The past few blogs have been really shitty, and I don't mean in a clever sort of way.

Some days I hope on Twitter to pass a little time before I can muster of the wherewithall to take to Unity to get to it again. And I get all hopped up on rage bait, then I put on "STRENGTH OF THE WORLD" and I just go FUCKING HAM. And in the moment I feel empowered, for a brief instance I feel as if I'm in some level of control of all of this and not just fading away.

And it works, we've gotten lots done.

But I don't think it's worth it, there is aboslutely no reason to vent our bullshit here. I don't know wtf is wrong with me honestly, well I do, but I can't expect others to understand.

Things weren't always this bad. I wasn't always a fucktard, I wouldn't always just go casually online and post a thousand blogs that would all get me outcast from the industry in even the most sane of times.

I've wined about it enough, but if society beats you down for long enough, if you're outcast long enough, you can kinda turn into that shitty person they decry you as. It's a downward spiral, and it would be wise to stop engaging.

It's REALLY easy to find a huckleberry any more. Really easy to find some story, some jackass online, someone that fits the mold of the person you know you need to scream at and destroy to save the world from that eveil faction on the other side, that evil faction that if it hasn't already ruined your life, is going to.

This situation is SUCH a bag of balls.

I hate that I'm validating all the haters, I hate that I have stooped to the level they have accused other of being. I have after all these years actually become unhinged and ran my mouth.

And honestly, this wouldn't be that big a deal 10 years ago, people used to say worse shit to random strangers in a Call of Duty lobby on any given Sunday. But the rules have chaged, the rules of engagedment are different, and we have really fumbled of late.

I don't know WTF I'm doing. The person I hurt the most with these blogs is myself, and the people who are depending on me beyond that. I need to make a mental note to remind myself that these silly internet rambles are undoing all the monsterous ammounts of work we are doing.

I really went hard the other day, and that's not really fair on my end. I have no idea what's going on anywhere in this world, there are so many reasons this person or that person can't get anything done, why things stagnate, and I need to stop assuming, And I need to stop depending on others because we have all the tools for success right in front of us.

Speaking of which I had a crazy day that I didn't think I had in me refactoring shaders like a MF'r. I won't get into all the tricks because I could write a novel, but we did some Shader sorcery today across a range of shader types, and I now look back on all the times I said, "THIS GAME CAN RUN ON A PATATO" and realize how friggin' dumb I am. 

It's really easy to do stupid things in tech, we all gotta take a step back and remind ourselves sometimes that sometimes shit just breaks, or sometmes shit just sucks, and it's no one's fault, well none of the developers anyway, we just don't know.

I'm too burned out to go the last inch and press build. I'm kinda afraid that the build won't be more performant. There was so much more I wanted to say, but it's all escaping me right now.

Eh, I shouldn't be making excuses anyway. I gotta own that shit. Yes, I can be a bit of an asshole sometimes. It's the only reason I've been able to push this game this far. And for all I know, it's totally incriminating, and not only am I a total prick, but I'm also a retarded goof just messin' around with retarded aquatic creatures all night long for years on end.

I don't know what the fuck is wrong with us, or how we ended up here. It all seems so bizzare, and after all these years, the strangest thing is how much we seek to destroy ourselves. All we have to do is shut the fuck up, well all we HAD to do was that. The damage is done at this point, best thing we can do is try to act relatively sane moving forward.

It's funny, the most unhinged people online are the most  meek, the most docile, the go online so they can scream at other low key people and just get that rage out that they have pent up, having not much to release it on.

I shouldn't make excuses, but this past 10 years have been really rough, for reasons I don't even go to in these blogs, ON TOP of all this endless, pointless gamedev bullshit.

Ok, enough feelin' sorry for ourselves.

Frankly, I don't know what the path to success is. If I really think about it, I think the best path would be to go even harder, now that the tides are changing, to reach out to the hate baiters that are on the rise, the rising tide of the audience that are sick and tired of the state of things, too feed off that discontent, to feed off the culture war.

For what it's worth, I've never really tried to sell this project on hate, and I don't have any inclination to. I've always just wanted to be able to compete on an even playing field and make a good game.

GOOD GOD CAN WE STOP GROVELING FOR 2 SECONDS!

ENOUGH WEAKNESS BAH!

Ok, dev has been going quite friggin' good. The game like LEGIT runs on phones, not KINDA SORTA, like i have a pretty run of the mill phone and I'm getting roughly 45 FPS, and that was a couple days ago, so if we're able to eek out just a bit more, this game is going to be GOOD TO GO in terms of perfomrance, and then we're done. We don't have to sweat that stuff again.

I did MASSIVE shader refactors today, and that invalidated a lot of matreial work, like days worth, but it's fine. Performance > pretty graphics. We can feel that out over time. Important thing is, WAY less complex shaders in so many ways. I sorta just on a whim decided to do massive revisions to complex blend systems on top of msc other stuffs, and swapping over to a custom lighting system. Considering how much of our look is from custom fesnel blends and the fact our game only has 1 light 99% of the time is just made sense. Hoping it pays off, might just be a stupid move that wastes our time.

I don't know the real nuts and bolts, like if a tiny fish with a really complex shader is going to hog tons of resources, or if it's screen% multplied by shader complexity, I COULD ask grok I suppose, but somteimes I just really like learning the hard way. I think it keeps us sharp, or maybe I just know if I hop on TWATTER I'm giong to take the bait and write another self incriminating blog.

Alright, I'm going to go test this sucker out. And while it's biulding, I'll think of a song to link at the top, and once it's done I will report back with an edit wether it's faster, slower, or if all the work done today was a total waste of time.

Edit:

The more optimized we can make it, the less hot your phone will get when you play, and the longer the battery life, so framerate isn't the be all end all, there's always more to strive for.

What a crazy month it's been. Was hoping we could get to maybe 50 FPS on phones, and wasn't sure we'd ever get the button input bug gone, but we solved all that and then some. One thing I'm really excited about, is in setting up these shaders to be more performant, we went ahead and tried little bits of polish and adjustments here and htere, and now SeaCrit is looking really unique! It doesn't quite look like a "run of the mill Unity game" any more, the crisp textures and high framerates are feeling really good. The custom lighting we used in Amplify shader also kicked things up a notch too. We've got lots to tweak and tune in the future!

We fixed the heading bug, I had accidntly disabled heading countdown when charging attacks which messed up everything, it happens, but it's fixed now.

New bug popped up. Now that we're getting high frame rates on phone, we're getting an update issue where SeaCrit thinks you're letting go of the button and causing you to swap prematurely and you're not able to swap your form right now!

It's a good problem to have, it means we're getting higher frame rates and new issues are arrising because of it. Normally I wouldn't bother talking about bugs, there are 50,000 others, and we have endless gameplay to get online. 

Whew, never in a hundred years did I think today we would end today or the past sevral days on a high note.

I am so fucking proud of this project right now. Wasn't even thinking about getting shader revamps done, wasn't thinking about performance improvements, wasn't thinking of having a near nervous breakdown, BUT HERE WE ARE!

What a unique project to be a part of, if painful at times. I really do think we're working on something pretty special at this point.

Not just the game, but this chaotic journey, and exposing the misery of dev to the world, and shouldering more of the burden than anyone in their right mind ever would, while blathering in the darkness.

Ok, we might be getting a bit too manic even for my tastes.  One day all things hopeless, the next feels like we might not be out of the game after all. We've still got gas in the tank m*ther fuckers.