What to blather about? I felt very compelled to make a long post about the balancing of potential against what you actually have gas in the tank to achieve. The difference between a good game, and a failure is knowing your limits, or at least having the pain tolerance to push past them once the reality smacks you in the face of how demanding this venture is. 

Most this world rewards mediocre conformity, thought I had more to say about this. Feel pretty stupid making this project when things could have been so much better smiling and nodding.

Anyway, got into some arguments with the usual neckbeards in the usual forums and it went as it always does. Manchildren bickering about having possession of the toys. Pointless posturings and flailings of logic accomplishing nothing. It's remarkable just how ill formed most opinions and conceptualizations of the world are, all filtered through a lense of me, me, me. There are few legitimate greivances in this world, most everything is a smoke screen on cognitive dissonance meant to vindicate the destruction of the other. It's so petulant and rampant and never called out. We've forgotten all lessons of the past for frivolous and self serving angers.

Everyone's a critic, everyone is a visionary, anyone can come in, screech and moan about how things would be better if only "X, Y, and Z" happens.

But will you make x, y, and z happen? Could we achieve something better in a more sensible way? You can't argue with someone concepts they don't understand. Most have no reference for the hardships it requires to discover truth and to gain perspective. Everything is this preconceived notion framed through tribalism. There is no grey, only the black and white of if you are for us or against us. 

Prosperity comes from knowing limitations, and pushing those limitations, challenging convention, understanding universal truths and deceptions. It comes from understanding the forms and functions of the mechanics that hide under what's shoved down your throat, understanding the subliminal nature of the creative processes. It's all the same, the politician on the TV lying to you, or that voice in your head telling you to take the easy road. Little "white lies" that snowball into abject madness by the coddled and ungrateful. By vocal, hungry mouths unable to feed themselves the necessary knowledge to sustain their unwarranted decodance. 

Ok, we're going a little f*cking hard here. Let's ease up on the blathers a bit and stop being a shitty neckbeard.

For all i know I'm on the precipice of releasing a mighty failure destined for the dumpster bin of irrelevance. Human existence is quiet squalor, fools chasing white whales of their own imaginings.

I'm not sure the linked song was all that good, i was trying to find a rendition of Shatner's famous revising of space oddity, but couldn't find one without fluff at the start of the video. And I think it's fitting that we have something here from a creative that isn't quite as good as they could have pushed it if they had a true fire under their arse.

Shatner already captured the white whale, he has the luxury of half assing things and enjoying the fruits of a storied career. This is one of many avenues that can stifle a creative work. For all we bitch and moan about fairness, if everyone had it good, if no one had any hunger, no one would aspire for something greater. Maybe i'm just rationalizing this decline, who knows. Better than just wallowing in it.

It's so fascinating the multitude of factors that play into success and failure, the multitude of soft handed individuals who will pry their way in for a chance at the glory, who will naively ruin everything, because they have no understanding of the creative process, the grit it requires, the iteration, the sheer volume of failure to learn the necessary hard lessons. They are not ill intentioned, they simply do not have the experience under their belt, because our world does not reward hard earned lessons, it does not foster and promote giving it your all amidst the madness. And in a strange way, i'm grateful for that. Because it gives this game a shot in the dark.

Maybe SeaCrit is a growing pile of refuse, festering in this unlit recesses.

But maybe... JUST MAYBE

Been spending too much time arguing with people online as of late. It's such a pointless venture.

I've got my own little pile of nonsense here i've got to sort out with my own devices. Enough talk, time to get to work.

Post Work Edit: No more coffee, not sure why but I just can't handle it these days. Glad to have gotten some solid work done yesterday. Gotta take a mulligan today, feeling off.

New day Edit: I'm going to start consolidating some of these lesser blog posts into one big blog post, for now i'll just post in here. Feeling a little better, going to push through and get some work done. Here are some thoughts...

Teleporters are in and working and they open up a whole new slew of possibilities which I really like. I had been thinking, "oh gosh, I really need to balance the size of combat areas and adventure areas and find a good balance between the two. But with teleporters I can at any point just slap one into the level and say "Hey, want something completely different? GO IN HERE!" Without the nagging overhead of having to retool an existing section of the world. It's a really nice thought and makes pushing forward less overwhelming. We can mix and match the world very easily.

Stat fish: Just started getting these suckers in and they're pretty neat. They need tuning, but I really think its satisfying to get stats or health just for eating these little guys, it's a very unique progression system that feels good. I had a really crappy system in place when I started adding them, it was based on exp and each time you got a stat level bonus, the exp system needed to get the next stat went up a bit. I was trying to give this system a bit of a falloff, but it was really confusing, i'd imagine players would just think, why aren't these darned fish giving me more max health any more? So i've decided to just ditch the falloff. In the future I may make the spawn chance of these rare fish based on a zone specific stat fish, but I think the better option is to just let the players farm them as they wish and sort balance later. I could always just scale difficulty such that 400 health from 2 hours of farming ends up not being a HUGE deal.

I still find it funny that after so many long years (I always cringe when I think about how long I've been working on this so I use vague #'s) I'm JUST NOW getting spawn systems in again. I never thought it would take this long to start feeling out the world. But to be fair, prior I had envisioned a far more simplistic and open world more akin to minecraft. Just a big sprawling empty assortment of stuff to shove fish in. Only recently took on the task of hand crafted level elements.

Pretty lame blog today, and I'm fine with that. Feelin' a little bleh, don't have anything monumental to blather about, kinda just wanting to ease into a tad bit of work and hoping I can hit this harder in the coming days.

So today, just going to spend a bit of time tooling up these gobble fish and the stat system a touch. Maybe get some other fish spawning in in other areas. Was supposed to be a mulligan today so any work at all is a bonus!

Ultra mini blog edit:

Got sh*t sleep last night, but i'm going to keep the momentum going with a bit of work today brewing up some tea as we speak...

So often we think about that big kick arse thing we're going to get in... or we're tasked with getting some really boring technical thing sorted.

If you focus on that big cool thing, you're going to burn out, you're going to get frustrated that day after day you're working on tertiary things and not feeling as though your project is getting closer to being "awesome".

Much better to adopt a setup mindset day after day. I'm going to work on this and that technical thing today, and tomorrow I can go in and add some cool stuff and tune that up.

So today i'm going to be cleaning up spawners and getting one iteration of every spawner type and trying to set them up so they all work and it's easy to start proliferating fish in the future, maybe a couple other minor msc things.

I'm finding there is more to do to get this demo that I could imagine in my brain, but that's ok, because there's lots of cool things coming online.

Same old blathers I know, but this is the day to day. Grueling, neverending grind. Truth be told i'm not happy with only putting in 4 hours a day as of late, but it's better than nothing, hoping i'm feeling progressively better in the coming weeks, i'm able to find the healthy balance of exercise without overdoing it or underdoing it, and just the right amounts of caffeine. I'm so damned fragile these days, hopefully health returns a bit.