Maybe this isn't so mundane! Maybe we're living through crazed time in an outrageous circumstance!

Does it matter if we at least BELIEVE we are fighting the good fight?

Maybe the real treasure were the neckbeards we met along the way...

ROFL. I swear on my life I didn't plan this. I open my Todo because I remember I had this grand idea for a blog post and my note to myself was: "Most players don't know sh*t about d*ck when it comes to game design".

Fuck it imma just end the blog there. Maybe we'll expand on this deep topic tomorrow XD

Ok, so little bit more. Worked way too hard the past week and last night while trying to push through not feeling GREAT I could feel the breathlessness kinda return, best way i can describe it is I feel out of breath, and it's like I'm catching my body not breathing on its own. So i become hyper aware of my breathing and being a bit light headed but no matter how much i do nice breathing I just always feel out of breath and compelled to have to go lay down. And after work yesterday, I'm pretty damned sure it's a result of the, I don't want to call it stress, but the "excitement" of gamedev.

So I don't know how many people put on metal music for 16 hours straight and push themselves to work as fast as possible as long as possible with the most mentally draining exercise for many years on end, but that MIGHT be a unique circumstance that has caused all this.

This isn't really a bad thing, as it seems to be something I can control, and I also haven't been sleeping great so that could be a big part of it too. So yeah, I'm kinda relieved and more inclined to believe it's been allowing myself to work super long stretches that causes this, but it can also hang around for periods of time, so I hope it doesn't for weeks or months again. But who knows. Feeling better today, just going to take it easy. And from now on 4 hours tops per day is the rule I'm setting for myself for now, if I'm feeling fine, I may up it.

Here's the good news: Game is KICKING ASS. I had a great day of work yesterday even though it only lasted a few hours and I had no idea what I was doing. I revamped the pooling system for fish and it was surprisingly simple and easy and I'm really proud of how deconstructed we've made it. It integrates so easily and I plan on doing the same tomorrow for particles, which is a little more intense than fish, but I've got our base unload system working.

Oh and more great news! The pooling system ACTUALLY DOES ITS FUCKING JOB NOW. The prior system was creating assets and instantly disabling them, which didn't allow the asset to truly initialize its animations and load textures and sounds and such, so once enabled in the seen they would cause massive lag spikes.

So  for the first time ever I'm able to create these assets and they fully load and it's so nice that when I spawn a fish of 6 fishes REALLY fast, the game runs SMOOTH AS BUTTA!

This also marks the last system that was a remnant of the prior coders I worked with. Some large chunk of code I couldn't expand on, couldn't do various systems or improvements because I couldn't touch that bizzare logic of foriegn, higher code paradigms.

I'm actually really glad we don't do anything "fancy". We do what works, and I like to think we do that very well all things considered.

There are lots of tag systems, and excess code we could have thrown on these fish to denote how many we want to spawn , but I've chosen to just bake it right into the damned name. I'm really liking initializing stuff by just writing it in. So if I want the "Mexicali" fish to initialize with quite a few preloads, I just write (HANDFUL) right into the name. Or SINGULAR if I just want one.

Obviously you can't do this for everything, and most systems have code you can write this into. But even though this is a tad unsightly, it kinda shows that the asset has been tuned, and sometimes it's nice to have that. I do the same thing with environments, where if it has HUGE in the name, it denotes unload distance, same with MASSIVE.

If something is misspelled I have failsafes that let me know. And it still functions. The pooling system can also create assets that aren't designated to be preloaded fine, and it gives a nice warning that they need to be set up for pooling and preinstantiation.

Too often in this industry we get drunk on having tons of head count, and we just throw massive ammounts of tasks at all the coders, and we want everything to be shiny, and fancy looking so we can FEEL like we're making a great game because all our tools are polished. But all that does it empower whiney babied designers who can't roll with the punches. 

In trying to make things LESS complicated, under the hood we make things WAY MORE complicated. This has fucking decimated this industry. To top it off, the work force is becoming less competent while having rising standards for tool quality. It's an absolute clusterfook! But let's not go too far down that road. WE'VE SHOT OUR MOUTHS OFF ENOUGH OVER THE YEARS!

I've grown to really dislike tag systems and layers and shit. Too much back end fuckery with enums can happen or systems messing things up. 

What's in a name? MY BASE ORGANIZATIONAL LOGIC!

I'm really loving shoving key bits of logic directly into the asset name. It kinda creates a sort of discipline to keep things tidy and we live and breath functionality everywhere we can pack it. Sort of a Wax on Wax off dynamic. And nothing breaks, it works fine without the proper tagging, but it's less bloat and we have added functionality if we punch directives into the asset name. Have to be careful where we do this and why, this is for initialization purposes so it's performant enough!

SeaCrit is becoming more polished, more performant, more fun, and closer to being a real game all the time! And soon I won't have this crazy impulse to push forward. For so long I've been trying to get this forsaken project out the door before we bit the dust. But that won't be the case forever. We're getting REALLY close to all these systems being ready to go. And then it's just the more smooth development of generating content.

Oh last thing. Screw it I'm gonna have a GET OFF MY LAWN moment here. We baby the shit out of people in this industry with the tools we make. We have created this gulf, where if you're on this side of the office, you're not required to do ANYTHING technical WHATSOEVER. Every tool you use, every asset you tweak, is made dull and boring to the point no one can fuck anything up. And no one learns to evolve, no one learns that you can actually open the hood to shit, change things, and make them better! Or use them in a way that suits your task at hand, but might break stuff if you do that ONE thing, so don't do that one thing.

We've essentially turned gamedev into a daycare. Where the goal isn't to turn creatives into lean mean developers who can get dirty with the nuts and bolts of zero's and ones, where these battle hardened gamedev warriors can get into the mud and kitbash up some fun systems using the general practices of iteration and innovation they have picked up over many years toying with limitless power in a sandbox that has a few power tools in it.

It's kinda fucking sad.

People don't grow up any more, people aren't tested any more, people aren't held to standards, and the products suffer, our culture suffers, we suffer this mundane soft parade bullshit where everyone holds hands and sings Kumbaya, and if you DARE fucking tell that fat ass fuck he's not wearing any clothes atop the throne, well it's off with your head!

OK! We fulfilled what I believed to be our daily responsibility of SCREAMING AT CLOUDS ON THE INTERNETS! Gonna make some turkey soup, get a light work out in, and fart around on the internet. Health willing, back to getting particles pooling tomorrow and we'll be in a great spot!