The Moody Blues crack me the hell up. When you think of most rock bands it's like: "HEY BRO, DID YOU CATCH THE NEW VAN HALEN SONG HOT FOR TEACHER!? UNCHAINED? RUNNIN' WITH THE DEVIL? THIS SHIT PUMPS ME UP"

Nah man, I was just listening to the MOODY BLUES! They talk about having pleasant conversations and asking questions about the nature of existence and having comfortable nights with fancy bed sheets... I just find the disparity of how badass the music sounds to what the topics of the songs are. The Moody Blues are the shit.

Anyhow, most days I could blather and blather endlessly about things, but oddly enough, I kinda just want to get to work here in a little bit and have the game speak for itself, loading up on coffee and will organize the ToDo list a tad here then it's back off to the races.

First game I ever played that had a level editor was excite bike. Back when I was a kid before the internet there was no internet to get free entertainment from. So you had to barter with your friends and trade in a sort of backdoor market of games during recess at school. Excite bike was a big title that was lots of fun and stayed in the market for a long time. But I digress.

Excite bike had an editor where you could put "chunks" of a level together just by laying these little chunks next to each other. It was pretty revolutionary at the time and it got the job done. I'm surprised I didn't come up with this earlier. I guess earlier in the project I had all this notions that the game could be part platformer, and that there could be all these interesting bits of art and new gameplay experiences with advanced level setups. That still may be the case, but looking back, the game is beset when the level design doesn't get in the way of the combat. Could you imagine a street fighter game where there were tons of pits and environmental hazards? IT WOULD SUCK! The game has absolutely top tier combat engagements, and anything else simply detracts from the core experience.

So I'm glad environment doesn't add to my game, i'm embracing the simplicity, it goes to show that my core combat mechanics have come along enough that I don't have to rely on tertiary gameplay elements. That's not to say I won't try some unique scenes and such, but moving forward I don't think I'll build up the world in complex ways to fancy up combat, just to create compelling and fun places to venture through, with less of an eye for building up difficulty in level design, so much as creating wonderful vistas and compelling areas to explore. Much safer bet with no chance of creating content that makes the game worse.

It's very freeing to finally coming to the realization of what the environments should be in this moment. Small, modular, fun, consistent. Easy to iterate on and not as likely to be thrown away. 

No more casting shadows on the wall.

Looking forward to posting an edit here with another solid chunk of work, hoping for a good 4 hours, I got pretty burned out yesterday. Any more than that is gravy. Work went REALLY fucking well yesterday. I got a SHITTON done. For the first time I don't really feel like blathering about it all, it's in the game, when new builds out people can play it. Really feelin' the flow as of late, just maybe I can pull this f*cker off.

Edit: Ok, I lied, I've decided to blather a little more. There's something that's causing me to resist wanting to work on the seacrit project, and that is this sort of decay that comes from not developing systems properly. Some things are named well, they have a proper setup and working with them is a breeze. Other things, they're finicky, and you have to try to remember how things work and if you do one thing wrong the whole thing falls apart, so you just try not to touch it and it's a nightmare. Projects can slowly start to have these sort of constant pains when you work on them.

Here's the problem, there is no perfect, clear solution. Spend ages tuning things, making them perfect? Now you can't adjust the system lest you risk making it messy again. The price of developing fun is messiness. Game development is always at odds with itself.

It's all about walking a line, pick your battles, deal with a little messiness. The better you get with gamedev, the less the chaos slows you, the faster you can fix it, the less major bugs pop up that cut you down. If you have too many cooks in the kitchen, it's really easy to point fingers, because progress often looks like failure. Lot's of people in this world will naysay things they don't understand for their own benefit, at the detriment of the entire project.  Who's right? Who's wrong? We're all animals trying to make our way in this crazy world of delusion. OK! Enough dilly dally! To betterments!