So fish are coming online, the item drop system is online, items with their bonuses are working, the shop that sells items and bonuses is more or less up and running.

Full steam ahead right!?

There is so much to stress about. The bar is SO HIGH, and we are but one person. We have spent so many years on this, that the thought of failure is gut wrenching, but we have to fail in order to figure out the level layouts that work best and the spawn timers that work, and do we make the ocean small and grindy? Where the player fights in a smaller region but saves up money and acquires  bonuses to grow in power before advancing? If so how do we communicate these mechanics?

Every decision tends to lead to more and more work that needs doing. More conveyance, more content, more mechanics to direct the player. And I just do not have that damned gas in the tank right now.

We're in this very painful position of this gaming being on the precipice of almost being ready to come online, just needs a bit of elbow grease and experimentation and level layouts. But also being many weeks deep into pushing ourselves solo to get all this coming online.

Who finds the bugs? We do. Who fixes them? We do? Who comes up with the plan? We do. Who fixes material and shader problems? We do. Who shoots their mouth off online and distracts us from the key dilemma of making a game that isn't terrible? We do.

Who gazes out into this feckless void of game development and sees this insurmountable wall of judgement and monopolies, and throngs of in crowds to which we don't belong as we sit here and neckbeard out in this lonesome cave?

Yeah, that's us!

I always start this blogs with the intent of being professional and soft around the edges but eh, whatever. Not like anyone reads this crap anyway!

I was really hoping we would have a more clinical list of issues and an extrapolation of how we were going to implement them and the bottlenecks to motivation and that by this point in the blog we'd be unlocking some of that elbow grease, but I just feel as hopeless as ever right now.

The thing is, for the past year I haven't gotten burned out, because so often our health would take a nosedive and then we would be forced to take a break and lie around for some time before we could get back to work, and I was often really itching to get some work done. Health has actually been better the past couple months so i've been able to force myself to work more. So this is actually a blessing in disguise! I'm more confident than ever we might not die before the demo gets finished up! Woohoo! Although sometimes I wonder if we're just a blight on this world anymore :P

That's one thing we could certainly try to do more of, is remove ourselves from all this insanity at least till we finish up the demo! The whole world has gone mad! Vindicated or not, right or wrong, it doesn't change the fact we need to finish our damned game before we can lay any claim to the notion that anyone should give this darned thing a try.

I wanted to go over the nature of passion and motivation to work on projects such as this. There are 2 main elements that can get you to get to work, and the best case scenario is when you combine the two.

1. You must see the goal ahead of you as achievable. There is no worse feeling in gamedev than say busting your ass through burnout on some section of content that you know is janky, that you know is going to have to be fundamentally remade in the future and that everything you are making now is just dust i the wind. It will not build foundations for future content, it will not be played by anyone, it's imperfect rubbish that you are attempting to slam out simply to move forward temporarily.

2. You have to be excited that what you're working on might be awesome in some way. A new spawn system that's going to deliver enemies to fight in an awesome manner. A better combo system that will make all combat in the game more fun. Improved items and graphics, and shadows and all those shiny bells and whistles that make a game awesome! If you're working on these things and have a clear path to making the game awesomer, work is going to be a dream!

3. Bonus: Here's a bonus third option. Work on shit you know is going to suck but will facilitate #1 and #2. Improve tools, improve pipelines, rename things, make stuff better organized and streamline the annoying workflow that's slowing you down.

But in this moment, we are so spread thin, we have so much to bring online, and we are so tired of working on this project and forcing ourselves to make the most mundain and monotonous progress on so many fronts with no support always having to dig deep to push forward a single inch. I really think we might just need a break. Maybe a day, maybe a week, I don't know. I DO know that stressing about it only extends the period of the break that you need.

Bleh, ok, I'm going to devote at least a bit of time coming up with a strategy utilizing the above concepts so that in the near future we can get to work, be excited for progress and have a sensible and achievable goal.

Ok as I type this, what's really holding me back just popped into my mind. What if this game sucks? What if we put the fish in, we put the babysharks, the hefty sharks, the noseyfish and the player kills a few of them, and then they ask, "Is that it?" You worked on this for 7 fucking years? And I don't know what the answer to this is.

I have a lot of systems that I think will build on each other, items, bonuses, scaling difficulty, an expanding ocean, shops, and lots of ideas for the future. But in the here and now I feel like i'm captain Ahab trying to chase down this monstrous white whale. This indie ordeal is a real meat grinder. You work so hard, with no safety net, and the world largely doesn't even know you exist, and those who share this experience are largely just fighting with you over the spotlight in this community that is increasingly toxic and railroaded to specific consumer repositories.

Gamedev ain't what it used to be... not that it was ever all that great.

We're probably just burned out and when you're spent like this, and you're feeling worthless it can be a bit of a downer. When I've got the energy flowing through my veins and we're bouncing off the pillow to get to work everything is right in the world. But now we're hopping on Twitter or various message boards and engaging with other fucking people, and good god we are just fucking awful and petulant and tribal and all fucking worked up with knives at each others throats and GAH.

There is never release, there is no vacation to Tahiti to sip on mimosas and catch some waves. We've invested everything into this, for better or worse and the world at large has gone absolutely bat shit fucking crazy. It's enough to drive you mad, gut punch the wind out of you at times.

Let's take a moment to count our blessings. I think the game is going very well, and it's entirely possible when we start stitching this together we'll really like the game! There's a lot of great stuff here to show to the world, we just gotta take a deep breath, and prepare to come in strong, and stop allowing ourselves to be worked up and burned out by a mad, mad world. We have no control of our shared madness, but we can focus here. We've got the ball in our corner here. And that's all we've ever wanted. Still in the fight.

P.S. This was not the post I was expecting to make today. I am very burned out and wanted nothing to do with the project but felt a bit of a second wind and figured we could do a little bit of something useful and maybe deep dive the current dynamics of where the project stands and maybe untangle some of those mental blockages so development can commence later today/ in the near future.

I have a horrible, neckbeard rant that I have cooking up that I'm not sure if I'm going to publish or not. It's pretty inflammatory, and will likely do more harm to us than good, but I have no mouth and I must scream.

Edit: Just had an epiphany. We will be creating unique areas for unique mechanis. Like a section of ocean that revolves around sniper rifles. Enemies that are good to fight with sniper rifles. Unique sniper rifles you can buy. NPC's that will explain how the mechanics of sniper rifles work. This will help break  the game up in small bite sized chunks and get me to have bite size chunks to finish up without feeling there's one perfect pipeline of level design we have to figure out!

So tomorrow I think we'll start with that Sniper rife area. And each little area will be a little puzzle "How do we make content that's fun for this mechanic of the game?

And once we have a decent number of areas describing the mechanics, we can make a few little areas that are 100% focused on just solid enemy engagements or exploration and then we'll be done!

This is doable, lots of cool stuff to bring online. Just gotta recharge a bit.