So over the past few days I’ve been creating my own little janky tools to help automate some of the project specific tasks I deal with in SeaCrit. And it’s really put into perspective just how nuanced and diverse the work practices that go into any kind of tech.

I have the luxury of creating my own tools, so I am intimately familiar with their limitations, when they can be used, when they will save values, and when not to use them as they would destroy everything in the project. People who create these tools do not have these luxuries and must assume that the user will be as ‘tarded as I am.

When I was growing up, tech was this magical entity, it was new, it was incredible, it was going to just get better and better and who knew what kind of wondrous technologically driven tomorrow we’d be living in. Flying cars? Floating castles in the sky? Would we colonize the deep oceans?

We kind of took it for granted that tech was going to get better.

When I was a kid tech was magic that lived in a cartridge, and now that I’m older, the only thing that’s changed is that now it’s magic we download from Steam.

To the average person, or the average investor, or the average CEO, nothing has really changed. Tech is what happens when you crame a bunch of neckbeards in a cage and crack a whip.

And that’s a REALLY bad thing. When no one knows how the motor works that’s driving the engine of society and it breaks down and no one knows how to fix it, well, we’re all kinda boned.

That’s where we’re at in the tech industry right now.

We all got really obsessed with the things we did understand the things we thought would make things better. But that’s not really congruent to good tech. Good tech doesn’t care if it’s made in a big shiny building with shined windows with big fancy framed pictures and receptionists and catered lunches or not.

The only thing good tech gives a solitary damn about, is can you neckbeard m*ther fucker? Do you know the ins and outs of the architecture under the hood, the bottlenecks, and if you want to subvert those bottlenecks do you have the staff on hand with the capacity and the drive to make that a reality? And can they push through the bugs and burnout  to bring that online amidst the finger points and the grab ass, and the office politic?

There are two realities gripping our world. There’s reality reality, and there is the cold reality of 0’s and 1’s. You cannot guilt a 0 into being a 1, you cannot shame it ito being, you can only force it through action, and if you want to build anything of value, you need to be damn sure that you want that 0 to be a 1 in the first place, lest you start spinning your wheels in the mud, and start burning through the most finite resource of all: PASSION.

And just to make it all that much more insane. Hard work and dedication can often lead to dead ends, it can lead to wasted time and money on a feature that doesn’t land, or maybe it was doomed from the start because rather than trying to build on a solid foundation, teams were ask to builds castles in a swamp. There are so many unseen and misunderstood hurdles in tech that it can drive you completely mad. And this is why content is a prison. The more stuff you’ve already made with imperfect tools, the more locked into those tools you become.

When you don’t have leadership that understands this, when you don’t have a culture that understands and appreciates the distorted reality of tech, that failure can look like success and success can look like failure for long stretches of time, you end up where we are today, where we are far down the path to ruin, with all the hard earned knowledge and skill sets left dead far behind us.

This notion that the engine of gamedev runs on sunshine, rainbows and happy thoughts has stranded us smack dab in the middle of a puddle of our own shit. And now we’re all flinging it at one another, and it’s kind of silly, because our job isn’t to fucking throw shit at one another, it’s to   turn 1’s into 0’s and 0’s into 1’s when it facilitates fun. Throwing shit at one another creates neitehr 0’s or 1’s, nor does it create fun.

So why on Earth are we doing it?

Well what else are we to do? Making games is REALLY hard, and it takes a REALLY long time, and even to begin to start to make a game takes a REALLY long time of practice and learning skills and workflows.

70 years ago, everyone in tech, they had a fundamental understanding of what tech is, they understood how fragile it is. Every single contributing member on a technical team back then didn’t just fall into that job because they had some kind of certificate that said they could achieve their roll, they didn’t fall into that position, they gravitated towards tech because of an innate lust for tinkering with things, for creating things, and over time learning the tenets of creative invention and iteration. Of finding hard limits and finding creative means of working around them, or brute forcing over them with radical revisions to the core.

We don’t make tech any more. We desecrate it. We twist it to suit ourselves, not with daft stroke cultivated over a lifetime of technical mastery, but with stiff armed negligence. With our sheer fucking hubris that we are in the right, and therefore the 0’s and 1’s must bend to our will.

Mjolnir does not budge to the wills of the unworthy.

So anyway, after hyping myself to get to work on some supposed grand session of development last  night and typing up a lengthy blather of nothingness, I was just super tired and popped 2 melatonins and slept for like 8 hours straight, WHICH WAS AWESOME.

Actually not tired out of my gourd today. And after thinking about it a bit, I’ve decided to ditch all our plans and go back to cleaning up the core of the game again, rofl.

I’m not happy with gobble right now. I don’t want to get a system to ALMOST good enough and not be really happy with it. So as much as I want to move on from these imperfect systems and get the demo out there, I’m going to bite the bullet and add a bit more polish. Specifically I think we can tone down all the text overlays a bit, add better sounds and a goofy size oscillation when you gobble a fish. Might also add a slight forward push when gobbling too to offset this feeling of slamming into a wall currently.

All those little tiny things add up. They’re the difference between an okish game and a good game.

The gods of gamedev don’t give a solitary damn how nice a person you are, they don’t give a damn your ambitions, your plans, your aspirations. 

The only thing those m*ther fuckers give a solitary shit about is how much blood have you bled to them.

Time to get to bleedin’...

I should just end the blog there, what a hard line to go out on! How the shit do I make this horribly dorked out endeavor sound so bitchen!? I'm about to go dearily type some arithmetic out of my keyboard but the way I talk about it you'd think I was off to some epic warfront in a hollywood movie. 

Anyway, after the tutorial we wrote up the other day on Lerps I'm just so damn conflicted. It felt good to write something safe, and helpful and that could exist in this soft parade world we now live in.

I enjoy both writing styles, I like to play that purely positive developer who's nothing but positive affirmation and I know that resonates more easily through the soft corporate landscape we live in. But no matter how "smart" I know it is to be the soft, edges sanded down version of IllTemperedTuna, a battle cry advances down the stem of of spin, "THIS IS THE SOFT CANDY ASS SHIT THAT LANDED THIS INDUSTRY HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! WE FIGHT FOR THAT INCH!"

So yeah, just wanted to note. I know we're retarded, I know our flowery language is making this harder for us, I know all the people who could help us get out of this cave are going to repel in absolute horror that anyone would dare just act like a free fucking human being with agency exercise free will.

I figured, we've come this far, and I've decided our mission is not hollow, these aren't empty platitudes to stir controversy. Fuck the world, this shit show goes on.