When you’re working alone on a game, mental factors are compounded greatly. I don’t know what it is, but when I need to tune some pain in the ass technical issue, i’m able to get right to it, hunker down and slam out 14 hours of work like no ones business kickin’ ass.

Now we’re on the threshold of  our dream, The spawners are online, fish are entering the breech, the oceans are wet with anticipation of the coming battles. Fish shops are open, sound systems are optimized, pooling systems are rebuilt from the ground up, effects are flashing and swirling. I could spend hours just speaking to all the mechanisms and systems that are ready to go.

God damn do I have stage fright right now.

What if we fall on our face? What if we build ourselves up AGAIN to FINALLY bite the bullet and some massive issue pops up and we spend the rest of our day fixing this mundane shit, what if this endless slog never, ever ends? 

For so long this project has been a shackle around our leg and it’s hard to imagine it will be anything but. 

Well, what will be, will be. If we don’t put our head down and get to it yet again we’ll never break on through to the other side of the slog.

This has not been easy, there has been no light at the end of this tunnel, we’ve had no extra hands on deck to help us shoulder the burden. But that’s just how it had to be, and though we cursed the rocky path, our heels are calloused and our shoulders are strong.

I really don’t want to get to work right now, I know some bug, some huge design rabbit hole will open up and we will fall to endless slog again. But maybe today will be different, maybe today we DO finally make tangible progress on the zone looks. And maybe the day after that we finally make true progress on the playable combat spawn areas. And then we add a few bonuses and we have ourselves a true demo finally!

Yeah like that’ll ever happen!

It’s a delicate balance, building yourself up to think there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but knowing that the road will always be longer and harder than you ever imagined.

I think the best course of action isn’t to focus on the end goal.

We get to fight today, we get to open Unity and do battle against this crazed world. We get to put on some Manowar, put our head down, and get to doin’ what we’re finally starting to be pretty decent at, and all that hard work and sacrifice is beginning to snowball.

This is a pretty special time in this project where all the tears and elbow grease will mix and maybe we’ll finally see something finally grow from this hardened mud.

Post work edit: Going to vent a little here about our mediocre day, because sometimes chatting here helps me feel out best courses of action for some reason.

So work went OKish. We got a really nice desert look that i'm happy with. I'm really happy with our new zone look setups and it's fun and easy to iterate new areas. But as always, I get way too caught up in the weeds when creating new areas, there are so many little things that can go wrong, and it's important the level not just LOOK nice, it has to play nice. So even though we're focusing 100% on the looks, we are absolutely pausing and checking playability too and making the bulk of adjustments just to be sure that's all working.

I've kinda decided that we're going to aim for 3 good looks for this initial demo. We now have 2, we have the shimmering shallows, and we have the Desert biom. Next one we'll be doing up will be a lush fiolage zone. Can you tell I haven't spent ANY  time whatsoever coming up with story and world building for these zoes!?

That reminds me, I want to try to weave at least a loose story into these areas, just tease the overarching madness, and inject some flavor and memorable characters. We have all this creative writing energy, we might as well focus a bit of it into the game! So starting tomorrow I will be giving ourselves a new daily goal of creating a new NPC and some fun dialogue.

Honestly, now that I think about it a bit more, I think our pace is fine. I WANT to think that artsy fartsy things like building up zones and environments can be done in a day, but that's not the case! So I'm glad we're taking the time to make these areas pretty and playable, and to do that right takes a lot of iteration, and the more we wax on and wax off, the faster we get, the better our workflows get and the faster and better our future zones will be.

So tomorrow more tweeking and tuning the systems and more zone looks. Was hoping to get this done in a day, but 2 days ain't that bad.

I’m so melodramatic. GET TO WORK ALREADY YOU FUCKING DONUT!