We like to imagine we're getting better at gamedev, that some day we will become so good that we can create some fantastical project that blurs the lines within the physical realm. But the reality is, getting better at gamedev is more about coming to understand your limitations than expanding your ambition. Whether it's knowing to make your systems self sufficient and impossible to break, or learning not to feature creep, or learning that tiny little setups in UIs and back end systems are just as important as the big flashy action code, the big lesson to be learned is to have a bit of respect for the tremulous nature of this unforgiving medium and that with great power comes gargantuan, soul crushing bugs that will WIPE THE SNOT out of your pompous dreams.

When you're first learning to cook, you always worry about burning the food, or not stirring it enough, and you get antsy and you just go overboard adding every single thing in your cubbord and every single thing you cook has the same flavors and the same textures and the same ingredients. You gotta learn how to turn up the heat, and let things burn in there. You gotta be able to isolate what ingredient is going to elevate your dish, have confidence in it, and hit it with that element that's most worth the flavor profile. It took me so long to learn how to just throw food in the oven at a high heat and let it just set to get a nice singe on it rather than meticulously stirring it every 10 seconds in a skillet. But it's all part of growing, you need to do things wrong at the start so you can make mistakes faster. To learn faster, to grow faster. It's all about making mistakes, building a pain tolerance for them, and having knee jerk reactions to potential solutions.

By far the most important quality to move forward in dev, is a resilience to failure, a willingness to push forward and suffer through hard periods of dev, to be able to admit you were wrong, fix things and move forward stronger. It's no wonder gaming has gone to heck recently, everyone's so up their own arse these days. No one's ever wrong, no one ever has to suffer or work hard to produce things of quality, everyone is so darned content to lie around and point the finger, to expect good things handed to them on a platter for their obedience as the plane crashes into the mountain. Pain is an important learning tool, it's not the only one, but only after going through great periods of struggle can you truly become better at your craft. I fear we've become to coddled as of late.

If you spend all day whining about tools, if you allow little techincal issues to stop you, if you do not take the time to reflect and improve your methods and gain muscle memory of gamedev, then you have already failed. There is no make easy button, though these tools could certainly be made more ergonomic, but I don't want to complain in my thread complaining about people complaining!

Such a crazy thing this human existence is. Are we human? Is this all a comedy sketch run on some fractal of reality?

Had a bit of a hell day yesterday, still can't believe I pulled through and the project didn't fall apart, had a constant nagging feeling that I broke something that I wasn't going to be able to fix and that the sky was going to fall. It's not so much the fear of losing a day of work... it's the fear that some terrible fall will break the optimism and forward momentum. That is the SeaCrit sauce, an unbroken will to work hard, suffer through bugs and make progress towards a silly little game, that there's some sort of method to all this madness. It becomes harder to keep the dream alive as your project ages.

Still reeling  a bit from yesterday. Was a really intense session, but gearing up to get to work today .

Making a note to myself here, Bring back big ominous caves:

Final procrastinating edit before i get to work:

NO MORE SPEED UPGRADES! I have this wonderful memory from when I was a little sh*t, and I was playing gauntlet, and my favorite class was the elf, because he was very fast, and if you get far enough you can find upgrades that PERMANENTLY MAKE YOU FASTER. It was so cool and fun for the time, and any game that lets you get faster is fun in my book. But there's a problem...

Once the player starts getting faster and faster, the systems collapse, the game is no longer fun, you begin balancing for too many scenarios and the magical polish of balance simply collapses under the weight of mechanics that no longer have meaning, some players will be very good, some will be bad, and huge differentials in speed will amplify this player skill disparity and you start creating content for a smaller and smaller audience. There is a very small gap of speed that you have to play with as a designer, you must ration this, you must ensure the player never reaches ludicrous speed. You must keep movement and agility in a sane range so you can create combat scenarios that fascilitates well balanced fun.

Anyway, long way of saying that I put gobblefish in and a few of them gave you speed, and it broke the game. This is like the 4th time I've done this in the dev cycle of this stupid game. I have a problem.

Post Work Edit: Major refactoring, decided to go crazy and radically change the scale of the project at the end. Since the very start SeaCrit has had very bad scale, fish are the size of small houses in the engine, which throws all sorts of things off like ambient occlusion and lighting and shadows. The gains for now are small, but in the future it may mean better graphics, or a better transition to various pipelines and easier integration of particles and art assets. I was just loopy and decided to do a massive revamp which is half way in progress as it's taking forever to rescale the various systems and particles, and level assets and such.

16+ hour work day last night. Might be a new record. 16 hours to make the game more broken than yesterday... Hopefully get things back to close to normal tomorrow. I really need to get some sleep.