'm DAMNED happy with how things are going. And the world is shaking up and this madness finally seems to be a debate and not something simply lorded over us to destroy us.

The way I see it there's no reason to capitulate the madness, because doing so spells doom for us all, a lot of mother fuckers have bent the knee the past several years, enjoying a lot of frivolous niceties as everything burns, and now here we are, the great divide, the great decline, mass hatred and vitriol in a dick measuring contest for arm chair virtues. 

I've bet it all on making a quality game. That's it.

So moving forward I won't have all the big fancy awe inspiring graphics and animations the big studios have the luxury of having, but I pray to have one leg up on these subversive bastards if I can keep the work up and keep improving things again and again: this game isn't going to be hot dog shit.

Taking one last day off just to enjoy not feeling like death, going to get some exercise, think over everything that needs doing, and tomorrow, barring any out of no where procrastination or real life bullshit, it's going to be back to building up the fish game! No magic bullet, no big idea is going to save it, just going to have to polish and revamp a billion and one little things.

HOW THE FUCK HAVE I  NOT LINKED THIS SONG YET

Edit: 

I should have titeled this post "ecco of a blather" as Ecco the Dolphin is one of the inspirations for seacrit.

The 3d adaptation is largely regarded to be a terrible game, so not following those footsteps. I really can't describe how locked into making this game 3D my brain was for several minutes I was so going to take the jump, it was going to be AMAZING. 

I've decided I'm not going to use the mermaids, I'm sticking to my original vision. I'm not going to do things just to spite the world or some bullshit narrative. This blog is where i've chosen to be petty and let my own personal baggage weigh things down. SeaCrit will remain untainted by any petty bullshit. It will be a fun, safe, ultraviolent romp for kids to wholesomely murder their adversaries for pearl they can purchase weaponry with, NOT a degenerate sandbox of big tittied mermaids.