The usual thought crossed my mind as I gear up to hit work today (FEELING BETTER!). Gosh, I sure wish I had money so I could pay some other poor saps to shoulder some of this pain with me.

There's that tempting notion that "if I spend more money the project will do better". This is the death of many a game project.

The greatest strengths of this project have been derived from sustained velocity through pitfalls and speed bumps. Gritting teeth through the sustained pain of gamedev.

Positive game growth doesn't come from brand strength, it doesn't come from money thrown at a throng a developers with no proven track record, it doesn't spring from untested hopes and dreams.

It comes from hard earned lessons, it comes from pushing through the pain for the umpteenth time to finish the umpteenth system, breaking another system and fixing that one again for the thousandth time. It comes from the sustained smashing of your head against the wall for the infinitesimal chance of producing something that isn't dog sh*t.

Coffee is on the way, hitting this soon.

Post work Edit:

The hefty bone is in and it works! Almost as good as I had hoped, I think it's passable. The notions you have for a system can vary wildly from how it actually behaves in game. I had it in my mind that you would start a bit less hefty and slowly get more hefty the more you heal up, but that just didn't feel impactful enough. So now the moment you cross the full health threshold, you immediately just go 70% hefty, the heft bone inflates, your size increases, you float about the ocean more at 70% total heftiness.

When you're working in code and you push forward fast, and you don't set the logic up as best as you could have, or maybe you just revised the system a ton and got burned out, or maybe you sucked at code back then, or maybe you're just a moron most the time... 

Things inevitably break in ways you don't even realize they will, and potential edge cases are a mine field waiting to happen. THE WORST is when things break so badly that you don't even realize they're broken, your mistakes compound into a double negative of sorts, sometimes literally, and the results come out positive. Then one day you fix a small thing... and the whole system falls apart. It's like going in for a small cavity at the dentist, and they find a massive infection and now you need your jaw surgically removed. The problem is a lot larger and infecting more of your project than you realize, and now a great # of values and tunings are going to break when the system is fixed, but it's necessary. I was adding some core movement modifiers rather than multiplying them, this was throwing off most all movement in the game, but everything was tuned around it. Now that it's fixed, i'm giong to have to adjust all fish movement speeds, and I'm still not sure the system is set up 100% perfectly so I should probably dig deeper and check. So much to do as I burn out every day. Wish I'd set this stuff up properly way back when. Might untangle the mess and make it cleaner in the near future.

The point is before I got sidetracked, at some point you have to pay the piper. I've been paying the piper a LOT the past few weeks. It's a delicate balancing act, because if you set things up TOO perfectly, it takes too much out of you and you don't want to adjust things. There's a sweet spot where you hash things together, but you don't mind dicing it up later to make the game better. Lot's of jokers, backscratchers and neckbeards that will point fingers and say things need to be pushed a lot further in either direction, but I digress. You just gotta trust your gut, know the codebase and do what feels right with your past and future plans. 

I'm REALLY trying to not feature creep into the future, tonight was a rare exception. I'm pretty happy with how things went, definitely worth the work, but my mind is fixating on all the rot that needs cleaning. It was inevitable I would come across it at some point, it might as well have been today.

There is SO MUCH still to tweak and tune. I think in this moment, there is more up in the air that needs fixing than ever in the projects history, and it's all scattered and some of it requires code, and I've been knee deep in these values for months and I just want them tuned and checked off the list. So I'm a  bit frustrated as of late. As always so much toil going in daily in this cave and not many to share the journey with, no one to shoulder the burden... But progress is being made! And that is what matters in the end.

This has to start coming together. No more big ideas, no more crazy bouts of "what ifs", no more haphazard implementations. Starting tomorrow I will begin to lock in decent values to the point they are good enough and I will check systems off the list, today will be the turning point. They will be "done" for the foreseeable future. Too many systems are sorta implemented. My head is spinning with everything that's half implemented.

 I do not regret past decisions, these hardships were inevitable, but this mass of loose wires is the worst it's ever been. I can't wake up every day and have my task be "Fix every single thig in the game that you broke yesterday", it's gutting, it requires too much coffee, it takes too much out of me 8+ hour day after 8+ hour day with my mind going a mile a m inute.

I keep thinking back to this game Hellgate: London. I was no coder then, just another entitled gamer who wondered why the hell the game didn't just come out and accurately tell you how much damage your grenades do. HOW HARD CAN IT BE?! You have a skill, an item, the values modify each other, just spit out the value in the UI FFS!

Now I know... I know the tangled web we can weave as we figure out the best way to set up these pipelines up the hard way. There are so many considerations we must keep in mind that can augment the shape we give to our code. Do other systems need to know unmodified values at prior times? How do we get the modified value without overwriting the core value? When is this value relevant to the value that needs to be displayed before it's modified by other stuff like passive buffs, etc. THERE ARE SO MANY THINGS THAT CAN GO WRONG and this doesn't even take into account multiplayer systems or working with other people on the team doing terrible, terrible tricks and shortcuts that can render code tainted and corrupt forever...

ANYHOW! Work went relatively well today. Wish I could just take joy in the Hefty system coming together, but I'm still in the belly of this whale. I just feel buried under the sheer weight of paying the piper every day, of doing work I didn't know needed doing at every step of dev. And the ongoing weight of actually finishing the darned game. It's a lot, but the will to finish this, and the optimism that this is finally coming together outweighs the negativity. I broke the work session into 2 parts, the first takes place mostly in 3dsMax and I get the hefty bone in place:

And the second was the start to implementation of the hefty system:

This opens the door to tons of upgrades like enhanced damage when hefty. Enhanced defense when hefty. who knows! The work never ends, but implementing Heftiness brought together a great deal of existing systems (once called the chungus system), so it was a good day, even though there is now far more left to do to finish this darned thing.

One day at a time...