It's been a solid week, I miss the days of 18 hour days where I just felt absolutely unstoppable, but let's not get too greedy. Progress is progress, and perfection is the enemy of progress.

I do feel disconnected from the "fun" of the game as of late. I've been hunkering down and working on really technical, bug prone systems like unloading, spawn, and endless tertiary elements of debugs and scene management.

It's easy to lose track of the spark of inspiration. When I think of SeaCrit as of late, I don't think of this super fun game I'm making more fun, I think of this endless slog and multitudes of tedious systems, and how frustrating it is that I need to handle all of them in unison.

But let's try to be upbeat, we've made a lot of progress. It's a lot harder to pound out an 18 hour day working on debug tools than it is to tool around with combat and items which are rewarding to see come together. Also, we're checking lots of things off the list, the unload system is now mostly done! (Oh I almost forgot, i want to add a system that increases the checkrate of assets when moving at a  high speed, adding that to the to do list).The spawn system is nearing a usable state. Once these systems do what you need them to do and no longer produce bugs, you can unload them from memory.

When you're working with complex tools there's this remapping you have to do when you work on them, you need to remind yourself how the logic works, where different variables and functions are called in other scripts. You need to finagle things for a bit before you can really push forward, sorta like warming up at the gym. And it's really draining, because you don't have time to warm up, you have 500 different things to do and they're all nagging, they're all taxing, it's all uncertain. Will the spawn systems you thought were going to be fun be fun? Are all those charged attacks actually adding depth to the game? Are the AI routines expandable and fun and allow for a depth of combat scenarios to warrant a game with endless progression and replayability?

It's all a gamble, and you bet in sweat and tears. . I work so darned hard... for what? A chance I guess. Frustrating to know so many skate by risking nothing, investing nothing, providing nothing. Most just casually show up, brush elbows and get their nice big nugget of cheese. It's so rewarding to simply not rock the boat as monotone chorus sounds through every single studio sung by soft handed smarmers. Best not to harp on it too much.

I'm so tired, tired of endless late nights working alone on an unknown project buried in a cave. Tired of peaking my head out and seeing the same madness, the same land mines awaiting outside. Tired of no one really giving a damn about anything of importance in this world as people bicker about the most divisive hateful things. So many lies and half truths, so many persecutions, shamings, by know-it-alls with their cush jobs and their judgements.

But I'm not tired of the progress, the potential still glimmers and excites. At least we're not surrounded by too many cooks in this kitchen, at least we're not surrounded by neckbeard toy hoarders with their idiotic arguments for going down rabbit holes of frustration that will drain all the fun out of the core experience like most every other team is. We are able to focus, we're able to expand the vision that builds on a solid core without any of the noise.

I'm hoping that when I wrap up these systems, my mind can remap itself to the cool elements of this project again, and I wake up again popping out of bed excited to push things forward. There is something to be said for simply still being able to suck it up and pound out quality hours of work day after day despite all the burnout and decay. I'm am very grateful for that.

I've been putting off doing a build for a long while. I really need to check to be sure there are no new bugs in the build process that will inevitably show up and stunt my ability to get the new demo on this site when it's ready. Always nagging techincal issues to stress about that get in the way of making the project more fun. For too long i've put off making builds because I knew the demo wasn't ready, and it still isn't, but I want the piece of mind of knowing everything will be ready for uploading when it is ready, so i'll be making a build today and doing some sanity checks, hoping that goes well, if it doesn't i'll fix it up and get it sorted.

Getting close to this new demo, it's not going to be "perfect", but it would be dumb to wait too long. Still terrified people will try it and think this is all a waste of time, but we need feedback, and who knows, someone may try it, like it and share it, and maybe that person likes it and shares it, and maybe this infinite loop of decay finally has an out.

I do envy those who are able to show up to their 9 to 5, they don't have a lot of pressure on their back, they smile and nod and they're surrounded by others who smile and nod and everyone just agrees to have a good time and enjoy things as the walls fall in. It must be nice, the sanity and security of being part of this madness. But year after year it must be taxing on the soul for some of them, I know it was for me. 

I take solace that though I have no support from the world at large, I am also not stifled by the politics, the agendas, the checkboxes and the shamings and back stabbings that affect most creative works. I open the project I bleed into it and the pain breeds tangible gains and the project becomes a little less shit day after day.

We don't have comfort, we don't have prestige, we're a bit of a crazed outcast chasing our white whale. But we do have purpose, that's what we're holding onto.

Ugh, what whiney blogs I make these days. Hopefully we feel better, get some kick arse new things into the game, and we're making more upbeat posts and who the heck knows, maybe we get out of this cave soon. Things are starting to come together... Really riding the razors edge of late. So close to this coming online, but motivation, distraction, health, the world at large, it's all in a great state of flux. It's interesting times. Enough blathering in circles, gonna drink a little unsweetened tea, gonna watch a little stupid crap on youtube and let this steak settle, and going to open the project and go hard on these systems in just a minute. One inch at a time.

Post Work Edit:

So I finally tried making a build for the first time in a long long time and immediately my heart sank upon trying it out. Everything broke, materials, input, play. I was wondering if my great fear had come true, some terrible thing hidden deep in the game was amis, and i may have to spend days or even weeks trying to track it down, if I even could.

So I hopped in Unity and started trying to figure out what went wrong. My first course of action was to turn off debugs to make it as close to the build as possible. And BOOM! Got the exact same errors, minus the shader stuff. This was fantastic luck, as it meant that it was likely just some logic pertaining to the debug settings, and low and behold it was, just some basic code out of order that wasn't assigning the start position before trying to send the player to the start position. Crisis averted...

But shaders still needed doing. Ended up just being an issue with Amplify that was causing all my shaders to be set to shader mode 4.5, and webGL doesn't like this setting, so disabled templates setting shader mode and recompiled all the shaders at the 3.0 setting and that seemed to clear that up. Quite a few other issues popped up, didn't fix them all, but got some things sorted out. The build runs very well from what I can see in this computer, I should try it on a lower end one, but for now pretty burned out.

Bad news: After all this time I was hoping Unity had solved the lag issue that happens on touch, but that doesn't seem to be the case and the performance issue still persists when playing the web build on the phone, but not a huge deal, not a GAME BREAKER, one could say!

So on the downlow, there may or may not be a totally new demo uploaded. I don't have any expectation that anyone will see it, or if they do see it that they will like it, as there's a good bit more to be done before this all comes together, from major implementations of things, to level design to polish to just about everything. But getting closer.

Feels good to have the web build working and affirmed that in the future more builds can be uploaded with relative ease.