Where to begin?

That's how I feel opening the project these days. I have SO MUCH to do. SO MANY systems to bring online and polish to make them all shine and elevate the game.

So often we add things to our game and they make them WORSE, but I can't bring myself to remove anything. I know in my mind's eye how all these elements work together to elevate the grand experience. How the gold drops and shops will give the player the very consistent roads of strategy, how hidden seacrit areas will be a joy to stumble upon and give this game its namesake.

But each feature is a mouth to feed, it shoves the others aside as it fights for a feeding position in this frenzy for my time. Everything needs doing.

The demo is so insanely modest right now. But I take comfort in the fact that the things that need doing are finite. We know what the game is, we know what the features are, we know that's going to make it fun, we know what's going to make it awesome. We are excited for the future and we are more confident than ever that SeaCrit will be something special. It even feels as though the world is becoming sane again.

It doesn't change the fact that gamedev is a real m*ther fucker.

I have a slew of reasons not to work today. Not feeling the best, stressed about a multitude of things, and not least of all, I am utterly burned the f*ck out pushing every day as the sole developer of this incredibly needy project.

But this is what we signed up for. Actually, no it isn't come to think of it. We fell into this, like everything else in life! And that's fine, that's how life goes for most of us. Life is what happens when we're busy making plans.

We planned for this to be a heck of a lot easier, we planned for there to be more sane and fair economic structures for finding and collaborating with publishers and game studios and store fronts. We planned for gamedev to not be so darned hard, for the tools to be more robust, for there to be some sort of reasoning behind all this.

We've learned so much on this journey, not just about makin' a murder simulator in the Unity game engine, but also about the nature of the world. We learned how petty all these crazed machinations are, we learned on shallow the wide ocean is, we learned there's really no rhyme or reason to who's behind the drivers seat.

It's all a grand illusion. But harping on it ain't gonna do no good!

It's easy to be frustrated, it's easy to want to just say "fuck it", everyone else are indulging their self affirming lies. Everyone else is patting each other on the back and elevating one another if their noxious echo chambers. Why push so hard? Why not just play the game?

We've too much neckbeard in us. We're too much of an incessant asshole to just give up and let the namby pambies ruin everything.

I was always terrified of being labeled a dick most my life. I always tried to be a "nice guy" to everyone. Never wanted to offend anyone, never wanted to put anyone down, words can really sting, I never wanted to put that on others.

But you look around in this world, and you start to see that kindness has been coopted by a bunch of assholes.

Niceness has been sharpened and turned into a weapon by the weak and petty. The cowards and backscratchers have ruined this world with their insane calls to virtues. Gah, this has been uttered a thousand times in a thousand different ways.

If you know you know.

I'm not afraid of being a dick any more. In fact I think it's absolutely crucial to our return to prosperity that people find their balls again and become dicks.

Problem is, there's a lot of bullshit in this world too. Lots of shitty people of all persuations that confuse standing up for what's right with throwing a fit and serving themselves. It's gotten all muddled up with this new age politics and intersectionality horse shit where people find it so easy to cut down their own "enemies" while wearing the mantle of virtue. It's fucking tired, and everyone is sick of your shit. We all see right through you.

Anyway. Have we said too much? You're not allowed to talk about this shit, YOU MIGHT OFFEND SOMEONE!

God fucking forbid.

Anyway, that's enough mental leakage devoted for this modern day dick drivel. What an absolute waste of fucking engery we have collectively put into this dog shit.

I'm gonna get off my ass and get to work on SeaCrit. Might be just 30 mins of work, hopefully we get at least 2 hours, we'll see. But we're getting close.  And hopefully if this game ever gets off the ground, we can be a nice shiney beacon against all this bullshit.

It's all so strange, when I started this project I just wanted to make a fun game for people to enjoy and maybe make a living. Never thought we'd be fighting the woke mind virus trying to save mankind from all the weak subversive shits trying to tear down the world so they could enjoy the smell of their own farts better.

Que sera, sera

Oh shit! I got so in my head whining about all this post modern crap I totally forget to talk about the game.

So I decided I need to go in and throw seacrits all over the damn place. And I want each play of the game to feel fresh and new. So to that end i'll be adding "seacrit Rocks" and they'll have a 50% chance of spawning as a regular old rock and a 50% chance of being a destructible rock that you can shoot open and find some goodies, like maybe a powerup (rare or common) or some amount of gold coins.

I really start going down rabbit holes in my head. How many coins should they give? Should I create a pseudorandom system where if after 3 rock spawns you don't get a special spawn I force one to occur to ensure no one ever gets a "bad run"? Should I apply these same pseudorandom properties to weigh against bonus vs gold drops for seacrit loot? 

How much gold is balanced to find in these seacrit areas? How expensive should shop items be? How overpowered will certain bonus combinations be and will it invalidate all other build paths?

These questions are WAY too advanced for where we're at with the project right now. So the best course of action is to just get it in the game and worry about balance later.

There are a LOT of things finally coming online. The demo is going to very quickly change from some little tiny chunk of sea with a small handful of enemies to kill and items to find to what hopefully feels like a full fledged gaming experience.

The short term goal is to create a snapshot of the game, get a couple areas in with some cool seacrit warps to other areas and develop some cohesive bonuses that show there is an exciting progression loop and get enough items to show the overall potential of the emerging gameplay.

Whew, holy moly there is so much to do. And thinking about it doesn't do us any favors. Enough stressin' about all the work that needs doin', time to get to it.

Edit: Almost forgot, I wanted to touch on the subject of motivation and burnout. I find the most important thing we can do when we're "Burned out" is seek to find out why. Our brain likes to know the path to success, we like to know it's a certainty and that we're not just spinning wheels in mud.

So what I like to try and do, is if I don't want to work on a system be it spawning, or items, or abilities or whatever, I think about why. Is tuning things a drag? Is there some element we know is going to be a total pain or unknown? Start with that, and even better, come up with a plan to make that workflow better. If we can figure out our pipelines if we can better insulate ourselves from failure, burnout and spinning wheels in mud, then the path forward to success becomes more tangible and enjoyable.

Content we produce can often times become a real downer, if we make it with poor tools, or if we create settings for inherently flawed systems. That's time and energy that's going to need revising later, or even just removal. I feel this is at the core of getting better at gamedev. Learning to avoid the call to create product before we're ready.

It's been so many years gone as I tune up the core systems and get everything good enough to warrant actual content. And I'm actually really proud of that. We didn't jump the gun, we actually showed restraint and patience for once in our lives. After so many years of stewing in preproduction, doing it endlessly has become tiresome, but just a bit further pushing this boulder up the mountain to go...