Blather

Thoughts occasionally pop into my mind of what I could blather about. My plans for the game, the state of things in this crazy world, some crappy old prog rock diddy that I need to think of an excuse to write a blog around.

I was brewing some coffee and I thought about this old Jethro Tull song at the end of one of their albums and all I could remember was, WTF was that Jethro Tull song about the rainbow about and if it's any good how do I write a blog that somehow takes rivers and estuaries to the topic of rainbow trout?

Dev is going well. Really well. It's weird, when dev is going well, you're not working on all the big things you thought you'd be working on when you wanted to make a game, you're working on really mundane, technical headache shit. And it's frustrating as hell. But at the same time, that's how payin' the piper goes. If you obsess over the cool stuff, the fun stuff, if you build all that stuff up you will have created the loose foundations from which a landslide will wipe away all your ambitions. Once you start to understand what you're doing, once you know the cost of producing content, you stop working on cool things and get to building the foundation. 

We all love our computers games, our flashy cars and cell phones, but all these fancy things started with the installment of sewage pipes.

So today I'll be working on level setups, and debug functions, and fish spawners, so that tomorrow, and every day forth I won't be spinning my wheels in the mud. I'm sure 5000th other distractions will pop up today, that I will begrudgingly fix thinking they're all distracting me from making that fantastical game I have in my head.

OH! I never talked about the happy accident that happened a week or so ago. I was adding a feature that would limit your velocity as you entered water from out of water based on your velocity vs facing. Essentially, if you belly flopped, I wanted you to smack the water and lose speed and play a splash noise, I wanted that perfectly angled enter of the water to  feel rewarding as you glide in at full speed. So as one does as a developer, we SMASH the values to 10000000000 to ensure they're working and as i belly flopped into the water, the counter force meant to coushin me sent me shooting upwards to the moon. It was pretty neat, so I kept it, and now you can belly flop and kinda skip across the top of the water like a skipped rock. This could lead to some cool "seacrit" areas where you have to fall down a long waterfall, bellyflop at the bottom and reach some secret area above. It's funny to have these thoughts for the future as I endlessly tweak and tune the endless slew of features to simply work.

Though it feels endless, every single day the list of things that need massaging shortens, the game gets better, and as the hard days go on and on I take a step back and I'm more and more happy with this project, the more I'm inclined to think there is a future here. I've said it before, things can get tough, and sometimes we can become so obsessed with some distant success that we lose sight of our ability to try to enjoy the moment, and the journey. Though it's frustrating and arduous and a bit lonely in this cave, work on SeaCrit has been fulfilling and fruitful. It's getting better by the day, and one of these days, I don't know when I will open the project and things will be ready, and I will start building level 1, and I will build level 2 and I will put out a new demo and it won't be dog sh*t and who knows what happens after that? Until then, it's head down into the wall and for the first time in a long time I'm cool with that. I'm getting exercise, I'm focused on the game, things could be worse, and I have a project that's healthy and moving forward one inch at a time. 

Another step in a long journey tonight as I build up a lot of boring stuff! Had a great friggin' day of dev yesterday, going to try to keep the momentum going. In fact the past month or two have been fantastic, this old dog is still learning new tricks and putting the axe to the grind:

That's gamedev, the bugs and technical issues that pop up while we're busy making plans about sharks with giant friggin' laser beams on their ' heads!

HERE'S A TULL SONG ABOUT RAINBOW TROUT F*UCKERS

Youtube figured I should listen to this banger again so I figured I'd link it

The algorithm knows me, give me Tull and I'm a happy camper!

Enough blathers, TO DEV!

Edit: Oh quick edit! I generally like to play the fool around here, but I'll take a brief moment to talk about a random issue that popped up the other day that got f*cking handeled out of the gate. At any given time a billion and a half edge cases can emerge in your project, some collider from some random ability interacting with the thousands of other objects in the scene is some weird way. I noticed that for some reason dashes weren't allowing the player to shoot through the enemy without colliding with them as the code is supposed to allow, I dove in and started tearing the prefabs apart looking for the damned thing, couldn't find it. 

Well there's this new crashdash collision that isn't a trigger, which means it can physically crash you into objects that gets scaled based on your wave speed bonus, meaning that it can have a scale of 0, 0, 0 and be really hard to trach down unless you look through the hierarchy of the project object by object, as most times you can select something and see the collider in the scene view, but because it was a 0 scale, it wasn't shown.

Because I of all the long years finaglig Unity and tooling the project hours on end, I was able to find the 0 scale collider without any headache, I did some fast scripting that disables the collision at 0 scale and boom problem solved without blowing anything up in a few minutes. At a larger studios this bug could have existed for months or never been found at all, an endless source of confusion and edge cases and band aide solutions are applied fruitlessly. Most projects are hodgepodges of too many cooks in the kitchen, none too invested, none putting their necks on the line to ensure its success. They're just exercises in late stage capitalism, indifference and tribalism top to bottom with no one really giving  a damn about the project. 

Every problem has unlimited solutions, and being well rounded gives you the toolset to come up with the best solutions, or sometimes just a notion o f a fast solution if "good enough" is good enough for a small edge case.

It's counter intuitive, a large workforce doesn't create more content better, it just creates more people isolated from the big picture who can make a mess of things, it gives this illusion of prosperity, that you're producing some grand project, or that your work is inherently legitimate as you burn through piles of money playing house. You start specializing people and you don't get better systems, they actually start to fall apart as there are few isolated system in a game. 

In gamedev, more than perhaps any medium: less is more. But you don't understand this 'till you've spent years and years failing doing arduous pointless labor in a digital cage. This is the last thing that anyone who can afford to build a team would have learned the hard way, you don't reach the top of the pile these days doing a hard days work and learning hard lessons getting to the grind. So in a weird way, I'm grateful for all the hardship, for having to shoulder this for so long, I'm finally starting to feel the project has a fighting chance for the first time in a bit, for the first time since having a realistic perspective of how good the game is (i hope, one can never be sure of the quality of their own work).

Anyhow, dare I say it, I feel like i've been kickin' ass as of late and the game is starting to get pretty  friggin' good. There's a lot of systems and mechanics lying under the surface just waiting to ooze out of the foundations. SeaCrit is starting to feel like a bit of a sleeper, lot of really good sh*t waiting i the wings, just gotta keep pushing on the pipelines then the floodgates open. It's a really good feeling, the tides have been turning, less desperation, more sustained confidence in the project. Ok, no more blathers, gotta get back to that low key caricature that's fumbling around making a shitty game. What I meant to say is, OH NO THE WORLD SUCKS, THIS GAME IS HARD TO MAKE, WOE IS ME, WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Coffee's hittin' the bloodstream, synthwave is going up, time to whoop some arse!