Nothing left to say that we haven't blathered incessantly, 5,000 times ad nausium while coming off as a pyschopathic doucher. 

That's not us. 

Have we been enraged? Unhinged? Unreasonable in our padded room? Yeah, but only because we give a damn, only because we really fucking care about gamedev and the past several years have been really fucking  rough.

I hope at the very least it's been an interesting read, if at times terrifying and awkward.

It's beyond time to shift gears. It's time to be part of the solution, not the problem. 

AND I MEAN IT THIS TIME!!

So, IllTemperedTuna, you IDIOT, what are you going todo  with all your free time now that you're supposedly not acting like an abject fucktard on the internets?

Stealth Edit #1: Mundane blog! We are safe, sanded, and DO NOT SAY ANYTHING OFFENSIVE ANY MORE. I gotta stop saying shit like that because it makes me want to break my own rules. So anyway, I'm finding it really hard to bring myself back to working on the game. I know every area will likely require polish, and we are so damned burned out you have no idea. But we've come so far and we gotta keep going so it's whatever.

I wanted to at least get some semblance of a plan so we have SOME level of structure. Just working randomly on stuff has served us really well up to this point, but that's fine when you're building foundations and just need to make things functional. What we're trying to do now is orchestrate all those systems so that we can add everything to the game to be the most fun. But what does that look like? 

Should we focus on making a tiny little demo fun? Or should we be working towards a big sprawling world? Should we just add one little thing at a time? Or do we focus on lots of things and a cohesive experience?

I don't know. But this I DO know. The WORST course of action is to do nothing, which is what we've done the past couple days and I'm kinda over it. But damn it's hard to bring ourselves back to work. I think what's getting to me the most is the isolation, the lack of any semblance of support.

How many more damned days do we just bust our ass alone in this cave without the smallest ounce of support or reward? Like is the game really still that fucking bad? I think it's starting to be pretty damned good! But the silence is deafening.

Oh well, no point harping on that shit only destroys what little fumes we have left in the tank we have at this moment.

So today I think what we'll do is just try to get shields in the game. Get a couple variations, work on the heading values a touch, and we'll get a few enemies in the game that drop those shields.

Super low bar, I promised myself if I wasn't feeling it, we wouldn't force ourselves to work more than half an hour. So really low bar for today.

Hopefully the mojo comes back soon. I'm burned out as fuck.

Stealth Update #2: I'm not sure if we have too much to say, I just really wanted to link this song because ti's such a fucking banger XD

Yesterday went WAY better than expected, and largely becauase we abandond all our plans and ended up polishing pu the core again. Did LOTS of revamps to how attack forces work, for the first time ever i'm really happy with how  mashing combos against fishes feel, and if you're using a keyboard, touch, or joystick there's a mechanic that will cause you to auto face a fish if you're not inputing directional input.

Was a nice reminder that the game is quite fun and all we have to do is kinda shove things into the game and keep building up the founadtions. I realize now it's not content taht's lakcing... that's easy. We just gotta keep building up the core till we can throw it at the wall and it sticks.

Slept like shit, might get a bit of work done, might not. What's it matter anyhow? Kinda just waiting for this idiot world to pull its head out of its ass.

Important thing is our mojo is back and we're looking forward to getting to work soon.

Stealth Update #3:

Very brief blog today. I'm kinda getting used to this calm! Still feeling a bit burned out, and that's fine, we're burned out because WE WORKED OUR ASS OFF, so it's like, eh, another day to recharge is fine, we earned this. BUT! I did do some thinking and I think we have a solid plan moving forward. 

Short term I just want to make 1 item for every item type to drop from enemies, and the corresponding enemy that will drop said item. And I had a really big realization about making item varients!

So all weapons/shields have a unique loadout for multiple things: there is a unique combo attack, there is a unique finisher move that grows in power based on the combo hits, there is a charge attack, and there is an alt charge attack, and they generally follow a motif. Like A shield and a sword will GERNALLY do lower damage and rely more on stuns and damage mitigation. Duel wielding sowrds will have various means of dealing damage with no lifetap or defensive mechanics at all, in fact, many of the attacks will leave you more vulnerable to damage for enhanced damage output.

But I had this idea... different weapon types could have 1 unique element that switches this up. Like spiked shields will return damage when you're hit, but instead of having a health boosting shield bash as a charge attack, it might be a bit more offensive, like some sort of attack that sacrifices a bit of life to deal damage over time. And this will create a lot of REALLY cool variance that is understandable by the visual appeal of the item.

One of the things that confuses players is games, it's it's sorta random which items you identify and they'll have this mod or that mod that makes them tanky or offensive, or enhances this skill or that playstyle. Visuals are kinda random and the play that stems from them is random as well.

And it's not that SeaCrit won't have random mods, but I'm hoping to have a more streamlined and distilled sort of play where it's a  TOUCH less random in the item department, and MORE randomness is found in spawns and potent item shop buys.

Same concepts will apply to armor and rings. Items will have certain bonuses and properties that define them, like heavy armor causing you to move slowly, but giving big buffs to damage mitigation for example.

Just theory craftin'!

It's not so much that we came to an idea of this bite sized set of work for when we get back to it, but I feel as though we have discovered our workflow for moving forward AND THAT'S HUGE! It's going to revolve around doing cool shit!

We were coming at this from entirely the wrong angle before, "Ok we're going to make this giant list of items, we're going to make all these monsters and we're going to feel out pipleines... YUCK!" That felt like such a chore, and it did not inspire us to want to get to work.

Now i'm excited, "Oh shit, we're finally getting those shields in, and we'll makea  few neat variations and we'll get to get them on fish and then we get to find the most fun way of getting those fish in the game, like should they be hidden in seacrit areas? Should they spawn rarely in common areas? How many branching directions should the player be able to move into? How big is this game going to be? It's actually exciting to think about. Fingers crossed we don't hit any huge bugs that suck the winds out of our sails.

Health is kinda meh still, I should probably fast and really stick with it, but then I start feeling better and eat something and it's back into the dumps. I dunno. I'm not sure if I'm burned out, or just not feeling well, probably a little combination of both. Anywho, game is going well, I feel as though the world is slowly pulling its head out of its arse and maybe we won't be any "lists" of people not allowed to be succesful any more. But enough of that crap, we have blathered WAY TOO MUCH about that crap.

What's truly exciting, is when we finally get back to it, I think the game will start getting better at a really fast rate, we're on the threshold of the dream. Or a catastrophic failure. One or the other XD

Stealth Edit # Whatever

Been enjoying absolutely nothing the past few days, we've been overdue for some extended burnout. Sometimes you just need some time to just let the project completely slip your mind, no guilt for not working on it, it simply doesn't exist. That's how you really recouperate from extended bur out and get fresh eyes on your project so you can find the fun.

I don't know where we're going to go with this blog, part of me wants to keep it brief because what's in a blather anyhow? What do these words even impress on this word? Doesn't seem as if anything enacts any meaningful change any more, and at this point thinking about what could be is just a sick exercise in futility. A sick game.

So one notion that hit me, is we often talk about the game getting better in exponential factors. If some sound improvements make the game 3% better, and some physics tweaks make the game 10% better, and some graphical improvemnets make the game 40% better on mobile, and all these factors come together, your game doesn't end up being the additive sum, each multiplier compounds! It's like the crit rate and crit crit mod and the haste mods, and the armor mitigations sending your DPS up the wazoo. Progress is exponential. But decay is logarithmic. 

Everything in every way has ground to a halt. And I don't want to speak to it too much, because what's the point? Why drone on and on, and on AGAIN about how f*cked everything is? About how much others have ruined everything? About how bad things will have to be for some time even in the best case scenarios because of how poorly this world has been run in recent years.

But it's important to understand for people to have a clear picture of the state of things.

Think back 15 years ago if you can. Remember how much more bitchen things were? Movies you were excited for. Book series. Cool new game genres coming out, fun new indie scenes emerging,  what's going to be the next big TV series!? What's going to be the next grand new IP that will captivate the world?! What's going to be the next Macarana? The next Gangnam Style? We were going to cure cancer, colonize Mars, everything was just always getting better, there was always great music, great film, great tv, great books, and enriching culture just around the corner.

Startups were creating all kinds of neat tech! Industrious people were creating all kinds of neat stuff and big corporations would acquire these up and comers and make cool new gaddgets and software and stuiods and everything was always just cool!

Culture has to incubate, it has to grow, and first it must be planted,  the seed is very simple. It's laughably simple. And yet somehow. BY SOME FUCKING STROKE OF GAHDAMN FUCKING GENIUS, we decided to fuck it all up.

We stopped planting the seeds in childrens heads, "If you work hard, if you've got some talent and you seize that talent and you push hard, you might achieve great things."

We're 20 years into the future of teaching these poor children simply to not offend anyone. We're twenty years into telling people that showing up to work and smiling and accepting your participation trophies that that's all that matters.

And look around? We're living in a damned twilight zone episode any more? What even are game studios any longer? They're like dystopian techno factories where you plug some game engine in one side and spit out some generic rainbow colored bullshit with androgynous formless figures on the other devoid of any culture or soul, or wit. It's disgusting. It's embarrassing. And it was fully 100% fucking predictable and preventable.

It's such a simple expression, so simple that it's easy to brush away its importance.

"People will believe what they want to believe."

When you hand people the keys to the kingdom, and you promote those who are petty, when you give power to those who care more for said power than they do their responsibility with that power, the mechanisms of society warp and the pipes clog, and the proportions of the secret sauce get all mucked up, and before you know it your pipelines are spitting out the broken limbs of the workers inside. The years of bone breaking grinding culminating in absolute fuck all. A disgusting horror show of petulant hubris.

We ARE trying to get away from blogs such as this, but some days we just gotta vent. I've been watching game reveals, and poking my head around the internets and this industry is just sucking so much wind any more. I honestly feel bad. These kids don't even know what decent games are any more. They look to their left, they look to their right and they see other people finger painting, they see others working in the confines of their paint by numbers game engines and they fulfill the requirments of the contract that they were given: To sit in their box, the affirm everyone around them, don't rock the boat, write your little scribbles, enter your tasks into jira, chat you BS in the group slack, punch your data into your excel sheets, go to your meetings, do more affirming, let everyone know how the tasks as they exist on those stale lists are being checked off. DO ALL THE THINGS! PRODUCE THE SLOP! SMILE AND NOD!

No one knows WTF they're doing. No one has the spine to say anything, no one dares.

This world is fucking broken. Top to bottom, left to right. And I'm behaving myself and staying in my lane keeping this purely about gaming, but the dysfunction is everywhere. Education, in the workplace, in politics, everything is shit.

And the worst part? We've surrendered to it. We've seen people try to make a positive change and it always falls flat on its fucking face.

Remember how we just talked about how things can get exponentially better? Well we are living through the era of exponential decline, because things can also go to shit in so many ways that you cannot fathom them.

The developer of yesteryear learned how to game playing games in MS DOS, they wrote their own games in Visual Basic, and it was fun! It was accessable! And they grew up and they played quake mods, and they made some warcraft mods, and they saw kids experimenting with Flash and you could see developers in real time learing the ropes and the bar wasn't THAT high. You just had to make fun things and you could put your stuff up on new grounds, you could host your projects on teh warcraft 3 custom matchmaker and get plays!

And we were so much more damned grateful and happy to get that stuff back then, there was always that air of excitement for the cool new things, comments talking about how bitchen a silly flash game was, theory crafting, community. The ATTITUDE was better.

We had self starters not afraid to take on gaming and figure things out on their own, and the best and brightest organically found each other out and started up fun little projects, and some of them made cool shit! We got team fortress in Quake, and we got DOTA in warcraft III, and tower defense maps, and we got hidden object games and idle games, and all those kick ass stick fight videos. Just pure, fun, communal communities free of corporate greed where creativity and ambition could grow free of the human negativity that now festers.

Oh, and it was offensive as SHIT. NO ONE GAVE A FUCK! No one had a stick up their ass, no one was crying for representation, but there certainly was plenty of it.

There was no social engineering, there was no big money and special interests trying to create some sort of horse shit equitable environment so tech billionaires could get their moral rocks off.

We've gone from passionate self starters, who love what they do, and learned the basics all the way to advanced mechanics in open enivronments with playerbases the world over, cultivating sound workflows and communities and practices as teams grew competent and thirsty to make even grander and more succesful products with tried and true formulas and human capital.

And what do we have now? Curtailed communities, censorship, nervous nellies, Karens in every corner ready to cut you down if you make a peep about the decline. Corporate interests. Plans for monopoly. Brushing elbows between incompetent, and market driven enterprises. Kids pumped fresh out of the institutions without any competencies given their finger paints, their slack channels, and their excel spreadsheets so they can make the paint by number corporate slop. They don't know any other way of being. Their entire life they have been lectured what's right, what's wrong, what's toxic, what is good, what is bad. They never developed their own taste, their own moral compass.

They don't know what freedom is, they are terrified of it. So like crabs in a bucket, they pull all around them down back to the safety of the safety of their cage. DON'T GO! It's dangerous out there, you might get yourself hurt by speaking your mind! You might say something that isn't safe! You might offend somenoe!

Gotta be a cog in that machine, can't mix it up, can't think for yourself. The machine doesn't like that. Think the safe thoughts, think in the same way everyone else on reddit does, as everyone in slack does, the stale way, the preapproved way, the boring way.

I keep waiting for this world to get better, for this industry to get better, and it's not getting better. And that's so fucking frustrating. Because our game is kinda ok at this point. I think in a sane world we could have some level of support right now.

This world is not sane.

So we get to push that much harder, we have that much more weight on our shoulders to keep on trudging on, and I AM SO FUCKING TIRED by now. I am so fucking sick of carrying this weight. All these years we've been seen as the bad guy, all these years we're the problematic one.

You you ungrateful fucking shits. I'm trying to save your industry for you, despite yourselves.

And do you have any idea the sort of pressure you put on yourself when you make ridiculous, self righteous, neckbeard fucking manifestos at this level? The sort of top shelf level standards you are now forced to hit to justify this disgusting level of neckbeard fuckery?

IT'S FUCKING STUPID

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, Lord

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan

It's got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home

Oh well, oh well, oh well

God fucking damn I love this song. I swear if it wasn't for the music of better era's we wouldn't have the soul in us to bleed into this project.

ANYWHO! Like I always say, ain't no one coming to save us. There's no hero on the way. There's no invisible hand that's going to save this industry. So us dumb fucks have to pull our heads out of our asses and get to work pushing these rocks up the fucking mountain that should have never been allowed to fall. But what can ya do? Life isn't fair, blah blah bitch moan.

Are we pissed? Are we frustrated? Do we want to throw in the towel and say fuck it? Sometimes we do, that's how I feel today. Everything just gets worse, everything is a fucking joke. No one gives a fuck, no one gives a shit. There's a massive fucking void, and the only thing filling it is the neckbeard screechingS, the dumb shit know it all fuck nuts wailing their insolence. Back scratching weasels, well fed do nothing hacks, power mad moralist c*nts, astrotufed academic power mad fuck heads.

And the entirety of these regressive human centipede shits wants nothing more than to continue to kick projects like seacrit into the fucking muck. WILL continue to do everything in their power to suppress the success and appeal and reach of projects like SeaCrit.

We're banned on the Unity forums, in their twitter accounts, we're banned in the gamedev forums of reddit, and I can guarantee you we are on more than a few lists of these smarm fucks.

But it's whatever. Guess we're just just developing a game on ultra hardcore, ultra violence, nightmare, neckbeard HELLRIDE mode.

No pressure! Just gotta make a game 50x better than anyone else while already working in our fucking lonesome for this ungrateful industry of crabs in a fucking bucket.

ROFL, I swear I sat down to write an uplifting song about "turning the beat around" and we were going to play some Gloria Estefan, to build ourselves up to get to work tomorrow after finding ourselves in a bit of a shit headspace.

Oh well, Guess we're not getting to work tomorrow.

Tomorrow it's back to war. Against this idiot, dumb fuck, petulant, unnecessary and unwarranted decline. Someone has to save you dumb fuck retards from yourselves.

I STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHY WE HAVE NO SUPPORT OR AUDIENCE WHEN WE'RE JUST SO DAMNED LIKEABLE! XD

ULTRA HARDCORE, ULTRA VOILENCE, NIGHTMARE, NECKBEARD HELLRIDE MODE... ENGAGE!

Stealth Update: Whatever +1 

(Legendary Drops has ben SPOT FUCKING ON with his coverage)

Mixed bag today. On one hand, YAY! People are FINALLY waking up! We were totally right, we were FUCKIN" PROPHETIC!

I TOLD YOU M*THER FUCKERS! I TRIED TO WARN YOU! THE SUBVERSIVES ARE COMING! THE SUBVERSIVES ARE COMING!

The gaming industry has become bloated and inundated by back scratching, lazy, self affirming ideologues who don't do shit other than cut down others and insulate their bubbles within socially engineered echo chambers. 

The industry was on fire. We were frogs in boiling water. And now we're cooked. Now the industry is in free fall and no one knows what to do. Dears in headlights in every direction. People too weak to acknowledge their failures. Untried, coddeled arseholes with arms locked in solidarity flabberghasted that their perfect plans for Utopia could have POSSIBLY been wrong.

It's easy to believe you're infallible when you've never attempted anything challenging or of importance in your life. The mind numbing hubris of this damned industry...

Being proven right has never felt so unfulfilling. You have no idea how much I wanted to be proven crazy. That the industry was in fact fine, that there were effecient systems and communities to be a part of in the future, great games and an improving ecosystem to watch grow and be proud of.

So yeah, we continue to be vindicated that the world sucks and hates us for no good reason :/, and that no matter how good a game we make those in control in this industry will seek to suppress and destroy us.

Oh well just another Thursday.

I also felt compelled to make this blog because I feel guilty about not getting much work done the past few days. Mostly health related, been feeling shitty, a few other things going  on too. This project is so INSANELY demanding it really doesn't take much to pull us out of the game. We need to be in top form to push forward. I'm hoping to be back to work in a big way in the next few days, but it's kinda whatever, because as I keep saying of late we've been busting our ass and we're due for some burnout.

I feel really conflicted. Yeah, vindication, but vindication about the most depressing sad shit. I'm so over this industry this world. And I feel really shitty about taking satisfaction that others are now in a rough spot in this industry. I keep saying it but it's true. It's not most people in this industries fault that the shepherds of this industry shat all over it, mismanaged it, waged their self esrving crusades and drug everyone down with them.

These kids don't know any better, they were just doing as they were told, they were hired and given inane and stupid marching orders, and then they were affirmed and encouraged to keep marching directly towards the fucking cliff.

How much long lasting damage has this industry inflicted on us all? Many of us dejected and demonized and had doors slammed in our faces. Others were trained to be insufferable asshates, cocky, vindictive, and incompetent, and it's not even their fault. This is what this industry wanted, this is what this industry fostered and encouraged. A giant fucking media machine feeding into this fake fucking industry of hubris and playing house.

I genuinly feel as though I'm taking crazy pills. How does this happen? What are the ubiquitous forces at play that caused this to happen. Was it simply hubris? Was it simply incompetence? Were people blackmailed? Were there forces at play that INTENTIONALLY wanted this industry to implode? Or was it simply a small group of subversives left unchecked by a bunch of spineless nerds that were allowed to fester and spiral TOTALLY out of control?

I don't fucking know. And that's what's so insane to me. Just how removed we are from the very aspects of our society that form the background of our lives.

I'm a gamedev, this is all i know, this is all I'm good for. And i've had to sit here and be told I was fucking crazy and problematic, as everything I hold dear was set in fire right fucking in front of me, and I had to sit here, hands tied behind my back and watch the fucking walls cave in. And I'M the fucking problem supposedly.

I couldn't even begin to tell you how many of these spineless fucking shit stains have cut our tongue out, pandered for the mob, slit our throat for a fucking cookie.

All these supposed accepting and wonderous intersectional ass hats have sucked the marrow from our bone year on fucking year.

So please try to bear this in mind when you read these threads and find my posts unreasonable. I wear my heart on my sleave, I call it like I see it. I'm a hard working, hearnest person and tht's why we've been so spot the fuck on with each and every single supposition we've made over these crazed years.

What a strange blog this has been. We were right, about everything. And every step of the way I legit wondered if I was batshit crazy.

We weren't fucking crazy. We weren't the bad guy. We weren't the incompetent one. But we were the one fired out of the cannon and rejected from this industry.

GOOD.

Getting to work soon, health has been bleh, what else is new? It's erratic as hell, sometimes I go a full month feeling great, sometimes it just comes and goes for a day or two, sometimes it hangs around for weeks.  Good news is it hasn't been getting HALF as bad as it used to.

MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES!

Crazy times, change is happening, and it's going to hit some really hard. This world is fucking retarded. It's coddeled, it's spoiled, and it's been fed a disgusting illusion for the benefit of the disingenuous, the weak, and the petty.

Wish I could be excited for the future, but it's just a really shit situation. Everyone wants to throw stones, everyone wants to burn it all down. It was never about uplifting others, it was never about what was best for this industry, it was always in service to themselvse.

Just gearing up for teh shit fit. And gearing up for gettin' back to work unceremoniously in SeaCrit, for an ungrateful, uncaring world that doesn't give a shit, and simply wants to see projects such as this fail.

Back to it soon. It won't be so bad once our health is back and the game is rockin' and rollin', just wish the world weren't so shit.

Stealth Update: Whatever +2

Just havin' one of those nights. Thinking of everything we've done wrong, overthinking every little thing wondering when this decay is ever going to end.

Spent over an hour trying to find the perfect song that might pair well with a melancholy blog.

I don't know, I just don't even know what to say, I just feel kinda numb.

I come to these blogs and think, "Ok, what can we say to undo the damage? What can make up for all the horrendous  things we've ever said? What can reach people and turn heads? What will wake people up and end all this chaos?"

And we've kinda just made a total ass of ourselves, we've accomplished nothing, in fact all we've done is dug ourselves a mighty holes where the cold ocean waters wash over wave after wave.

I can usually muster up something meaningful to say, something philosophical, something about gamedev, something about our plan for SeaCrit. It's kind of our ritual to beat off the cobwebs when we gear back up to get back to work.

The world may suck but ______________! We're gonna do _________________ and it's gonna be awesome!

I'm just not feeling the fight tonight. Are we the bad guys? Is SeaCrit even going to be any good when we get this stuff in?

Well... good news is, health is a bit better today! But now we're inverted, that drive to work is gone, but we're  feeling ok. The body is willing but the mind has just had enough.

Well, sometimes this blog can get our mind fired up, but it's not looking like tonight is one of those nights.

I just feel so isolated by this crazy journey. Life just passes by day by day... what are we fighting and clawing for? To make a fucking ass of ourselves? We've spent the better part of a decade self incriminating ourselves and being a miserable fuck, I don't even know if we want to be successful at this point, it's just going to be more bullshit.

Oh well, not all our blog posts are going to be bagers.

YOU SAID WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS (BLOG)?

I DUNNO BITCH!

FUCKIN' PUT THIS SHADE ON YO' HEAD AND GO WALK INTO TRAFFIC!

I CAN'T DO EVERYTHING FOR YOU!

I GOT SO RIPSHIT MAD, I TORE THE THING IN HALF,

PUT IT OVER MY DICK, LIKE A FUCKING LUNATIC

THEN I STARTED TO THRUST, THE GRILL ON THE BUS,

IT TOOK OFF FULL SPEED, AND PUNCTURED MY KIDNEY

AHHHhhhhhhhhhhh, I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!

Here's hopin' we get back to work tomorrow, the days just bleed away...