Tech is so fascinating to me. Left to our own devices us neckbeards would make overly complex mechanisms that no one else would be able to use. It take vast financial resources, feedback, and an emphatic mindset to understand what the end user will enjoy.

In order to build tech we have to wrestle together a group of people with very little in common. Deep pocketed investors who have never written a block of code in their lives, managers who don't always see the forest for the trees or the trees for the forest, and designers all trying to make people around them happy. Then you have these know it all neckbeards who may or may not know WTF they're talking about who are absolutely insufferable and think they're god's gift to the universe, gah some of them even ramble on blogs with endless blogposts!

There are a lot of points of fragility in this process amongst these strange bedfellows, where things can go wrong. We bleed into these features, we throw ourselves at the wheels to try to make our games and our tools, they become part of us, extensions, and we form bonds with those we work with that can distort our perceptions of reality and our evaluations of our own product. Projects become our babies and we start to see value in them that others can't see, we see their potential, we know that given enough time, no matter what they would grow into something amazing and strong that we will be proud of. 

And somewhere along the line, for faults not of the majority of the team, things can go terribly wrong. Maybe the latency of the hosting service is no good. Maybe someone who doesn't know what they're doing makes a key decision early on and now the entire team is stuck with it, doomed to make a lackluster product. Maybe everyone is just trying to make everyone else happy and afraid to admit the truth as everyone else just seems so darned chipper and proud of how everything is going.

In the end, it is our fallible humanity that is the greatest point of fragility, of our own destruction. Our compassions and cowardice. Our bullheadedness and exploitive natures that stifles talent and uplifts us only to send us crashing down from great heights. It feels good to push others on, it feels good to have a we can do it attitude. It feels good to buy into the shared sense of purpose and ambition, no matter how faulty. If only we could tear our souls out and approach these technical problems as automatons. If only everyone had the grit and determination to keep pushing out the elbow grease when the chips are down and success seems nigh impossible.

But if not for our fallibility, if not for this timeless struggle against the never-ending, there would be no meaning in the work. There would be no art or soul to cold remedial tasks of no consequence and compounding interests would be long dead.

So much squandered in the pursuit of The Ecstasies of Gold.

There are too kinds of people in this industry my friends, those with loaded pistols, and those who dig.

We dig.

Editx2: 

 I was just getting ready to open up the project and get to work. I was going to work on spawns. And I have the elaborate spawn system, where I have these chunks of debris and they form around the spawner and when they all around in this circular  shape there's this emmision of light and then a fish spawns there. And I put a decent ammount of work into it, and I'm not sure it feels right. And i'm not sure why.

Anyway I have this notion in my head. I have to fix it, I have to make all that hard work worth it. But maybe that's the wrong idea, maybe the game is better without this clunky overdesigned spawners.

I don't know. I'm late into the project and running on fumes and decisions become SO MUCH more important. Ambitions are finite now. Time is always finite. So much time has already been lost. But I digress!

I think the best thing to do is just open the project mess around a bit, see if we can get some decent spawn setups and try to improve the game and maybe lock in an area of play and we can use that area as a benchmark for even more areas. I still don't have an area where you fight fish that i'm truly happy with, and that's a big thing weighing on my mind. And it's compounded by the fact I have 5000 other things weighing on my mind and everything is calling out for completion and it's just me and we're burned out as hell, but the point this game shows its promise feels as though it's fast approaching. Gotta stop stressing everything. Most things I worry 'bout, never happen anyway...

P.S. The quality of these blogs has been a bit erratic the past few days. No more blogs unless they're bangers, that's the new rule! Feeling a bit better today, hoping to get a little work done before crashing out. No rest for the wicked.