Used to think we were crazy.

I mean we are crazy.

But I used to doubt our perceptions as all of us have to do at all times. Because we’re all predisposed to think we’re right, that everything we believe to be true, because those truths empower us, make us feel good, that we’re the good guys,  that the people we’re contending with are evil.

We are righteous.

I feel emboldened as hell right now. Not only have we been right about damn near everything, we have been right that others have been digging themselves a hole, virtue is their shovel,  and they have been working in shifts to dig their collective movement into the dirt.

But what has been lost? Our tech is dated and boring. The user base is petulant and formed of the lowest common denominator.

We got what we wanted. Everything is retarded, everything is controlled. You put that bowl of slop on the front page and it will be purchased.

No one questions anything, no one resists, no one competes. An endless golden shower.

Well it used to be that way. People are FINALLY waking up. People are FINALLY getting angry.

We weren’t crazy, we were just ahead of the curve.

You like to think that hard work and principle would get you ahead in life, you gotta believe that lie to stay sane, even if our every action is in compliance with the ruling throng of monkeys hooting and hollering and throwing shit at one another.

Oh well, for the past 8 years we’ve been pushing ourselves to the brink creating something awesome while they have regressing in a puddle of their own shit. What can ya do?

Despite the madness, it isn’t impossible to map out the truth, even amidst the smoke and mirror.

You just gotta be stubborn. I kinda think of it like UV mapping with 3d assets. You can “Lock” a 2d coordinate. The rest of the mesh will be a total mess as all the intricate data is extrapolated through whichever vantage point, and the garble of reality will be a splatter of vertices in your scene.

But once you begin to lock down little things to be true, the rest starts to unfold. You can’t expect others to tell you the truth, but you can find it in yourself. And if you are honest with yourself, you can begin to understand others better than they know themselves. You just gotta have the stones to look in the mirror without the petulant desire to ignore the blemishes.

The tides are shifting. I’m seeing a whole new crowd of grifters and back scratchers fighting over the table scraps now.

It doesn’t really bother me, they will fail too. Just another day in this mad world of craven madmen looking to play their politics and form their new tribes to secure their pounds of flesh.

They don’t know how to make the SeaCrit sauce. Only way to do that is to throw yourself to the machine, year after year after year after year, with no respite.

I’m excited for the future, not like I used to be. I don’t thirst for money and fancy things like I used to, it’s all so petty, and just an extension of that lowly back scratching machine.

I’m excited that I may help others to one day walk this same path, and hope it won’t have to be so painful and demeaning for them, so hopeless at times. But I say this with those dark days behind us, and I know that should this game ever find the light of day, which seems increasingly more likely as the energies shift and SeaCrit grows in strength day by day, all that sacrifice and all the years of decay will amplify the satisfaction of an earnest life’s work.

Suppose we should talk about what we gon’ work on!

We are really inching to that day when we make the game, but today I want to polish up drop mechanics. It should be FUN to have an item drop from an enemy, not a pain in the ass and feel weird as you try to move on top of it to equip a new item!

So I’m going to change the item logic, rather than allowing the player to equip items mid combat, but requiring them move really slow over top of the item, and having enemies often times attacking them while they’re even near the item, i’m going to totally disable item interaction for periods of time when the player attacks or when enemies are “agro’d” towards them. Then I will adjust the item drops to be much easier to trigger. Hoping this makes items more fun to gain and not diminish combat when they drop.

I had this great moment the other day that really picked up our spirits. I had pushed myself pretty hard for the day but wanted to check off a couple of our “daily” tasks, and one of those was to get a new NPC done with a new ability loadout. I had an existing ranged fish that had a shield, but they were still firing 2 projectiles in rapid succession as if they had two pistols. So i figured, eh, i’ll create a new ability load out, reduce it to just the one attack and call it a day.

But I decided to go a little further and I created a crappy windup shoot animation so the player has a visual indication of when the fish is going to attack, and I made it so this attack limits the fish’s heading for a bit, to give the player a little time to move out of the way of the attack. And HOT DAMN did that just make the game so much more fun!

I say this all the time, but too often we as AI designers get in this mindset of, How do I make this enemy kick the players ass. WRONG MOVE!

Ask yourself “How do I make it easier and more fun for the player to kick this enemy’s ass!?”

We do not make games to punish the player, we make games to REWARD and engage them!

And once I made these changes it was  so much more fun than I was expecting, and I found myself just wanting to stun that fucker swim behind them, and deliver some critical hits.

Suppose I can blather a bit more. I had this idea… since now you can deal item damage and cause enemies to drop their weapons and armor, I thought it’d be cool if I made those actual drop items, it would feel so much more ergonomic.

GOD DAMN IT, I have just convinced myself to do even more work, I ALWAYS FUCKING DO THIS.

So I just decided that we need to totally retool our item drop system. I’ve just decided that ALL drops will in fact be from items that enemies drop. If ever there was a time to do it, it’s right now.

Will likely take a day. But luckily I haven’t gotten tons of content made up just yet.

So long story short, instead of enemies dropping some random item sometimes, you will be able to see ALL item drops on fish, and they’ll be glowing and cool looking, and when you destroy that item, it will drop and you will be able to pick it up.

I just spent an entire damned day making my prior drop system that generates an asset on the fly when you kill a fish work, but looks like i’ll be refinagling all this to coincide with the visual items you see on the fish.

Bleh, JUST ANOTHER TRYING DAY OF GAMEDEV, fixin’ shit that isn’t broken, gutting solid work that was fine, just because we had a neat idea randomly.

It’ll be worth it, I’m excited by how organic item hunting will feel once this is implemented. Still frustrated by how much of a pain this is going to be getting it up and running. I’ve got logic that currently destroys those items and works in tandom with the pooling system, so i gotta navigate that, then I gotta create logic that puts these items at the right orientation once they drop and disable the prior logic for NPC armor and migrate to drop item functionality and assets.

BITCH, MOAN, BLAH BLAH BLAH

Gotta get to work on  this soonish. Still waking up from a nap.