Finaly forced myself to work a bit and I implemented a new swimming system. I'd been thinking of this for a while, but when you see a dolphin swim you see them arch their bodies up and down to create a forward movement, and I thought it might be cool to try to add some new movement mechanics that increases your swim speed when the player swims in a sort of wave pattern.

Well, I got it in, and I really like it. It feeds into my design philosophy of making everything a toy to play with, and expanding on the core movement over getting ahead of myself and adding more sub-par content before the game is online. I think it adds a whole new element to the game and movement becomes a bit more strategic as you may want to swim fast, but you also don't want to swim directly into enemies and environmental assets. It's sort of like skiing in tribes, which isone of my favorite all time mechanics in a game ever, if you land on a downward slope, you can "SKI" down it and pick up speed. I wasn't thinking of tribes when I added this, but the fun factor is similar. I'm hoping this mechanic is easy enough to pick up organicially by accident, but it's not totally necessary to the game. I should probably add an NPC that descripes how to do this in the tutorial area and later in the game. I'll add this to my "todo" now.

In adding this mechanic, I realized my movement mechanics were inherently flawed. I wasn't hard capping movement speed with a max "max speed" value, I was allowing drag to limit max speed, at some point the water resistance gets to be enough that you can't move faster. But this leaves the entire system open to chance and means that the slightest change anywhere in the future can break everything. So I revamped the entire system. Acceleration now augments how fast your max speed is set. It's a bit counter intuitive and I implemented the system towards the end of my dev session when my brain is most turned to mush so it was a bit of a PITA, but it's in, and kinda working. This totally broke some other elements like my weavinig mechanics that allow for fast strafe movement, as now there's a hard speed cap that caps what should be enhanced movement, so had to add the strafe speed bonus to the max speed cap, but not the value that's lerped by acceleration. The whole thing gets complex and hard to understand so at some point you just have to add it see if it breaks everything, and then try to figure out why then fix things. So it's back to fixing movement code and assigning the correct values AGAIN for the 5000th time! Ugh.  Such is gamedev. 

I wish I had a lesson learned from all this. There is none, in order to get better you have to write crap code, and at some point you will be better and that crap code will be splattered everywhere. It's like if someone projectile vomits in your car, you can't just take the seat they were sitting in and burn it, you have to reupholster the entire damned thing if you want to get rid of the stink.

I often talk about how crazy the world is, and how everything is everyone else's fault. Had a bit of a shit weekend, but I can't blame anyone but myself. I fixate so much on how shitty everything in the world that I got pretty shitty myself. You can't get lost in your own misfortunes and harp on negativity or you're not better than everything that's gone to crap, and even worse if you take it out on others who are kind enough to tolerate you really do become an irredeemable ass. If you start justifying your own shitty actions because of how shitty other people are then not only are you an asshole, you're an asshole that feels justified in devolving deeper and deeper into being a shitty stain on this world.

We don't talk about it much, but there's something inherently good about quiet suffering, I have a great deal of respect for people who go out there, work their job on 4 hours of sleep, come home, feed their kids, and keep the wheels of society going while all the petulant assholes go out there and piss and moan and makes their power plays, their victim plays, and kick and scream so they can be the squeaky wheel getting all greased up for their own enjoyment with no appreciation for the people out there sucking it up and doing their best despite all the petulance and childish nothings.

I'm an old dog at this point, not sure I'm going to learn any new tricks, and who knows what ends up with this silly project, but even in failure, and even when things go poorly, even when things are frustrating and unfair, we can still make the most of that situation, we can still take solace that we handled a situation with some level of maturity and grace. It is what it is. I will never be the most level headed, mature human being on the planet, I just pray my idiosyncrasies though they have not served me best in life, are somehow aligned in a way that this embarrassing existence isn't forfeit, and that some good can come after all the nothingness I've caused thus far .

Life is weird. Said this all before, but it's been a long strange ride and I don't know where all my griping, all my late nights, all my blathering, or where this project fits into the world, in this strange day and age. All I know is that deep in this dark cave I feel as though I'm working on something neat, that though I've become bitter and resentful and ungrateful, that I'm going to try to work on it, and try to see that even with the current state of affairs, I can still try to be a grown ass adult and make the most of things by not being a whiney little self entitled b@t{#.

We live in a strange time, a time of self pity, a time where everything is everyone else's fault, a time where the solution is to point the finger and get angry and to justify your shitty behavior.

Not perfect, never will be, but going to endeavor to be better in the future. In the meantime, there's a game that needs doing, and I'm starting to feel as though I'm getting pretty good at this. When I'm working on the fish game all the other inadequacies melt away and I'm at my best, and if I can finish it, and make something of it, perhaps I'll have the resources to be better in other aspects of my life. It's tough to have self respect, confidence, empathy, and all the other positive, charismatic characteristics when you've been deep in a cave for so long, you tend to go one of two ways in this crazy life, you either have this upswing of all the positive things giving you a safety net when things go poorly, or you end up in a downward spiral, a victim of a variety of shortcomings that suffocate what positives  you may have had to offer the world. There are a great many people with a lot of good in them these days who have been caught in the downswell of the madness. Oh god, I'm starting to blather again, GOTTA GET TO WORK.

Time for coffee, time for work. For now, it's head down straight into the wall.

Cuz I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all.