Saw this video the other day and it really resonated with me. We live in a society...

I spend so much time thinking about this stuff and the craziness and we have this great decline, yet so many are patting themslves on the back as everything goes to crap. 

Virtue > Truth

Anyway, don't want to get preachy right now, just wanna talk about the status of things.

I was really excited yesterday I had a nice big long dev day! And I was pumped and I went for like 14 hours like the good old days, and my brain melted and it felt like a return to form and we got some things done. And then my health started crashing, and now a couple days later and I can still feel it. 

I don't like to use the word "stress" but I suppose that's what it is. Grinding really hard, getting pumped up by metal music, going hard on the game, recording for youtube so put that added pressure to work fast and get things done. For extended periods of time, trying to bust my ass to hit the finish line of having a decent game for so long, I realize now that this has likely been the core issue with my health over these years. Trying to push too hard and get this game done, extended stress, not enough exercise, no outlet, no reward. And endless mad dash to try to make something of all this decay.

Anyway, I REALLY want to work on the game despite feeling a bit off today, want to wrap up more of the new waveswim mechanics. If I work not sitting down and kneel I find it helps me feel a bit better, but who knows. Point is 14 hour days is counter productive. I was doing great working 6 hours give or take for extended periods, I do one crazy 14 hour day and I can feel the poor health setting back in, so no more of that crap.

Speaking of the waveswim I made some adjustments to the core logic and now i'm really excited about it. It was already pretty good, but now it has this all new feel. If you've ever played super mario world, you know there's the feather and if you rock forward and back you can fly indefinitely. Waveswim is kinda like that but you oscilate up and down and move forward like a dolphin. It's hard to describe but it's really starting to feel good now. 

You used to have to hold forward, but now waveswim forces you forward so long as you maintain waveswim, and that's maintained by swimming in sucha way that you "bend", so you can sorta swim in circles, but i've just added logic to check if you're swimming in the same directioni or not, and if not it lowers the waveswim to half. So there's 2 modes, high speed where you're pretty locked in and have very wide turn arcs, and a more tight lower agile mod you enter into any time you start twirling and evading things.

I don't do this enough, but that's enough explaining i'll just post a damn video!

Nothing fancy, but it kinda shows how the system works, at first the keyboard controls are very rigid, and eventually it becomes very smooth, to the point you don't have have to hold forward any more and you can just dictate which angle you want to swim towards, kinda like a racing game. it's pretty fun! If you let up on the keys, you will rapidly slow down and get a lot of your agility back in a psuedo waveswim state so you can swim around obstacles and such. Needs a lot of tuning but that's the goal.

I figure I can stress about not getting work done, or I can have the stress of getting work done, so might as well get to it, set this system up a bit, and call it a day.

Think we'll limit ourselves to 3 hours of work so we don't turn our brain to mush again and hopefully get back to a sustainable rhythm. Really kicking myself right now. I just want to finish this damned demo, but working in such long bursts is counter productive, going to have to take it easy for a little bit till we literally catch our breath again. It's so weird to think that gamedev can negatively impact your health, like you can work your brain so hard it's like pulling a muscle, just with stress of mental work.

Ok, enough mental energy exerted to complain about weak sh*t. Gonna get to setting this stuff up.

Edit: almost forgot the point of all this whining! I think i've finally discovered that this stress has been a large part of the health issues over the past year. So if there's a silver lining, it's that. We're almost there, the game is almost fun I think. And hopefully from then on, we won't have to stress so much or work against the clock trying to finish this damned game before time runs out.

EDIT: Really want to work today, but I don't want to push it, still feeling off. I've decided i'm going to try to eat even healthier, less oils and fats. It's gonna suck but I'm going to give it a try and see if it helps.