What a turn around the past few weeks have been. I've almost forgotten how bad things had been just a month ago. Brain was fogging, feeling worse by the day, dev had been paused for months, everything was in a dark place. I was doing these brain exersizes every few hours to see if my brain was coming back, I what's 66 + 85? I just couldn't think. Maybe I was never all that great at doing these figures on the fly! But i don't even bother thinking about these things any more, I just feel like my old self and i'm back to work. Vision is a bit better, body doesn't feel as off, my balance is back, i'm able to concentrate and remember things, I feel somewhat sharp from time to time. It's such a massive relief to be back to work as of late and feeling at least relatively healthy.

Don't want to distract myself too much! Lots of work to do. Yesterday I was rearin' up to whoop some arse but I ran into a bug, and I'm very stubborn, and I wasn't going to give up on this damned thing so I just powered through and solved it. Was a bit of a doozy, wasn't easy to figure out what the issue was, I just knew it had to do with some list somewhere not behaving well. After a lot of trial and error I figured out it had to do with a random script I had commisioned long ago before I started figuring out this coding stuff, it was childing sounds to assets in the scene, and for some reason when it did this to the player fish while the player was selected it would cause some pretty horrendous error messages that would totally disrupt debugging and testing. I've been putting up with terrible perfromance when debugging the player for years now, and it's finally sorted. As a bonus I retooled the sound system just a bit and now there's stereo sound which I never had before. Was it worth 6 hours of painful dev? I dunno, but it's over now and I never have to deal with it again and the project is a bit better.

I have a MOUNTAIN of things to do. LOTS of world builing to do, lots of story and dialogue to smarm, lots of ability tuning, item adjusting, combat tweaks, as ever. I could spend hours just talking about what needs doin', but if you go too far down that rabbit hole it starts feeling insurmountable so better to just get to it.

On the bright side, work has been quite enjoyable lately, but always that looming fear that some huge bug will pop up, or some huge revamp will be required and work fast becomes tedious. Yesterday was a slog. Hoping today is more fruitful. I'm getting close, I can feel it.

I was going to link Lionel Ritchie's "All Night Long" but the dancing in the video was so cringe i'm falling back to this classic:

What a fucking month. Ups and downs, strikes and gutters. Pumped to slam out another solid day of work. I just remembered, I've been meaning to make  a blog post where I talk about all the good shit. I usually just blather about all the negativity. There's this notion that as an indie dev you're supposed to just mope around and talk about how hard game dev is.

I didn't start this project because I thought I was bad at this shit. Been a journey, but I've been whoopin' the Lama's @ss, and the combat is coming together, been doing some innovative shit with stun mechanics, movement, targeting, upgrades, items... and I'm dumb enough to think it's crossing the threshold of experimental to actually improving the game. All tweaks and improvements from here on out will set this project apart from other games as this crazy world flounders under the weight of the madness. Lots of innovative shit going on, and it's finally coming together. TURNING THE BEAT AROUND M*THER FUCKERS.