I’ve said it in a few prior blogs, but sometimes we need to remind ourselves that life is what happens while we’re busy making plans.

Why knows what tomorrow will bring, success, failure, terrible success? We can fixate tomorrow so much that we don’t take the time to appreciate the now.

I do have a bit of stage fright, what if we open the project and everything just ends up being buggy, since we’ve been going so hard and fast of late there’s going to be bugs and we’re going to have to fix them rather than getting to all the work we were already stressing about.

At times it can feel endless. This project will never finish, we will never get to creating neat things, we will forever be stuck in this circular spin of arduous work as the wheels kick up that dreary mud.

Rofl, typing all this out was supposed to help me want to get to work but I feel as though I’m making a case not to!

How’s this… 

Time to get busy devin’, or get busy dyin’

Ok, feeling a little silly making this edit. It’s been less than 12 hours since I swore of more blog posts and that they were too draining. But Inspiration just struck and I feel as though I may have to totally revamp the core movement mechanics of the game. So I've decided I can make little stealth edits to this post, and it won't TECHNICALLY be breaking my promise to not make new blog posts XD

I look at the overly complex systems I have currently, and they’re not quite what I always wanted.

To me the holy grail was a more free form kind of movement, where if you oscilated your direction of movement, if you did it just right, it would feel as you you were a dolphin, oscillating forward at great speed. Like imagine you needed to get out of teh way of something really fast and rather than just pressing right, which is so boring, you had to actually artfully swoop round, and try to oscillate just right to get out of the way of something.

I’ve tried and failed to achieve this in the past, but after a little meditation, out of nowhere, it just hit me.

We’ve grown so much, we’ve learned so many better means of coding and designing and debugging and displaying various values on the screen, and as such, I’d kick myself if we didn’t at least give it one last go to try to get online.

I almost fear more than anything that this WILL be better, and I’ll have to finagle the other waveswim systems to incorporate these radical new changes, but it shouldn’t take more than 2 days for the absolute most vital system in the game to potentially be a revolutionary, intuitive new bit of awesomeness.

While I’m burned out and jaded, I’m not quite burned out and jaded enough and sleep deprived to stop myself from going for it!

So today, we forget that we’re sick and tired of dev, we let go of all the stupidity of the world, and we open our project and we get to making kick arse shit!

And if we fail, that’s fine, the existing systems are pretty kick ass already.

TO MURDER!

Stealth Blog Edit # 2:

I was starting to believe I’d never burn out again and I started getting cocky. “Screw it, let’s just casually revamp the most complex system in the game today.”

Revamping the movement systems has taken a lot out of me, and a lot of that forward momentum is gone. I don’t fully regret it, but I do miss the endless gas in the tank I was enjoying the other day. I’m really excited by the POTENTIAL of the system, but in its current state it’s a little worse than the prior system. Sets in too easily, is a little too fast out of the gate, aside from that it’s pretty good! And I still need to tool up the final waveswim mechanics a touch. And if I’m being honest, I need to do a cleanup/ rename pass on all the systems. 

Just thinking about it is making me want to never touch the project ever again! We’ve been going REALLY hard for… I don’t even know, let me check! We kicked ass for over a month! 12+ hour days all over the place.

I think what’s driving me mad, is this new notion that everything has to be perfect. Everything needs to be named correctly, everything needs to be situated in the perfect spot, and I’ve slowly drifted from my own advice.

The best way to dev is with reckless abandon! There are steep falloffs to the value of code cleanup! Once you reach a certain level of cleanliness and neatness, you start not wanting to touch the code, and touching the code is the only thing that makes it better!

Ok, sometimes writing otu these blogs actually help and they don’t just allow us to spiral further into our inane ramblings XD.

Feeling a touch better about getting back to work. And HOLY MOLY, it’s not just the dev time that’s been great, the results have been fantastic. I just got what I THINK might be a revolutionary visual settings system where the game saves your current FPS, then checks it against the new FPS with a given feature enabled. So if you enable shadows, you can see in realtime the frames cost, and I created a checks system that loads recommendations based on current frames/ frame cost of a feature. Let me dig up that code really fast.

 if (player.flipFlop) suggestionText.text = "Flippity floppity, get off my property";

else if (fps > 120) suggestionText.text = recommendTextFramesToSpace;

 else if (percentChangeFps > -5f || fps > 60) suggestionText.text = recommendTextLowImpact;

 else if (percentChangeFps > -20f || fps > 40) suggestionText.text = iffyText;

 else suggestionText.text = doNotReccomendedText;

It’s a really simple system and it really plays on the strength of us being able to set the settings right in the game. What I thought originally was just some janky solution because i couldn’t be assed to create a proper UI system as I’m already spread thin upkeep all these inputs, now I’m starting to see new avenues for really neat features because of the uniqueness of it all!

EDIT: HOLY MOLY. I jumped in Unity just to copy the above code but ended up falling down a rabbit hole revamping my entire loading system. It used to be I would set the object’s tags by hand background, large, huge, massive and this would modify the distance from teh camera to determine if the object unloaded or not, and i had many of these unload scripts called “chunks, and it required a ton of micromanagement and overhead to keep working and it was always such an annoyance wondering if i’d goof with all the hand set settings, not to mention how imperfect all the distance calculations were.

I FINALLY have a fully featured, automatic system that’s got all the features of before, checks based on player speed, takes into account the objects z position, but now it perfectly takes into account the object’s X and Y bounding box as well, and it sorts all assets into 2.5D Cartesian planes/ Quadrants.

The game isn’t very large yet, but it’s nice to know I have the system mostly done and it’s scalable AS HECK.

I’m so incredibly drained. Every day I have a day like this I think, ok, THAT IS THE LAST THING, there can’t possibly be another thing that needs revamping before we get in there, tune up the key settings and pop out a new demo.

But as if by magic something inevitably always does. I don’t even think this will impact performance that much, but maybe it will on some devices, I don’t friggin’ know…

This I do know. Whenever I see the assets unloading in real time now, I can breathe a sigh of relief knowing I don’t have to deal with annoying setups or taggings or parent setups. It just works, and it’s more performant and elegant than it’s ever been.