For better or worse I just haven't had the same kind of energy to run my mouth in these parts. Usually i'm this ball of creative energy that can't decide whether to work on the game or to write a blog post about this or that dev problem, or how much the world blows.

There are many distractions in the world today. And sometimes it feels like the last thing that matters any more is trying to make a silly little project for people to enjoy. To top this all off, we are also simply burned out, this is hardly anything to be alarmed over, it happens.

All the same I finally got some OK sleep so I'm going to be forcing myself to be getting a touch of work done. The game is at an exciting crossroads, it's finally time to build up the world and make it fun to swim about. This is both exciting and terrifying as I have lamented so many times before. What if it's just not as fun as we wanted? What if we build up the world for the 10th time and we have to just scrap it again and we're just spinning our wheels in mud.

For 7 years we have spun our wheels in mud.

Ugh.

Ok, enough bitchin' and moaning.

World feels as though it's changing, which for us is a good thing, because we don't feed the machine. But at the same time, it's going to be sad and melancholy because a great many people are having to face the music and the sensation of doom and gloom will be palpable in this industry. It doesn't feel right that so many people had their lives uprooted and destroyed, and for many developers like us will be seen as the icon of hate. 

Do we feel a sense of joy that those who twisted the knife and demonized us for so many years, an so casually cancelled and demeaned? If I'm honest, yes, I do. But it's tinged by the good times too. Before any of this madness took hold, these relationships were all good, and none of us are solely guilty for the madness that has been allowed to fester in this world. We are all pawns to the tribes that develop in our day, and if you're not eating at the table you're out in the cold. It's hard to fully resent anyone knowing we're all just fallible people trying to get by in our own way. I wish more people had a bit more empathy seeing the humanity in others, and the darkness within themselves. We're all bound to this mortal coil in the same way.

Same old story we've said before. Whining about it isn't going to do any good. The only thing that can do good is to make the game better.

Sometimes I wonder if we're just waiting for the world to become sane, waiting for it to be morally acceptable for this project to be published and played. But then I remember, YOU SELF VICTIMIZING IDIOT, YOU DON'T HAVE A GAME YET! And I'm reminded that we're prone to the same flights of victimization and imagining the world is against us that plagues most everyone, or at least us weak and vulnerable nerdy types.

Ok, enough of this cringey crying, and I mean it this time!

So I've got the game set up in a way now that it should be easy to quickly build up the world, and I'm excited by the new seat of our pants workflow we have going on right now where we can just throw things at the world and they will be ready to go rather than building up small areas chunk by chunk. We'll have to optimize it later, but it will be very easy to do.

I'm trying to force myself to slow down because there are so many mechanics of play and level design we haven't explored and I'm accepting more and more that this isn't JUST a side scrolling beat 'em up, it's also part platformer, so we have EVEN MORE on our plate, but whatever, it means more ways for SeaCrit to be great. 

When your game shows you what it is, LISTEN! It's not that the combat isn't as good as I hoped, the combat is really starting to shine too! But the platforming elements with diving and jumping and wave swimming is really rewarding, and I just find myself wanting to see this fun world to navigate more than combat at the moment, even though there are so many combat systems and itemization ready to come online. It COULD just be that i'm burned out working on those systems. All that matters is we get stuff done.

But we are as spread thin as ever. Tuning movement systems, splashes, dives, knockbacks, bite forces, and now trying to simultaneously think of interesting gameplay forms and layouts stemming from a very small set of meshes that we arbitrarily downloaded for free from the Unity App store. 

I KNOW that this workflow is far from optimal, I KNOW that we could have such a better and more beautiful game if we had a bit more help and hands on deck to make compelling environment art and build up the world with said art.

But at the same time, as I always say...

IF YA WAN'T SOMETHING DONE RIGHT, YOU DO IT YOURSELF!

So for all the additional pain and uncertainty of having to build this massive project in our lonesome with zero support, zero safety net, zero audience, zero well wishes as a zero!.. It is kinda cool knowing that when this demo comes out we can proudly proclaim, "Yes, this pile of excrement came out of but one hole, the maw of this cave."

:P

We're fucking retarded XD

Ok, enough fuckiin' *ff on the internets, time to get a little exercise and then get to work! Perfection is the enemy of progress, as always!