I need to be more careful when speaking to morality regarding yesterday's blog. I know how under the skin it can be to be lectured by flippant assholes. Sometimes we have to question our motives, are we truly seeking to do good and uplift others or are we trying to shove others' noses in shit to suppress them and enrich ourselves? 

What I like about gamedev is that it's clear and predictable and there are absolute solutions. What makes real life so interesting is the grand game where all the world's a stage and even to ourselves the nature of reality is shrouded by dissonances. But enough about morality talk  for now.

I realize the blogs have been rapid fire the past couple days, but I really wanted to get this out of my head before I get to work. I have no idea how the next phase of SeaCrit is going to go for two key reasons. 

I’m in the uncharted territory of actually having all the powerful bonus tools, and fully fledged fish, and a working level creation pipeline, and for the first time ever, I’m actually feeling confident about pressing forward and itching to make fun stuff.

In terms of how to get the game out there, I’m entering this Unity contest, and they seem knee deep into finding alternative revenue streams where they can get around the store front dominated arenas of steam and app stores. And I don’t blame them, in fact I’ve long wondered what the hell Valve does with 30% of the gross revenue of this entire industry. But now i’m learning they have been working on an alternative OS system which could be remarkable if it’s free and they have good intentions behind it, and to be fair, they’ve always been incredible advocates of freedom of speech and free expression.

I’m really torn. All these years I sweat and bled while touting all my supposed principles. And now what is it, do we just ignore all that to finally catch a lifeline wherever it may expose itself? Do the ends justify the means to sell our soul for the potential to enact good at a later date? That’s how it always starts, that’s when the foot enters into the door and you find yourself in new circles with those newly adopted dissonances. 

I feel this may be our greatest hour, not tainted by success, not corrupted by the larger mad systems. Just a neckbeard in a cave busting their ass againts all odds, not knowing what the future holds how our creation fits into the chaos around. Just workin’ towards makin’ a fun little game, damn the torpedos.

Whenever I speak like this I wonder if I’m crazy. I’ve been wrong so many times before, I have thought SeaCrit was getting better and it was absolute trash in the past, and you look around and you see the dissonances that rise in this unique space. Sorry to drone on about this dissonance stuff, but it’s so key to understanding the world, and the truth of matters beyond our own and others’ biases.

The truth is we as gamedevs love our projects almost as we do our children. We birthed them, we nurtured them, and they are a reflection of the care we provide and we become overly proud of our own creations. And that’s a WONDERFUL thing!

But in the grand scheme of things when people start to embellish their own worth, and their own circles, and their own projects, that’s where the politics start to creep in, that’s where the back scratching and the collusions begin to find their tendrils into everything, and this grand human experience starts going down those usual trappings of self serving lies and nepotism. Do I blather about this shit too much? I know it’s difficult even for me to contemplate and I’m the one trying to hold others’ account able. No wonder now one reads this shit XD.

I don’t even remember where I was going with this, so let’s just ramble and leave a half formed mass of logic here so we can get on with work. I feel for Unity, and the Unity users and gamedevs in general. We’ve been kicked into the dirt, had our tongues cut out, had all our money stolen up by all these CEO’s and storefronts, the craft is undervalued and coders and designers are taken for granted, and all the while fairweather devs swoop in bright eyed and bushy tailed and muck the whole thing up. There are few industries that show the fallibility of the human condition quite like gamedev does.

But one thing that kinda irks me, is that Unity is going for this ad revenue based model, and it’s always been my dream to make SeaCrit this ultra fun time waster with absolutely nothing getting in the way of the fun. So the notion of the player being bombarded with ads kinda rubs me the wrong way. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for this game to be incredibly successful and make TONS of money. It’s not that I want to buy a yacht, or a fancy cars, or spend all my money on fancy shit for myself, it’s actually sickened me to see how materialistic this world has become. 

I’d like SeaCrit to become successful because this industry needs saving and it pains me to see that every single damned day everything just decays. There could be so much better general knowledge surrounding gamedev, tutorials, forward progress towards better design systems and better pipelines for EVERYTHING. Better tutorials, tutorials on how to make tutorials!

Instead we live in this culture of constantly throwing things away. I’m so sick of the nihilism, sick of this notion that we’ve all been sold that the only things that have value are that 10 minute chunk of garbage media with the  stupid quips and the shallow substance. Year on year it gets worse and worse and these coming generations don’t understand the concept of creating anything built to last. Of building the character required to subject ourselves through the long periods of growth and hard fought talents on which all the cool stuff in our lives is built on.

Just look at the music scene today, the movie scene, the Western gaming scene. We consume garbage in every conceivable way: what we feed our bodies, what we feed our minds, what we feed our souls.

But it’s this neverending treadmill, now that SeaCrit seems to be becoming good, which at one point seemed impossible I’m already thinking about the next challenge, how do we get humanity back on track? How do we compel people to stop pointing fingers before looking at their own dirty laundry?

I’ve no idea, and the whole of humanity seems totally out of control right now, fixated on all the most petty, superficial things outside of one another’s controls. And ANYONE who wants to point the finger across the aisle would be justified in their accusations because we’re all acting like abject fucktard assholes of late.

We need that alien invasion or something, some common goal we can all agree on, because apparently the difficult task of making games wasn’t enough.

I swear I had a point, but I totally lost it. Maybe it was just that since everything else is so out of sorts and out of our hands, it’s simply to fixate at the task at hand, the one thing we have any control over and get back to work in SeaCrit.