Gonna be a meandering bleh blog today more about me bitching and moaning about personal things that no one wants to hear about and that's fine, I'm takin' a break today and don't want to put too much effort into a blog trying to make it poinant or meaningful, so I figure today we'll just ramble and let it roll and if meaning finds it way in, so be it.

So right out of the gate i'm deleting a lot of whining I just typed out about my health, because who wants to listen to a grown ass man whine about their tummy hurting?

Just taking a breather today despite feeling better because I don't generally allow myself time to just regenerate. I'm either feeling like shit, or I'm burned out, or I'm working on the project and it felt like a nice day to just take some me time before pushing hard back into it tomorrow hopefully.

I'm also trying the carnivore diet! I hear that can do wonders, and i've tried it before and every time I started feeling better I thought to myself, "Eh, it's probably not the diet" and then i'd eat a banana or something. So considering how much time I lie around thinking I'm going to die lately I figured, you know what, screw it, let's just once try something that's in our power to make ourselves feel better.

It actually kinda amazes me how many people are in bad health who do absolutely nothing about it. Junk food, no exercise, pop some pills that come with a slew of side effects leading to more pills, pain meds, drugs, alcohol, blah blah, LET'S GET BACK ON TOPIC!

So I had a "It's not a bug it's a feature!" moment yesterday in the 2 hours of work I was able to slog through yesterday where I realized I didn't want to create 15 different custom NPC's to drop 15 custom items, and I already had rings dynamically showing on fish, as well as an armor item, all that was missing was the weapon visual!

Prior it was my goal to give weapons to fish who would swing the damned weapon around. And my plan was to have all these unique fish with unique attacks and unique weapons would be a challenge to get from powerful enemies. But then I got to thinking...

I'm friggin' lazy.

Well no that's not true at all, but it makes a much better punchline. Sometimes we gotta be lazy to finish the damned demo, and I got to thinking, you know, it might be funny if these fish that have these powerful weapons just swim at you face first and try to bite you. So that's what we're going with.

I actually do have enemies that swing weapons in already, they're just not set up to have unique visuals and I genuinly think the most fun fish to get the items from right now are the ones that are bare without the items so it's very obvious.

So my immedate goal for this week is to get these fish dropping items, get a couple small areas set up and put out this damned demo! It won't be THE demo, but it'll be a stepping stone. Maybe we get a little feedback on it, maybe a few plays, maybe we don't, it's not a huge deal. I just want to put out a demo to ease that mounting pressure of needing to put out something perfect. I know the game is pretty good at this point and getting better all the time, validation would be nice, but we dont' need it.

I'm also letting go. I built up this massive random area generator and I created all these "chunks" of seabed with populated bits of gameplay above. And I created like 10+ different unique chunks that inheret from core chunks and they all adhered to a rigid file structure and theyr'e all named well denoting their prefab ineritence and they all...

SUCK!

So screw it I'm going to salvage the few that are kinda ok and just start from scratch . Well i'll be keeping the shallow area ones because the random level generator for that is actually really cool, it's akin to excitebike and I wanna keep that. But the rest I'll be building from scratch with a focus for playability first, and quality over quantity. Better to reuse 3 very fun, polished chunks, than to have 20 chunks that all suck.

It used to be that you ran the level generator and it would stick unique areas together meant to go together and it could create long stretches of random areas and then unique areas again. And sometimes you get so in the weeds you don't realize how stupid the setup is and it dawned on me all I needed to randomize was that section of shallow area that plays more like a racing game than a fighting game, and then stick the other non unique playable area at the end. So essentially I coulda just build 2 chunks of things side by side and generated the random bits without much trouble. I don't even want to think about how many months and even years I have wasted on stupid shit right now. To say nothing of just learning basic coding along the way. The majority of our time was spent spinning wheels in mud, but honestly, there isn't any other way, so who gives a damn! We powered through it, we got better, and that's what matters! Some motha fuckas always tryin' to iceskate uphill...

Speaking of alcohol, and since this is sort of a bleh blog anyway, It just dawned on me for the first time in a long time how long it's been since I absolutely needed another drink. It's really kind of amazing. I speak of the awkwardness and the destructive urge to make games and neckbearding having an affect on my career, but if I'm honest, and I have to be because I'm a fucking neckbeard, the alcohol certainly didn't help. Drinking is like a cheat code, we all want satisfaction and fun in our lives and to feel good in a crowd and to make friends and meet that special someone, and alcohol can help with that KINDA SORTA? But it doesn't actually solve anything, It's the shortcut, it releases feelings of happiness and good times that you didn't earn.

And early in your life you might think of yourself as the life of the party or at the very least not the most quiet loser in the corner, but over time... you don't want to be in your middle age with nothing else that gives you joy but a poison that saps your will to do anything of value with your life. 

You'll never wake up one day with a 60% increased risk factor from poor health choices, it sets in slow, and then one day you'll wake up and you'll wonder where your health went.

When you're young, you're invincible and you know everything and you're going to jump through all the hoops and the world is going to bend to you and everything fits together, but as you get older it's not just your body that you realize is falling apart. It's really depressing all the good times that i've wasted having good times. So many things that decayed. And you take a step back and you see the world we're creating today and we ARE NOT equipping the coming generations to do any better. It's a sad world we're bringing to bear.

Anyway, wasn't my intention to turn into Mr. "drugs and alcohol are bad, MMmmmmmmkay." Hell I was never able to stop, I wish I could say one day I pushed against the addiction and toughed it out and willed myself off it, but truth be told one day I woke up with the worst hangover i've ever had and from then on I just never wanted to drink every single day for some foresaken reason. And to be 100% truthful, I've had a few binges the past year, I still enjoy the shit out of getting drunk and playing some dota till I'm in low piority, but i'm able to stop now, and I can go as long as I want without another drink again, and that feels like a super power.

Not sure why I'm saying this all here, I mean, I wonder why the fuck we say anything any more. You go on twitter and it's just a bunch of people yelling at each other with no intention of taking any action to do anything. Discourse is so silly these days. Just rabid, angry people, screaming for the machine and others for others to do things the way they want.

This wasn't supposed to be how our republic worked. You're supposed to pick the hardest working most capable people to go out there and those few people who have expereince and a can do spirit and a history of getting shit done, yell at each other, and then win or lose someone who has got shit done and is well rounded and knows a thing or two about the world gets that shit done.

Nowadays we're lorded over by people who think cake grows on store shelves. People who have never changed their own oil, never put even put together an Ikea desk. It's absolute fucking madness.

WTF are we talking about again. Eh, let's just call it here.

Imma go watch some absolutely worthless Youtube videos, maybe get some light cardio, and do anything but think about this game for the rest of the day. Tomorrow, health willing, we're gonna hit this hard.

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

Edit: pretty in the dumps, not feeling well among other stupid shit. Oh well just one of those days. I think it's time we take a break for distractions. I always say this, but we're nearing the end of this demo, we're just some idiot neckbeard on the internet, not sure we even have that much to say. If we're not a total failure, maybe we can speak with our demo.