Impromptu blerb!

Always thinking about the decay going on. The soft handed, entitled masses wearing the mantles pointing fingers.

There's this debate that goes on, "How clean does your code have to be?". And that kinda depends entirely how far into your project you are!

Early on before you've found the fun, you WANT to be messy. You want to gleefuly take your scalpal to the code base to violate it.  You want your game to be this amorphous blop of half formed ideas that have no great investment so that you can carelessly mess things about and try new things.

You don't want to always be burning yourself out keeping everything perfectly filed away, named, and structured perfectly, it takes intense man hours and discipline to maintain something clean and organized. The most wretched thing in all of gamedev is having to remove something you've polished to a wonderful shine. You betray your faith in the project. You told yourself this was worth making workable and modular and water tight, and in the long run, you have to gut it. You have just proven to yourself you cannot properly plan and to second guess every ounce of effort you invest into your project. 

Think about the concept of the big bang. absolute, grand chaos exploding in every direction to nigh infinity. From this chaos in all the cosmos, here we are risen from a puddle of disgusting, fantastical disorder. 

Iteration demands imperfection, happy accidents demand mistakes. Our brains demand oxygen, breathing room.

It's a constant struggle balancing raw passions and the discipline of measured advance. Gamedev is not a blueprint, we are not building a house from prefabrications of engineering and structure. We're opening Pandora's box, we're inventing new technical marvels which then are fed into our chemical brains and we don't know if the fuels of fun will even combust or explode the darned thing apart.

To produce a compelling game is to endeavor in processes of great evolution. In your early years you must harness an explosion of ambitions and ideas that have no form, and as that hot volatile mix cools and hardens into shape, you must temper out the imprefection and now heat and retreat the shape over and over as your arms grow tired and your mind grows leery.

And this is the true gambit of gamedev. The prestige. Can you follow through on the promise, can you attempt the impossible, find that you will fail, and keep pushing without burning yourself?

Adhere to perfect order too early and you'll produce a dull, soulless nothing. Indulge in the passion and joy of all the uncharted awesome from the start to the end and you will have an overscoped, buggy mess.

In the end, games are forged of order from chaos, and that's true of any great work. We're born into this world wild and free and untested and we're ready to take on the world, not knowing the harsh limitations of our minds and the chaos surrounding. Can you keep that fire lit through it all? Can you measure the intake so that fire lasts the cold distance?

It's a bit embarrassing to ramble about, but holding my tongue from blather and complain has never been my strong suit. Went to the ER again recently and the doctors think I'm in perfect health. Breathlessness, fatigue, nausea, bed ridden days on end. At best I just feel kinda sick, it's been a rough year. They still think it's psychological, or at least chemical in my brain. I thought for SURE I had finally found the issue, I started taking some medication for blood sugar and the symptoms kicked in again. Blah, blah blah wine bitch moan.

I'm going to spend less time in this dark room, going to get more light, extended exercise rather than doing nothing or stints of intense workout. I'm not going to be so militantly strict with my diet and eat some carbs as I think that may be have a negative impact. And that's about all I can do. Hope gets me feeling decent again so I can get back to work. We're so darned close. The writing is done, the level generators are done. The item systems are done. The upgrade systems are done. The charge systems are done. The combo systems are done. The movement systems are done. The AI systems are done. The Dialogue systems are done. The shop systems are done. The portability to PC, Phone, Touch, mouse and gamepad are done. To say nothing of the never ending polish of Shaders, materials, animations, lighting, sound, music, backgrounds, foregrounds, modular level design. 

And dare I say it, the combat is no longer sucking!

I've got a bit of content to make: Items, enemies, zones, ability loadouts, upgrades, etc. But I keep telling myself I'm not trying to make the perfect game here, I'm trying to make something that shows enough potential that maybe some entity out there with more resources would take a chance on this damned SeaCrit and we can start something awesome!

The world like gamedev is always oscillating between order and chaos. And that's a good thing! That's where the strongest steel is forged! It's easy to look back and curse the rocky road, but bless the shiny stars above for our hardened souls.

I should just leave it there, as it seems as good a spot as ever to stop the blaves, but I can't help myself

Cowards and backstabbers in this industry. You've got bootlickers at the bottom, and people with their heads up their arses at the top. As such, most teams don't really focus on the internal workings of gamedev. CEO's think about structure, but in the wrong way. They're not preoccupied with building the framework of the projects and tuning a team that can properly develop the best product, they're engineering teams in service to their empire. They align the structures of human resources to align with their continued leadership. If you create a marketplace in which you control every product on the front page, if you create an industry in which everyone shoulders the blame and all studios abide by the same practices, methodologies, and hierarchy... no one can be held to account, the boat never rocks.

You look at studios that are now "too big to fail" like Unity, like Disney, like EA, like any modern era entertainment studio, and you're going to see  a very rigid structure in service to the powers that be, far more built to insulate the current state of things, than to advance our mediums, to advance us as a people, to advance prosperity and cultivate better culture and art.

I'm not super happy with how I've framed this, but I hope it gets the general point across. Long story short, most studios are now resigned to 9 to 5'ers doing the bare minimum not to get fired, making rehashed remakes of prior games that pushed the envelope, and all the way bottom to top is a hand pieced together, mediocre team that does exactly what it's told and nothing more, while the stale industry locks the market and beats a dead horse while the audience begrudgingly hands over their money for the product social media tells them they should be interested in.

So anyway, I have a couple blogs in mind that I want to write up in the coming days, Blog #1: Why gaming sucks. and Blog #2: Envisioning a better way

I wanted to do one post where I speak about all the things the big studios do wrong and then write a blog on revolutionary practices that we could adopt if the industry wasn't so full of shady, money grubbing, greedy sh*t heads, and if we actually tried to make good stuff.