Hoping for a mundane blog right now. Feeling pretty numb about things, which is actually a good thing I guess, better than frustration or anger. I mean… we are frustrated.

I just opened the project and IMMEDIATLY everything is breaking that I thought we got in a good spot yesterday. It truly never ends. The reward for hard work is endless bugs and retooling. And then we go online and whine about it. No wonder we tend to keep gamedev relegated to caves and only talk about the fun crap.

I almost indulged some heavy blogs, can’t even remember what they were. Increasingly it just feels like, what’s the point? Why try to talk about anything of any depth of substance? This is a world at war with such things, so you’re basically just coming out and putting a giant target on your back.

LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR ALWAYS

That does remind me though… I do hope that SeaCrit can be a bit of a bridge. Easy to pick up impossible to master. And with the POE 2 controversy of late it raises a lot of notions about what is ethical difficulty and challenge in a video game? What is the dynamic between fun and challenge?

For me it’s always seemed simple, the game should be moderately difficult, but have great scaling, often in the forms of allowing for artful navigation and next level skill ceilings. Mario 64 is speed ran and played to this day for a reason! It’s just so satisfying to master, it’s so satisfying to be terrible at like me!

I kinda resent the idea that games have to be ultra punishing, and that in order for the best players to feel any satisfaction, others have to lose and fail over and over again. IMO games should not be gated based on ability, they are fun that should be shared! 

That’s what gamedev is for! This is an impossible endeavor that day after day surprises us with hellish challenges, and we don’t gatekeep because we want to horde all the toys! We gatekeep because we’re trying TO FUCKING SURVIVE THIS HELLRIDE, because we know the meatgrinder this is and we need to protect others from this senseless pain!

I don’t know why I’m bringing this up here, I think it has to do with the nature of difficulty and the dichotomy of difficulty between casual games and the ultra hardcore. But I’m kind of a practical joker at heart and one of my great dreams in life was to one day release a Mature rated Barbie game (NOT LIKE THAT YOU F*CKING GOONERS) and it would be extremely limited release and manufactured in terribly small quantities and it would have an 80 dollar price tag, and it would be years before anyone bought the forsaken thing. I’m not realizing this is so similar to the shit ass petfuckers bit by luis ck, but I swear i’ve wanted to do this for as long as I can remember.

So anyway, it would be one of those shit games that has lots of mini games like being able to buy pets and customize your house and wardrobe, but there would be like an arcade off to the corner with even worse mini games, but there would be like one random one in the corner called something like “Hell Murder Death Cult” and you’d put your token in and it would take like 15 minutes to boot up on their shit computers and then the most epic, ultraviolent, but fucking video game of all time would load up on your computer and out of nowhere everyone would be like, DUDE DID YOU BUY BARBIE MY PRETTY PONEY: CANDY CRUSH EDITION! THAT SHIT IS FUCKING DOPE!

Oh well, anything but getting to work o nthe game right now I guess but at least we got a bit of a blather out of it XD.

Ugh, I gotta fix these new clouds I put in. I gotta fix these HORRIBLE movement edge cases that I was positive I had fixed yesterday.

Every time these issues inevitably pop up I think to myself, “We should spend a day or two just cleaning up the project and renaming things, and think of new logical paradigms and structures and try to come up with new methods (literally like new functions that handle this logic better and more succinctly without so much mental strain to understand the logic) And I just go down all these rabbit holes and it’s like the last thing we end up wanting to do is open the project and do spring cleaning when we’re already at our wits end.

Gamedev is a real mother fucker.

Let’s count our blessings. The game is getting better, it’s performant, it’s ALMOST fun if we can just iron out all this bullshit, and there are lot sof neat things to get online if we can just get over this little hump. And we’ve got a purpose in a world gone mad, and I think that’s about all you can hope for these days. So all in all could be worse. Health has kinda been up and down the past week, but nowhere need as bad as it was a year ago, so I’m grateful for that too.

Anywho, enough rambles, enough whining as always, time to suck it up and get all these broken systems up to quality. JUST TWO MORE WEEKS! We only have to bust our ass two more weeks. HAhahahahahahahaahahahaha I swear I’m not going fucking crazy.