I find myself going down rabbit holes, of devising huge  mountains to climb when the potential for a quality demo is right in front stairing me in the face. I told myself NO MORE FEATURE CREEP!

Never again is what you swore the time before

Too many crazy thoughts going on in my head to build up in conjunction with core tunings to the core play. I'm simultaneously thinking about now I need to create knockback value lerps based on input speed while thinking about how i need add boss enemies and advanced spawn routines and start filling out several NPCs all at once while juggling core polish to core combat systems. IT'S MADNESS! I literally just told myself last week only 2 NPCs. VERY SENSIBLE! I'm not trying to be coy, doing any of that other shit is stupid, will produce nothing of value, and only lead to pain. If things go well, perhaps in the future we can indulge such stupidity.

Top priority: Make the core movement mechanics of charge attacks feel tight as f*ck. I've been overindulging in core movement polish as of late, and it's paying off. All the notions of focusing 1000% on the core movesets and systems surrounding player power and interactivity seem to be finally paying dividends. But they interconnect in so many crazy ways it's taking insane ammounts of time. But this is the foundation on which everything else is built. NPC's are not meant to be twitchy in a game such as this, it's nice, but 99% of their role is to be a gear check. I must make unloading on enemies fun, that's all that matters. If the enemies are fun to engage, icing on the cake.

I'm making this blog post as a promise. NO CRAZY ASS OVER THE TOP BOSSES OR ADVANCED LEVEL MECHANICS. Just get in some decent enough areas, start filling in some times and shop items. Then some scaling difficulty. THAT'S IT, THAT"S THE PLAN. SIMPLE!

NO BOSSES!

NO OVERLY COMPLEX CAVES OR SECRET AREAS!

NO ADVANCED AI ROUTINES

WE WILL BE FINDING WAYS TO MAKE SIMPLE FUN. 

Because at the end of the day, the best games are elegantly simple. 

Sneakin' some blog in:

Was really happy with my last blog entry so I didn't want to slide it off the top of my feed, but I felt like blathering so I figured i'd post here.

Having REALLY mixed feelings about dev right now, fighting against the pipeline, still trying to figure out how best to incorporate terrain sections and level assets.

Some random Ideas: start building out level areas without terrian and build it on flat ground. If I choose to plop it on terrain, I can quickly plop it on the ground.

Just start using smaller terrain sections.

I'm VERY happy with how platforming type gameplay seems to have taken off out of nowhere. I started adding some new areas, cleaned up some out of water movement mechachanics and got some new slippery phisics going on on top of assets that bounce the player off of them. LOTS of little things all coming together and holy moly suddenly i'm adding things to the game that are really fun to play around in strictly in a platformer type of way, no combat required.

BUT! As always I am being pulled in random directions, I feel as though i need to polish these movement mechanics, add more platforming because it's coming into its own now as well and continue to polish up the combat mechanics.

It's all really starting  to come together, i'm also SO F*CKIGN BURNED OUT AND SPREAD THIN. TRuly a rollercoaster ride. Not getting the 18 hour straight dev sessions any more either, but stable and VERY solid 6 hour sessions. I'll take it.

Making progress, game is getting better every day. But at a big price. Im burned out, not sure how much longer I can keep this up. But every day  i wake up and I feel like if I can just  get a couple more good days in I can get that demo I've been wantign to put out for some time out.

Truth is i'm learning the hard way how to best build this game, the physical world. What scales for things are fun, what compositions work. Slowly but surely as i'm always distracted by various technical issues that always pull me away.

More than ever I wish I could clone myself 4 times, and divvy up the world building, the code, the combat design and item design. If I could get a couple days of a team doing work that would be incredible. Been so long since I came back to the project to be suprrised by cool stuff other people have made. Oh well, it is what it is. Just a bit further. It's REALLY coming together, but so much to do.

Oh! and almost forgot, had a bit of a happy accident while playing around with some cave setups, I accidnetly set up a corridore where the player has to bob up and down to swim through some rocks, and it sorta forces the player to execute a "waveSwim" which gives them bonus speed and smash power, and it dawned on me I could make a tutorial out of it and give the player the chance to smash down a giant rock by requiring them to gain dash charge and smash it down. Gotta add some NPC fish explaining it and add it to the game somewhere, but it's made!

Ive decided i'm just gong to build super modular and in smaller pieces. This way I can mix and match and am not locked into bad ideas and the game can come together faster. I wont be working in a specific mindset in a large area, now's the time to experiment and try new things. I regret that i'm having to try so many variations of practices and setups and it often feels like spinning wheels in mud, but this is the only way to really move forward.

It's weird, but I hate that all this stuff is working and seems to be fun. I had a clear obtainable goal of just working on combat and items, and now I have this entirely new gulf of development opening up to me. IT WILL NEVER END! I WILL NEVER RELEASE THIS DEMO!

I'm SO SICK AND TIRED OF POTENTIAL. I'm SO DARNED TIRED OF DEVELOPING PIPELINES AND FIXING THINGS. I JUST WANT TO PUT OUT A DARNED DEMO.

Ugh, I'm very happy that the game seemingly has no ceiling, I can just work and work and work and it will get better and better and better. But simultaneously I REALLY want to get this demo out, get feedback, and hear from some trusted people if I'm wasting my time or not. I'm hoping there are some people who might be pleasantly surprised by how well things are going... or maybe they can end this grind and tell me i'm wasting my time. I don't know up from down any more. I don't know if the game is doing fantastically or if i've gone made testing and developing it for so long that I can't judge my own work in the slightest.

Really wish I had just an ounce of helping making all this :/

The only answer to being in this constant fight or flight state, trying to work your way to the end  and get through this terrible cycle is to push forward and get more work done. I need a break so bad, but the need to push through is infinitely greater. The only way any of the snowballing nonsense has any value at all is if I can keep this up for the foreseeable future.

Excess Blog Day 2:

Got some solid world building done today. I finally feel as though I have the assets for building out open negative space, at least a start of some stuff. The big revelation today was that it wasn't foreground asset that were missing, but it was the lack of background assets to give open waters a sense of distance, scale and permanence. So I've got most everything kinda sorta ready at least for a first pass to build up the world.

IT'S TIME TO DIVE IN AND START MASHING THIS STUFF TOGETHER! I will be ensuring that it's modular, and easily iterated and improved, as well as reused in other areas if needed.

It's taken a lot of work to get the foundations built in such a way that I won't feel as though I'm spinning wheels in mud, but there comes a point that preparation no longer makes sense. It's time to get in there and start making the game.

PERFECTION IS THE ENEMY OF PROGRESS.

Excess Blog Day 3: Bit 'o blather 'fore I go

The goal as I trudge through these setups and cleanups of the foundation is that I will wake up one of these days, open up the project and start building out actual areas that string together to form the experience of the game. Today will not be that day, but I believe I am getting close. Today I will start finagling together more modular chunks of levels and terrains. Should they be combined together? Or left apart? I think I will do a combination of both because who the f8CK knows which is better? We'll iterate and what works will survive, this is GAMEDEV DARWINISM.

Lots of little things always nagging and breaking about, that's the real mojo killer right now. But only way to get beyond that is to put our head down and push through. Every error, every fix gets us a little closer to the pipeline becoming water tight (LONG WAY FROM THAT right now).

Here's the facts: I'm one dude. I shouldn't be trying to develop the perfect pipeline, I should be getting the game good enough that maybe it gets some eyes on it, and from there... who knows? All I know is building a perfect core in the current situation is impossible, so I gotta leverage what manhours and motivation I have day by day.

So to start I want to spend a little time cleaning up core combat a bit, dashes and charge mechanics may be good, they may not be, I gotta fire up the game and play around with it and see what my gut tells me. As a whole, combat is a bit overwhelming out of the gate for people new to the game (everyone but yours truly) so at some point I need to dial things down in the beginning and make some of these new mechanics unlocks, items, purchasables of some kind.

When it comes to physical fitness, it's when you start to get a bit sweaty, short of breath, and your body starts to hurt, THAT is when you start go get actual gains. Same thing with gamedev. It's easy to do the fun stuff, to add neat things, to get them kinda working. Games are made when you're burned the hell out, just wanting it all to end, but you're full of hard earned lessons of how to go the distance. You know it's possible, you know how to do it, and it's going to be painful as hell. Suck it up.

Today we suck it up and get this shit in and fix a lot of annoying tedious shit. 

SAME OLD, SAME OLD!

Day 5 doing stealth edits, because I don't want to forum slide superior, more melodramatic blathers:

Rough day yesterday, health nosedived out of nowhere. Hope it's just the coffee i've been drinking. Not going to harp on it too much but I'm taking an off day to just recuperate, and get my mind off the project. Doctors apt. today, so not all care free, but i need some medication that prevents me from f*cking dying so gotta venture from this cave for a bit.

Rain or shine hittin' this hard tomorrow. I find it amusing as I type this, but JUST 2 MORE DAYS of work and I think it will be smooth sailing... just 2 days of doing tedious sh*t and hopefully things being to fall into place, as ever.

Day 6: really been feeling off as of late, good news is the project is the last thing on my mind for now, so at least getting a bit of a mental break and been hibernating here and there catching up on much needed sleep. Forced myself to work out, probably hit it a little hard. Going to try to just get some sustained, moderate cardio for the foreseeable future. I'm glad that i'm starting to feel more conventionally sick today than oddly out of breath and dizzy the past couple days. I'm so over wondering wtf is up with my health, for all i know this is just a little bug i'm blowing out of proportion. Anyhow, whining and complaining about health is such a buzz kill so i'll leave it at that. Hoping to be back at it soon, and that this little distraction ends up being a distant speedbump down the line.

Not sure of the days any more: Another off day. Is it a bug? Is this how it ends? I'm trying not to be a little b*tch, though sometimes I just think I'm never going to have a good day ever again. I miss working hard, having some drinks on the weekend and just enjoying myself, foolish as it was. These days I have to push hard at the chance to maybe feel close to ok for part of the day. Waaa waaa who wants to hear this sh*t? For the first time ever I got some extended exercise in and I controlled myself and didn't allow push too hard trying to make up for lost time. Too often I want to get the exercise over with so i can get to work, or I can cook something, or do literally any stupid thing other than get my health in order. After all this time it's been hard enough trying to enjoy the arduous process of creating a game in my lonesome, I now find myself searching deep to find ways to psych myself up for getting some exercise in so maybe in the coming days i'll feel well enough to execute on the fish game.

By all these blog posts talking about how out of shape I am and how much I love cooking I probably give the impression that i'm some sloth land whale who can barely navigate a house, but I've actually been getting in pretty good shape as of late between the diet and the working out. It's something positive to focus on. No matter how "rough" your life may be, it takes nothing to spend a bit of time you would have been sulking around to move around a little and get yourself in decent shape so you can look better, feel better, and work better. It's such a simple thing so many of us have just given up on. This existence really isn't that complicated if you take a step back. Work a bit, work out a bit, try to eat healthy, don't be a total f*cking d(ck to people who don't deserve it. Sometimes I wonder how we've let things get so out of control... but it's so easy to let things slide if you let it. Doing my best to get out of the rut, but can only do so much. The fate of my health seems largely out of my hands at this point, but doing what I can. Paying the piper, truly. Feeling a tad better, hope to get to work soon.

Day 2 of not keeping track of days:

I'm fixated on gamedev again, feels good. Just aloof thoughts for now, not SeaCrit so much.

There are two stages of gamedev. The first is nurturing potential, keeping doors open so that fun may enter into your project. It's dangerous to keep your doors wide open for too long, your project grows and grows with no form, just engorged with possibility. You can have mini games! Day Night cycles! Advanced AI routines! You can do anything if you work hard enough! You're going to make the most advanced, most incredible overarching experience ever!

The heart of your game can only pump so much fun through your game, you must be ever vigilant in controlling the rampant encroaching feature creep. because some day you have to bring down the axe, you must remove the excess of potential and try to save your project from dying on the cutting room floor.

This may come as a bit of a shock, but I truly believe the potential phase is by far the most important. But it's important we develop in this phase knowing it ends with the knife. We must pursue excellence, fun, and have our heads in the clouds and work for lofty impossibility while giving ourselves the best chance of being able to incorporate it into the game. There must be purpose to their existence, it must be a purposeful piece to a larger machine. Most profitable devs will wax poetic about how true game devs fixate on finishing projects and they pump out endless cookie cutter nonsense. To be fair, that flies this day and age...

I'm really walking the razors edge moving forward, I SHOULD focus on some tight combat and get some items in and get a demo out, but I can't bring myself to hack away the potential, it's gripped me. I'm going to have to push hard in the coming days and do some of the tertiary level building i've blathered about endlessly over the past few weeks. All the vital systems of items and upgrades are feeling like a distant memory.

Will this tedium ever end? Just as I feel it's coming together I hack it apart and piece it back together, a bloody mess of systems all bleeding out demanding life saving attention every step of the way.

It's coming together. Just wish the world wasn't so f*cking stupid and it didn't have to be such a hellride.

Day who gives a Sh*t: I'm not going to put much effort into today's blog, this is a stupid f*cking rant day, damn the torpedo's, f*ck it.

I've had some tough days as of late, feeling ok today. Against my better judgement i'm going to neckbeard out and speak about how things have been as of late. Every day has been a crapshoot with my health, am I going to feel like I'm suffocating today? For the past week I just haven't been able to catch my breath, I lay down, I feel nauseous, feint, and dizzy. I'm glad it never got really bad, but there's something terrifying about laying down perfectly still and feeling a growing sense of being out of breath that you can't catch. like if it got any worse your body would start spasming trying to get more oxygen as if you're surrounded by water.

As far as I can tell i've been doing everything I can to get ahead of this, taking all the meds my doctor told me to, i'm eating better, I'm exercising. And yet I'm sitting here wondering if i'll ever feel good enough to push hard again on the project ever again.

I had a doctors visit recently, she told me to stay on the medication, to keep doing what i'm doing, and to try to keep maxing out dosage on the current medication Metformin. And I'm telling her all these terrible things going on and she just can't seem to figure out what the issue could possibly be. I google this medication side effects and it's like a laundry list of all the things i'm experiencing. Fatigue, short of breath, nausea. Like... should I be on this damned medication? My vitals are good, my blood sugar's getting there. I could exercise harder, I could change my diet more, I'm finding i've got solid will power the older I get. And yet we never discussed powering through without meds, we never discussed how working out can interfere with the meds.

She didn't seem intent on testing anything, or leaving a number I should call if things go really awry, or discussing potential alternatives, or anything really. I don't know if you'd believe me if I discussed the overall level of communication I've been given, or the shallow depths of understanding staff seem to have about the care they provide. I'm not entirely sure what these people do if I'm honest.

I'm kind of flabbergasted at how poor this entire ordeal has been. This is an incredibly common issue, an incredibly common medicine, and I feel like after doing 3 google searches I'm better informed on this sh*t, and better able to diagnose this issue and google has fought me every step of the way to provide quality information. Its impressive how good we are at stifling life saving information from being shared with the masses and provide care for their own illnesses.

I don't know what the future holds, maybe i'm an idiot and the moment this prescription flows out of my bloodstream my blood sugar skyrockets and i'm back to poppin' the pills.

I do know this, this is day 2 of quitting the prescription, I feel much better, I haven't had any feelings of suffocating or high heart rate, no nausia or lack of energy, a tad maybe. I've eaten healthy and well and got in a modest amount of exercise and my blood sugar is pretty stable thus far. Quitting wasn't even a consideration, I was supposed to ween off it if I wasn't feeling well, then push back towards 2k Mg a day once I was feeling better. Feels like total madness. This whole system is so unbelievably broken I don't even know where to start. But i'm generally too busy blathering about how gamedev is broken.

We're all so coddled and sheltered, and insulated from having to do hard work and execute at a high level that the vast majority of people are just blind to how utterly f*cked everything is. We just gaze into the void of society and believe surely there must be a reason for why things operate as they do. Surround people with people in lab coats, put diagrams of internal organs on the wall and give staff a rigid structure of care asking tedious questions from a digitally populated plan and suck their money out every step of the way.

There is more effort put into destroying people in this mad world than there is helping people. That's the real kicker. 

Peewee died today. I know it's cringy as f*ck to post this shit, but I've posted this video so many damned times I'm posting it today too. Wasn't a huge fan, but I always thought he was a talented, entertaining dude. I will say this, it's disgusting what they did to him. But let's all hold hands and decry it today and say how amazing he was now that he's dead so we can suppress those nagging feelings that we're absolutely disgusting hypocrite shits.

Today I'm not a happy idiot. Hoping I can translate some of these frustrations into energy for SeaCrit soon if my health doesn't continue to plummet.

What a waste of space our health care system is. F*cking joke. How many PSA's do we get every single day about divisive horse sh*t, but not a single one to warn the cattle they've engorged with corn syrup that if their vision is blurring to check their blood sugar. A single one of those would have saved me untold torment. The quality of life of the people around us means nothing if it's not profitable. Healthy people in shape isn't profitable.

If our world were halfway sane we'd encourage cottage industries of delicious, healthy home grown food, and put work out equipment on every corner open 24/7 free of charge. It's madness we stuff our kids with cheeseburgers and pizzas endlessly. Prioritize gluttony and random nonsenses.

This world never ceases to disappoint.

We live nihilistic lives consuming processed cheese and carbs injecting ourselves with untold amounts of deep fried ice creams, drugs, and medications because god forbid we got off our arses and started giving a damn about one another, held one another to a standard so we could live prosperous lives of consequence.

I don't want to jinx it, but I think i'm feeling A LOT f*cking better today. I feel like the ball is in my court: I can exercise, I can eat well, my future is up to me. 

There's no health wizard out there that's going to wave a wand and give you health. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

Get off your arse, do some jumping jacks, get a run in, do some push ups, some sit ups, eat some meat and veggies and keep the cheesecake and carbs to a minimum. Most importantly find something of value in your life that gives it meaning that acts as a catalyst to push through all the other bullsh*t.

Day ? of who knows (hopefully the last stealth blog for a while and i'm back to work soon):

Feeling better, it's kind of surreal. It's been pretty eye opening the past several months this rollercoaster ride of feeling terrible and not knowing what the future held. I won't get too melodramatic, but I have a bit more of an appreciation of the little things as of late, makes all this posturing and cancelings and BS seem even more silly. There are more important things to do in life than these stupid games. 

It's been nice to have a bit of a clear head and not stressing 0's and 1's for a bit. I've been enjoying a little bit of down time not stressing the fish game 24 hours a day or health, only been a couple days so far but I really needed this, It's almost TOO nice, but work needs to be done! 

So glad I'm able to make an optimistic post just relaxing, I didn't know what the future held just a few days ago. So many ups and downs. The fish game remains in limbo, but at least I don't feel like I'm f*cking dying any more, fingers crossed this holds up. Going to keep eating well and putting reps in. I kinda want to make videos on cooking and being healthy right now. I've learned so much. Lost a bit of weight, feeling good, getting toned as f*ck. I didn't plan on getting on a good diet and working out, but inadvertently I'm suddenly in pretty damned good shape again! I've got energy and ambition again.

Future's uncertain, always is, but we've got gas in the tank. Back to whoopin' @ss SOON!