I think a lot about processes, pipelines, whatever you want to call them.  Culture, history, economics, game development. They're all processes of various things across various lenghts of time with different sorts of inputs. Say what you want about the world it sure is interesting!

How do I improve the process of working on SeaCrit? The better I'm able to answer this question the more I want to rip the code out of the project and throw it out the window and start fresh. We'd like to think we can think ahead and figure out how we're goign to work smarter so we don't have to work harder. But this is a fools errand, the only way to work smarter is to fail harder!

But sometimes we look around and see we're so surrounded by garbage and rot, that it taints our processes and ambtions, we surrender to the decay, why try to create something decent in a world where it's going to be covered in sh*t the moment it's birthed into the world? Worse yet, we start to worship silly nothings and reward our own silly petty notions. This is far more destructive and lasting than immediate surrender, it poisons the soil for generations.

I had a point I wanted to cover in this blather, but I'm sure I've blathered it before.

Actions speak louder than words.

I'm going to try to get some decent work done tonight and I hope the fish game becomes more decent. All else is noise eccoing from madness.

I didn't want to spoil my little diatribe with blathers of echos of actual dev. I'm torn, do i continue to iterate on fish and core play? I do I start building out the world. Both are incredibly important. I'm leaning towards world building, big banger for less investment and it's easier to check off the list, and the odds of positive return is damn near inevitable whereas gameplay is more wishy washy and requires far more iteration and work.

I'm calling it! TODAY WE BUILD UP THE WORLD!

Prefabs, modular chunks, reusable assets, interesting teleport entrances, small story centered towns, new zones. So much to do...

I'm going to try to force myself to improve my process tonight. Most my career i've been more artist than designer or coder, and I was paid to make things look nice. I KNOW in my brain my process would be better if I built in ugly big blocks and sectioned out the world quickly so I could figure out how to best make the game play well, figure out the right sizes for playable areas, for secret areas, for towns, for shops, etc. But every fiber of my being has been trained like a pavlov dog over the years to make things pretty at all times. Everything must look great or its a failure from its very inception. As I type this my entire being is telling me to jazz up the spawn particles for the NPC spawners. I'm telling myself right now to find the happy medium, to develop modular chunks that look good and are also placeable. But I know i'll end up spending WAY too much time trying to add details rather than making big broad strokes that the game needs right now. Whatever happens it will be progress, and progress is good!