The rollercoaster goes on! The game is coming together. Hit a lull yesterday, got sidetracked working on secondary systems and good lord I forgot just how much time and energy can be spent developing complex secondary systems. Even after all these years it still shocks me how tiny little systems like spawners and UI can take just as much or even more time than core systems!

I'm going to try to get my focus back on the prime directive of building out the world and developing level design pipelines so that my quest to make the world look halfway decent and also design a world that's fun to explore and interact with aren't at odds with each other. This is the crux of world building, because if you spend all your time making it look pretty, you end up locked into a beautiful disaster that doesn't facilitate fun play, combat, exploration, etc. If you don't spend any time making it look good, you might have a playable level but you'll wonder, how the heck do I add anything that looks cool without breaking all the perfectly laid out collision volumes? Where Can I fit in a nice vista?

The optimal solution is to do a bit of both in tandem and learn things the hard way, once you learn how to make things look pretty and play well, you can start doing both at the same time.  My main regret was spending so much time creating NPC's... but come to think of it, maybe I can reuse them! I remember I had a cave full of cats, maybe I can retool the dialogue a bit and get that little bit of story back in. Part of me wants to just start from scratch and do a more traditional dialogue system.

Yesterday was a doozy, wasn't feeling well and forced myself to work anyway, and didn't have the same gains I did the rest of the week, and I was spawning an sub optimal setup of fish and tweaking multiple combat systems that made the game worse than when they weren't in at all, so everything just felt unfun, and I was having the recurring notion that this game will never be fun or realize it's potential. But I fired the game up later and played around a bit and made a few little tweaks here and there and made a few notes of what to improve and I'm feeling optimistic again. Dare I say... I'm READY TO KICK SOME ARSE.

Funny moment. One of the first things you need to figure out as you make games is figure out when to use an "Update" or "FixedUpdate" loop. And at this point I kinda just took it for granted that all these loops were properly set up in my scripts, well turns out I was doing some of my combo settings in an update loop, rather than a fixedupdate loop. Anyhow I changed it and it immediately felt way better to execute combo attacks, so that was a huge win. It's nice to get huge wins for almost no effort, that happens so rarely these days.

Feelin' like my old self lately. Games getting better, and when I have a good day, things just get friggin' crushed. It's kinda funny, when you're an armature dev, you just job ideas on paper or throw it in notepad, then you join a team and you become a "professional" and you write these overly complicated bugs and to do issues to be filed away in Jira or whatever, and you've got all these cooks dispensing these issues to others and there's this huge organism creating this ILLUSION of progress as everyone busies themselves pretending to get work done, pretending to do things.

I'm so friggin' happy to just open up my stupid little notepad document and throw some half thought of ideas and play this gamedev thing Loosie goosy. I find it amusing that I spend less time developing SeaCrit than most studios devote to cataloging UI bugs. To each their own!

Stoked as ever to be working on SeaCrit! Excited as ever for the gains that will happen today! And inching ever closer to this game not being absolute horse shit!

This music video has always had a place in my heart, so imagine my surprise when...

I went to listen to this banger, ONLY TO REALIZE IT'S THE CORE INSPIRATION FOR THE BIG ENOUGH VIDEO.

I absolutely lost it when the damn builder got struck by lightning and fell to his death. They sure weren't wrong, they're still around, and around, and around ragdolling to their impending doom through all eternity.

Good times of late. Gonna deal with some real life stuff then hit this hard soon!