So per usual i was doing some procrastination and watching some YouTube, and something always strikes me when people complain about games. NO ONE KNOWS WTF THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT.

Everyone's a critic, anyone can play a game and point at it and say, THIS IS BROKEN! DID THE DEVS EVEN PLAY THE GAME!?

In gamedev knowing isn't half the battle, it's like 1/10000th the battle. The battle is knowing these issues will pop up before hand and properly planning and developing around the inevitable pitfalls. Build systems to be bulletproof, to be isolated, with clear logic, with concise and obvious means of communication, make things modular but also watertight. Don't feature creep mindlessly, know what's going to add the most value to your game loop and attack those points viciously. Don't overscope, but don't be a bitch either and make a piss poor, boring, unambitious game. 

Only way to accomplish a quality game is to crash head first into the wall over and over and over again, and this looks a lot like failure, but the differnce is, is the team getting better? Are they learning lessons and better code? And here lies the rub, studios don't know the difference between quality talent learning the ropes, and a throng of hungry mouths doing the bare minimum so they can collect a paycheck and browse reddit all day. 

They confuse burning money with empire, they think hiring a massive team of people with impressive portfolios somehow shows an ability to create a studio. Time and again you see studios get a bunch of artists together with no idea how to create a giant technical marvel, and fast forward 5 years and you have a sh*t game with some OK art oozing out of the sides. No one's at the helm, no one's taking pride or shame in the project, it's a huge collective of people who were all depending on everyone else to solve the key problems for them. There was no synergy, no heart, no core understanding of wrestling this massive undertaking and how the pieces need to fit together year after year building the foundations. We play these fully complete games, point at a thing or two we don't like, and naively think we can also fulfill the entire pipeline with a team piecemealed together.

What we don't understand  is games, unlike almost any other persuit are fragile in a way the layman cannot fathom. They are as fragile as the worst tiny section of code. Every fault builds on itself year on year, and you can actually become further and further away from a fun, complete game the more you work on it. And the VAST majority of developers are incapable of identifying these concepts and properly judging key systems and standards, so it becomes very easy for people to overestimate their abilities in terms of generating pieces to the grand puzzle. Studios will generate years and years and years of faulty content that is doomed to be a buggy mess. And as they eliminate feature after feature, they inevitably strip it down to the same, tired shape as every other game that every other studio has produced.

Corporate games have a certain "anatomy" to them, because year after year, after they run into these shortcomings time and again where ambitious ideas stunt the progress of their huge, buggy mess, they rely on massive amounts of content. There's a reason why they love story elements, collectables, achievements, quicktime events, massive worlds with tons of art and story quests with dialogue driven NPC's.

ALL OF THESE THINGS are  easy to accomplish. The systems that support them they can package up and throw in game to game. Studio execs get off on hiring 40 overpaid artists to do what a few of them could do if they actually worked 4 hours a day to make endless nothings for a buggy, unfun mess. Throngs of environment artists, level designers, animators, writers, quest designers, gameplay designers, who don't know the forest for the trees pointing fingers at coders who are burned out dealing with their unrealistic tasks. A blame game ensues among people conning one another to do the least amount of work and assuming the least amount of responsibility. This industry is run by spoiled children. 

What cannot be packaged up and thrown together by these dysfunction teams is the wholistic experience, the SECRET SAUCE... THE FUN!

The average studio is filled to the brim of people who do not dare take on the massive task of iterating on painful systems to make something next level, they either lack the competence in the team or the leadership. And you can't even really blame them, because most decisions are made by fools who don't know how the sausage is even made. The entire situation is doomed from the very onset. 

I'm glad we don't have to deal with this nonsense here, and I must admit I do take a level of satisfaction watching this industry burn from this cold dark cave as do nothings point fingers at one another and everyone blames everyone but themselves for projects churning to muck over the wasted years.

And that's what still excites me about SeaCrit. I'm able to tackle what the larger studios can't, i'm able to weave these overarching systems together in new ways that actually create interesting and engaging new scenarios that don't feel stale. I Realize the most recent build isn't the best, but the new one is MUCH better in combat polish, and will have much more and easily iterated on content, I really do believe the future is bright here, and it's made even brighter by just how much the industry at large has stagnated, how they have bled talent, how they have overscoped with no idea WTF they're doing, how to handle code and develop in a non destructive way, not just in maintaining workable systems, but maintain a company culture in which their best and brightest don't jump ship amidst self entitled morons who have no idea how the seacrit sauce is made.

Anyway, I repeat myself, but what else is new?

About to force myself to do a heavy edit pass on the new game dialogue. I've realized story is NOT something I should be indulging in right now, I should have gotten the core game up and running, but it seemed like a great idea while I was really burned out, "I'll just switch gears and writing story will feel like a vacation while I recharge on the core systems and code" Well fast forward a few weeks and instead of feeling refreshed and rejuivinated I feel like I've just slacked on the writing. Oh well, part of learning how to make games is learning how to maximize your off time, and sometimes you gotta learn to just let it go and enjoy some totally worthless time off.

It doesn't help that it's the holidays, but they're almost over. Looking forward to the new year, looking forward to putting my head down and getting this stuff done!

I think this game is very close to showing it's potential, and it's really exciting to think of how easily artists and animators and a team of coders could be thrown at this project to add immense value and fun. That's what i'm most proud of with this project, I just really believe it's a well pieced together game at this point that's positioned to go the distance. It's not very buggy, it's fun, and it has a ton of room to get even better. And I know how insanely rare that is this day and age. It also ports to damn near anything and anyone can pick up and play it on any device.

Holy sh*t I wasn't expecting this blog to get upbeat out of nowhere, but i'll f*ckin' take it!

Enough yammerin' time to get to work! Oh right, i gotta find a song to put at the start... let's just go with turn the beat around, that song is catchy as f*ck.

Edit: Had to take the mean tone of this blog post down a notch. It's easy to get bitter in this damned cave.

Do I wish i was super full of energy to hit the project as hard as  I was a few months ago putting in 60+ hour weeks for months on end. Of course I am. But the reason i'm so darned burned out is because I hit this really damned hard. We made damned good progress, gotta let the mind and body rest a bit. Gonna be finishing this writing up at a leisurely pace over this weekend. Back to the grind soon!