Nope, just losing our marbles XD. WHAT ELSE IS NEW!?

I’m a bit tired of appologiesing for and justifying my behavior, maybe at some point we just have to accept we’re an insufferable, easily agitated neckbeard :P

It is what it is!

So we may not make blog posts many people can enjoy because of our dispositions, but just maybe we can throw together a game that has some value because of them, and that’s what we’ve been doing as of late. So I suppose I should give an update on what’s going on with the game!

HUGE back end refactoring has been goig on. I keep thinking I’m done with tertiary things and it’s time to get to making the game good, and just as I jump in to do that some system reveals itself that needs refactoring and bringing up to quality. IT NEVER ENDS.

I keep forgetting about all the systems that exist in my own project! But I truly believe today is the day we’re FINALLY going to go in and get back on track improving core systems.

Oh I almost forgot! We have spent a TON of time improving performance. The game runs like greased lightning now and I’m excited to see what sort of low end devices are able to run SeaCrit should we ever get it out the door!

I’m in a bit of a frustrated state right now, and not just because I’m a whiney beyotch and the world at large is on fire as I alluded to yesterday. A lot of frustration is coming from this neverending grind of fixing things that I  could have sworn I already fixed. Any of you fellow gamedevs reading this will know what i’m talking about. You can’t put your finger on why, but for some reason we always end up fixing the same bugs that pop back up one way or another and it feels like we will never break free of the endless upkeep to simply push forward to get to work on those core systems that have been sitting in our mind for weeks on end.

But I do take some pride that it’s taking a while, because we are soldiering on and we are doing things the right way. We are  building something to last and we are taking the time to structure things in a way that we can iterate on them properly in due time. We are not attempting to build castles in sand as so many others have done in recent years, which has lead to the fragility of our world as a whole.

So today if health holds steady we’re going to get to work on polishing up the movement mechanics. I can’t remember if I blathered about it in the blog, but we’ve completely gutted how waveswim works and revamped it and just last night I totally broke it so I gotta fix it again. It was feeling PRETTY good, but I need it to feel perfect, so today that’s what we’re doing.

It was 90% there, but turning just a tad too much out of the gate was making the player build up speed too much so I need a better solution rather than directly linking rotation rate to increased swim speed. And I coulda finagled the existing logic, but it was overcomplicated and I decided to just blow some of it away and figure it out in the morning. I think this is the first time i’ve ever done this, where I just horribly break a system and leave it for the morning. I’m not sure I like it, but at least I don’t feel totally burned out.

I’m looking forward to cleaning up the system and getting it working as it needs to. One frustrating element of setting up these systems, is the MOMENT you get it organized and clean and easy to work with, that’s the moment that all the variables are mostly working and it takes just a few moments to get it working and you never have to touch it again. 

That’s the joy of gamedev, experiencing things in their absolutely worst state and the moment you’re able to make them not an absolute nightmare to work with, you’re off to some other excruciating problem. It’s a neverending exercise in self punishment. And I think maybe that’s why all of us in gamedev are collectively going insane, because this endeavor is so trying and painful on its own, it’s really been compounded by the madness of the day. 

Yes, let’s go with that! It’s not my fault i’m an insufferable neckbeard, it’s the world’s fault!

So plan for today: Clean up movement and FINALLY get it in a really nice place. Once we get the core movement and waveswim mechanics feeling good, we’ll get the secondary elements of breaching the water and exiting at an acceptable speed to feel good and there was also splashing through the water on your belly keeping too much of your vertical velocity downward as well, gotta add a velocity penalty based on your velocity vector vs facing vector.

I mean this is just the stuff off the top of my head, it’s neverending. But I think today and maybe tomorrow if it takes that long SHOULD get us over the hump. And then we can get to balancing attack forces and start getting more of these items/ bonuses in.

WHEW… did I ever mention gamedev was hard?

We really are in groundhogs day right now. I sh*t you not I have felt as though we were 2 days away from this being good to go for the past 2 months, and we really have been hitting this hard of late.

Oh! And just yesterday I did some web builds that I promised myself I would do more regularly but didn’t and ran into many, many issues but we got them sorted, and the game is ready to be deployed whenever we get this stuff online! Feelin’ pretty good about that!

There are some performance spikes when the player encounters certain things for the first time and the system loads meshes and textures (I believe that’s causing the slowdown) but I HOPE we can fix that by adding them to the start area and deleting them before the fade in ends, adding this to the todo list now before I forget!

It’s easy to get in our own heads thinking about how the world could be so much better if only whatever. That our lives would be so much easier if only people were less tribal and if there wasn’t so much dissonance.

How much of our life are we going to squander sitting around getting butt hurt and wishing for reality to magically change for our convenience?

Is life fair? NOPE!

Would it be easier with we were a back scr@tching retard? YEP! (we’re just retarded)

But things could be worse. We’ve got our project, though it’s been depleting, we’ve got a little gas left in the tank, and we’ve still got something to fight for. And that’s far from a worst case scenario!

So enough groveling for now, we’ve that Unity contest coming up in a few weeks, timing should be just about perfect to get all these mechanics up and running for an initial demo.

Deep breaths