Everyone plays the victim these days, and the last thing anyone wants to hear is some dude whining about their health, it's like, "dude, hide that shit no one fucking cares. toughen the fuck up and deal with it."

But this is all directly tied to the project and it's hitting me hard today, and this is as much a personal "diary" as much as it is a gamedev blog so i'm going to cry about health issues g*d damn it!

I've talked about the feelings of breathlessness and general unwellness that i've been feeling the past year, and how mysterious it all was and how I had no idea wtf was causing it. Was it the excess drinking I used to do? Was it because it was very sugary drinks and I didn't know I was diabetic? Was it long covid? This all started happening shortly after getting covid. Was it some other rare illness? Was it from the stress of working too hard continuously day after day for long stretches?

I had no fucking idea. It was maddening, and I would try all kinda of crazy shit like not eating any acidic foods which was hard because i love me some hot sauce and vinegar. I fasted for days on end. I exercised hard, I tried not exercising at all. I stopped drinking caffiene which seemed to be directly correlated.

The past couple months I've been feeling better than ever, in fact I thought it was mostly all gone. I thought maybe I had gotten over long covid, or continued blood sugar management was finally edging out whatever was causing my body to shut down and feel like shit.

The past couple weeks are some of the best work I've ever gotten done, even worked right through the weekend just to keep the momentum going. Not THE best, but the best without much caffiene by far. I was allowing myself a cup of tea but that's it.

I was getting cocky.

I don't know how many of you experience this, but if you work hard enough at annoying and demanding logic type stuff constistently nevernding your brain can sorta start to shut down. It becomes hard to even put a sentence together and logic problems in your project that used to be relatively easy demand more and more mental effort to get done.

I've always prided myself on being able to keep pushing and wrap things up. Even if a problem is nagging at me and seems impossible, I almost always hunker down, put in the hours, and get it resolved before I end the project. I HATE ending a work session with some huge bug weighing on my mind. Another thing that weighs on my mind is how people like me are percieved by society. "Oh you sit in a cave and work on a video game, you must be a lazy piece of shit who just doesn't want to get a real job". Every day it's like i'm trying to prove to myself that i am taking this seriously and do work hard at something important, it's part of the reason I record my work most days. 

Every single work session is a mad dash to try to get out of this cave and bring the seacrit to life that this isnt all stupid, this project isn't a joke. That's the truth that we're fighting for every day, and I've come to realize that pushing this hard hasn't helped, it's actually taken its toll on my health.

Wah, wah, bitch moan, this is exactly the shit an inde dev might exagerate or talk about to get clout, I get it. But it is what it is.

I started feeling kinda bleh a couple days ago, so i figured "Ok we'll get off the caffiene" but work was going so well I figured we'd push forward "au natural", stone sober, no coffee, no tea, no nothin'. And we got some good days in! 

Today I had a short work day, but very demanding and fruitful, I wanted to finish strong and even though I felt my brain going to mush, I just pushed. It couldn't just be writing code making me feel like shit, i'm literally just sitting in a chair typing on a keyboard, how could that take a negative toll on your health? Well just as I was finishing up the last bugs my brain just gave up and I felt the breathlessness set in hard and the diziness and the nausia and it hit me all at once and it was in that moment that I realized it was the "stress" of developing that was the largest factor causing all this.

I don't like the word "stress" because it makes it sound like i'm sitting here crying and developing like a bitch always angsty. That's not true at all. Work is demanding, it's fucking rough sometimes, but i've got manowar, shinedown, and sabaton blairing most days as we soldier knee deep through the issues of development and KICK ASS. Heart is pumpin, adrenaline flowing, brain firing on all cylenders, we're recording youtube videas so we're working hard trying to impress an imaginary audience. We are GOING FOR IT and feelin fucking pumped.

Maybe I need more exercise, but the catch is when I try to get more exercise that's even more stress and it has caused this to set in in the past.

Blah, blah, blah. Point is, as much as I hate to do this, I need to curtail the push to put this game out a bit. No more 14 days back to back drinking caffiene, no more pushing past 8 hours trying to prove to myself I'm serous about this and trying to finish this all up ASAP so we can get our life back. It's NOT worth it.

I've been enjoying working on this project again, I'm as excited for its future as much now as I ever have been. What's the difference if it takes 2 months instead of 1 to wrap up at this point?

Feel like absolute shit right now, but at least I think I finally know what's causing all this. Hoping we get back to normal, we've done it before. Just gotta take a nice deep breath and take it easy for a bit, then we'll do responsible sessions and try not to go too hard.

Different days are more demanding than others, it's when bug after bug pops up and i'm dealing with complex issues for hours on end that this really becomes a problem., otherwise I think I could spend long hours doing mind numbing content creation. It's hard to describe just how intense development on this project is. Just think of annoying math problems that you HATED as a child in school, but imagine doing them for 8 hours straight but you're old and your body is falling apart and you've got adrenaline pumping through you and your life depends on getting the answer right. That's kinda what developing on SeaCrit has been like.

Like always in gamedev, it's all about finding the balance.

Kinda relieved I finally know what's causing this health problem, but also in the dumps having to deal with it again, it's truly debilitating in a very terrible, frightful way. 

Just gotta roll with it, looking forward to getting to work hard, but measured soon as health rebounds. Here's to this being the absolutely last post I whine and moan about this shit. NO MORE caffeine moving forward, no more 9 days straight of work, no more 8+ hour work days.