Gamedev is slow and cumbersome. Projects take years to gestate, sometimes longer if they're ambitious. Teams get locked in, cultures form, trajectories are revealed, and like a massive glacier they lumber towards their fate. Inevitable.

For indie developers, it becomes of paramount importance to try to find that viral in. That moment when you can translate internet clout into profitability or market share. Get some wishlists, translate hype into capital to either recoup costs or push forward with further development.

Here's what we've accepted for a while now in this cave: We're not special

I've tried to internalize this time and again. It's easy to fantasize about some outside force to swoop down from above and make this venture possible, to daydream about the invisible hand bestowing success upon us. 

We don't have connections, we're not a famous social influencer, in fact we've gone out of our way not to rely on clout. No social movement is going to elevate us. While others have gotten spotlights and accolades and every conceivable bit of help along the way with gatekept storefronts, publishing, media machines to hype their trash in an incestuous circle jerk in reverence to the mad machines.

No one is going to want anything to do with SeaCrit until it's value is obvious, then maybe if lightning strikes and we're given a moment in the sun, people may swoop in when the going becomes easy, oh well. 

There will be no sense of sharing the burden, we will not kind of impress anyone and find a group of people to go through the thick and thin with. This is it, me this damned engine, and this darned cave and this fading fire. 

We have to make the game good, it has to stand on its own. On one hand it's frustrating and depressing to come to the realization that no one in this world is on the lookout for cool projects to invest in unless they fit some sort of political mold, unless they know 100% that that project will bolster themselves. 

This world is full of well to do, privildged do-nothings looking to exploit one another, wanting to suppress those getting their hands dirty doing the hard work. When there is nothing to risk, nothing to invest, and only fruits to enjoy, then the support will come.

I'm watching Grumms and others in this cultural sphere kinda starting to team up, and I just find it kind of shady. And I'm seeing that same tribalism and schmoozing and politics starting to form right out of the gate in the other direction. And it's kinda disheartening. Is it jealousy? Am I just being a hater? Is it principle seeing the same sh*t happening now? Maybe it's a bit of both, oh well. Life isn't fair, time to grow up and push on.

Maybe by not being "special", by not having any support network, by not being someone with clout to exploit, it means we have the opportunity to push this further than we ever thought we would solo. Maybe if we're able to make this game decent it does become "special".

Frustrating to watch all these guys who whined about meritocracy over the years to farm an audience are doing absolutely nothing to foster meritocracy outside their immediate circle. But perhaps that's asking too much, after learning so much about the world and human nature... you come to realize people don't know what they don't know.

As a human, if you want to see the truth, you have to constantly check yourself. Because we are all prone to our own biases, our own feelings that our work somehow has more value than it does, we're all imagining what we're working on to be special, and others are getting in our way. And that's just sad.

We're part of a rare breed that locks themselves in a cave and burns the midnight oil for years on end, and truth is, that most often leads to failure. I'd like to think i'd have done it anyway, but maybe it had to be this way, maybe the hard road was the only road, we may never know. Blah, blah, blah.

Alls I know is i gotta get to work. Time to get busy devin' or get busy dyin' per usual. 

Was feeling GREAT yesterday. So great that I put on some Manowar and worked out way to hard and ended up feeling like sh*t. I gotta pace myself, apparently we're not out of the woods yet with health stuff, but DEFINITELY doing better. I'm doubling down on diet, used to eat tons of seed oils, no more of that shit. Seems like the world is collectively waking up to the dangers of this crap, but we've always known about sugars and fructose and no one does anything about that...

The worlds crazy, you gotta do what you know to be true. We're living in insane times, and the rot seems to be on its way out, but maybe it just ends up being replaced with a  new one, who knows... there's something about this forsaken industry that attracts lazy smarm f*cks who have no idea how to make games willing to f*ck everything up to get their hands on the toys.

Enough blatherin', time to get to work on that waveswim system! 

Hope this goes well today. I'm so ready to start consolidating this TODO list, and feel as though we're making progress towards this demo. I repeat myself, but we keep fixating building multiple areas, and adding more NPC's and in our head this is the big thing that's going to take the bulk of time. But gamedev is an illusion. It's the tiny little bugs and polish that take the lions share of time.

One of these days we'll open the project add a few new areas, add a few new fish, and we'll do it effortlessly, it will just be FUN. And we will wonder, WHY THE HECK DIDN'T WE DO THIS SOONER!?

Because the gah damned piper had to be paid his f*cking due. So that's what we're gonna do. While everyone else does their bullshit griftings and posturing and plays their petty damned politics to manuever to put themselves at unfair advantages. We're gonna shove our hands in the soil and get to tillin'. Cuz amidst all these barren fields, someone's gotta actually cultivate the systems of fun.

Always feel like I said to much in these blogs, or didn't say enough. It doesn't matter. All that matters is we get to work on the Fish Game and we make it better. I say this so many times over and over as I blather and blather. WTF am I ever doing? Not working on the game is what! TO DEV!