How many blogs in a row can one man blather about how tired they are of writing blogs and gamedev?

I don’t know but here’s another one.

Strange days, mixed emotions. Sure, the world is KINDA becoming less crazy, there’s an inkling of maybe meritocracy coming back possibly, if we’re lucky in our lifetime, but who knows?

On the other hand, people are firmly pressing their heels into the ground and they are IN ON THIS TRIBALISM.

I’ll be honest. I just don’t feel this blog today, but I’m forcing myself to write one up because it is part of our routine for getting back to work, it gets our mind back into the game and HOPEFULLY gets us at least KINDA fired up to work on the game. So let’s chat about that!.. I guess. 

I am SO not feeling dev lately. This is what I get for pushing myself for like 3 months straight and doing 16 hour days for weeks on end.

So we did a TOUCH of work yesterday, mostly just putting our toes back in the water, and we got a couple things done. We now can easily test fish and specific items non destructivly using a new Test Item feature for spawning fish, and also made sure quick fish spawning was in working order.

We don’t really talk about it much outside of development, but debug tools are SO FRIGGIN’ important. If we spend half our time testing stuff, then improving that pipeline and making it more efficient is almost as important as the game being fun! And that’s a crazy thing to wrap your head around, because whether you’re working solo or with others, one way or another, there’s a lot of energy that gets lost in the shuffling between creating systems, testing them, fixing them up again, and deploying them again.

And I feel so weird talking about this stuff, because like… no one talks about this stuff. And you might THINK that this would be super important things that big AAA studios would take seriously… but it’s not.

Unless it has to do with lighting, or it has to do with monetization, or water shaders, most dev teams just do not give half a damn.

It appears to me the general lifecycle of a game developer, is about the time they’re actually good at gamedev, is they get sick of this industry and take an extended break and then they come back and do half hearted games at a later date.

Or if you’re at a big AAA studio, it’s just abject friggin’ chaos any more and nothing makes any friggin’ sense.

I used to feel crazy rambling about this stuff. I legit thought I was crazy.

How can there be MANY multi billion dollar studios all making the same PLAIN AS DAY FRIGGIN mistakes!? The ONLY thing that would explain that is if across the board, at every studio, they got rid of every single person that knows what the hell they are doing, but that is IMPOSSIBLE, because no one entrusted with that much responsibility, we would be in charge of the incredibly complex and difficult task of creating a modern AAA video game could POSSIBLY be that incrompetent, there is NO WAY that all these billion dollar dev houses would just across the board let the whole of this industry fall into chaos.

But we weren’t crazy, but I do feel like I’m wearing a straight jacket, in a rubber room just repeating these things to myself over, and over, and over again.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

Make it make sense.

We could go on, we could sperg out again and again in these blogs as we have done before. It’s not fair! It’s so stupid! The world isn’t getting any better! Wah! Wah, wah.

Gosh, we are so insufferable.

I say it over and overa again. Actually this one I haven’t said that much, because it terrifies me.

If we can’t make SeaCrit any good, we are no different. We are no better.

That’s a really tough line to say. Because after all these blogs it still rings true, “We are no different”.

I’m just as prone to thinking our game is the bee’s knees, I’m just as prone to delusions of grandeur, I’m just as prone to the cognitive dissonance that we have a part in this story of gaming, that our game will be fun, and many may play it, and we may get to have an impact.

And who the fuck is my dumb ass? We were stupid enough to take this wild gamble. We didn’t even program when we started this damn thing, we’ve never put out a game before, we haven’t succeeded in shit, other than finding a few jobs on the outskirts of this industry where got worked to dust.

Holy crap, why am I writing this shit! XD

This was supposed to be a blog to pump us up and get us ready to rock and roll tomorrow!

I’m kinda retarded.

Ok, time to stop being a lazy, fearful, delusional piece of fuck, IllTempererdTuna, let’s build ourselves up!

Game is kinda kickin’ ass, it is FINALLY running on phones, it works on EVERYTHING! You can play with touch, you can play with keyboard, you can play with mouse, you can even play my favoritest way, with a keyboard and a  mouse! Oh, I almost forgot gamepad works too!

So much cool shit is just ITCHING to be put in the game! Sniper rifles! Shields, Full plate armor sets! Crazy ass bonuses, and shop items, and enemies of various types!

And so what if no one’s noticed our game, or taken our chance on us. Anyone out there would have to be a total DIP SHIT to take a chance on our project right now, to say nothing of the fact we’ve BARELY put the damn game out there! WTF is wrong with us! Of course we’re not getting any plays, of course no one knows about our game, the only place it’s listed is on Itch.io and the Unity play places, and we’ve shown ourselves to be abject fucktards so why would they do anything to help us in any way shape or form?

The game has POTENTIAL. I know how good it MIGHT be if we can push through this burnout and polish up some key systems and start getting the combat and item drops online.

Holy shit I’m so glad I’m doing this blog, this is actually kinda working.

So short term we’re gonna get some shields in, and take it slow. We’re going to tune up combat BIG TIME and make it fun, because right now it feels a bit off. But the good news is because of the way my combo abilities inherent from one another, once one attack pattern is working it’ll propogate to others and combat SHOULD start feeling better.

I want so badly to sit down and make the game in one day, we’ve been at this for SO FUCKIGN LONG and it would be sofucking nice for a win, but that’s a poisonous thought to have, because this industry is so batshit any more and we’re so out of the circle of “acceptable” developers, that we need to have something supremely unique and awesome to make any waves. And it’s frustrating only having these 2 hands. But on the flip side, if you want something done right, YOU DO IT YOURSELF!

Deep breath.

Success often isn’t “on time”, just gotta suck it up and keep going.

We’re getting close, I can REALLY feel it at this point. We have accomplished SO DAMN MUCH in the past few months, I’ve kinda impressed myself actually. And we were killing it so consistently and for so long I kinda just started taking it for granted we were immune to extended burnout at this point.

Suppose it was inevitable, but I just really don’t like stewing around when we’re not getting any younger, we don’t have the means of any decent sort of vacation, just waitin’ around as the days pass by kicking ourselves because we’re burning daylight and we need to start making this game awesome.

It really is kinda terrifying. I’ve always just assumed that we would make the game fun EVENTUALLY. But it’s not there yet, and we’ve never actually pushed to that level before. How the hell do I know we’re even capable of that? How do I know that our underlying systems are set up in such a way that we’re ever going to tune things to eventually be fun?

It’s enough to worry about to drive you batshit utterly crazy.

Fighting against this crazed culture war, fighting against this sporatic health, fighting against the burn out, fighting against the tech, fighting against the fallout of this industry, fighting against time…

And most of all, fighting against these bloodthirsty gods of gamedev.

HOLY FUCK is it hard to make a video game.

We are at the final boss right now. We’ve got everything set up… EXCEPT the actual game loop and I’m kinda terrified. Do we have enough health potions? Will the world simply spit in our face? Will the game simply be a horrible disaster that people will politiely continue to ignore? Have we simply dug ourselves such a deep hole that we deserve to wallow in it until the end of time?

The only thing keeping me sane is the notion that if you build it, they will come. If we can by some miracle, go against all the odds and actually make this fun, and it’s playable on anything by anyone, and it’s got the replayability we’re hoping for, and the neat items we’re hoping for, and the cool new mechanics strike the right chord, and maybe we’re the right fucktard at the right time for this to all come together and maybe we can get the SeaCrit out.

But there’s the rub, can’t be optimistic either! The only thing worse that debilitating fear is optimism. Because optimism is fleeting.

Countless times we’ve hoped for this or that over the years and it has been an absolute dick punch each and every time we get our hopes up.

So back to the controlled burn.

Screw it all, none of it matters. We’re making a pretty neat game, it’s not easy, but that’s fine, never thought it would be.

And though we’re burned out, and the world has gone to fuck, there is nothing stopping us from opening Unity tomorrow and maybe taking a few steps closer to making SeaCrit not totally hot ass.

If only making a game were as easy as running our mouth and making a fool of ourselves…