Feelin' a little better today, fasting, I'm hungry as sh*t right now, but it seems to be helping so we're going to push through and not eat. No dev either! As much as I want to start setting up these items setups and try to get mini boss spawns set up and start setting up the gameplay.

I was certain I had something in regards to gameplay that I felt compelled to write about, oh I remember now! I'm going to create reusable areas that I can create custom loadouts for. So imagine a cave that ends with a miniboss, and I can have several areas in the game teleport you to this cave, and each teleport will load a unique boss creature at the end. This will reduce design time reusing the same location as well as reduce memory cost.

Will they be too easy? Should I enhance gaemplay by spawning enemies around them? How much health should they have? So many things to consider you can go mad worrying about it all, best to just get your hands dirty and learn what works the hard way. That's how we got more confident in making levels and figuring out what level designs were more fun and worked, by making mistakes! 

It's counter intuitive for us perfectionists, but the only way to make things anywhere close to perfect is to make things REALLY badly at first. Just gotta push through it.

The world is still crazy. It's so weird seeing the same rehashed gatekeeping and back scratching rear its ugly head time and time again. It's like the only thing that DOESN'T matter any more is doing a good job and working hard. Too many people at the top of the pyramid who are convinced those things aren't important and want to blot that out and are convinced their heavy handed stifling of industry is somehow enriching the world when deep down all it does is entrench themselves.

Wah, wah. I know. Just kinda grumpy and feeling like shit, hopefully back to work soonish.

It's kinda fun to think about, all these modern games clocking in at 500 gigabytes, all with these massive worlds with massive stories, mounds of slop thrown together by hundreds of people, nothing cohesive, no unified vision, just these gaudy monuments to the superiority of empire and greed.

I think it's kinda cool that more and more i'm finding paralels in design to games like the orignal zelda and Metroid. Modular and reusable design patters and sensibilities, finding ways to make little teleports and reused play a boon to the game, greater than the sum of it's parts.

Too often we can think, "oh boo hoo, we're just one person, we can't have the massive swathes of content that large studios have". But this can be a good thing! It means that you get to make your game while having tremendous knowledge of the rest of the project!

So often we play these games and we wonder, do any of these people even know what this game is!? And very often times, NO! THEY DON'T! This industry is a damned mad house!

You know what!? I'm GLAD i'm having to shoulder all this shit.

If you want something done right, DO IT YOURSELF!