It's Ok if our game SUCKS. Truly.

It's not just Ok that our games suck. We must ACCEPT that our games will suck!

Games are not visual art. People train for years and years to the point they can sit down and draw an emaculate horse, and unskilled onlookers will rightfully think, "Wow, what an amazing artist!".

Games recieve their value by being different. Fun is derived from gameplay loops that have not yet been explored. 

In a terrible twist of fate, we are punished for keeping this medium alive. Those of us who try new things and explore new genres and "seed the fields" for other developers to "draw inspiration" from our hard work. But I digress! This thread isn't for bitching and moaning we're trying to build ourselves up so we can bite the bullet and get this show on the road!

I find myself becoming the very dev that I questioned as a player for so many years...

"Did the developers even play the game!? Why is this item in the game, it's worthless! It feels like they spent months and months of time on this random system and it's barely even in the game, and it's not fun!"

I find myself a bit terrified of finally putting this stuff in the game. What if I add these half finished systems to the game and they're not fun? CLEARLY I need to make sure each system is fully robust and has tons of polish before I add it and try to make the game.

The grass is always greener. Years ago I was spending tons of time building up the world and adding tons of weapons and enemies and places to explore and I felt like I was totally wasting my time.

Now I find myself doing nothing but building up core systems and there is no game to play.

I'm not trying to say there was a better solution, in fact i'm trying to say the path to success, or even just progress, is often going to feel like failure. In fact it IS failure.

Those artists above we touched on, we see them draw difficult subject matter and we are in awe at their consistency. But before they became competent, they had to fail. They had to fail and fail and fail and practice practice practice in a multitude of ways. In refining their composition, their forms, the lighting, mood, color theory, rendering techniques, and all the "Je ne sais pas" that creative develop subconsciously that allows them to create greater works.

Gamedev is SO maddeningly complex. We are not JUST trying to make greater games, we are also trying to improve in our skills and our planning and our execution so that as we go the distance we can uplift our systems and our content in an artful way that allows them to coalesce to create something that is both fun, viral, and performant.

This industry is incredibly fragile, not just because the work we do is prone to breaking and difficult to craft in itself, but because the temptation to blame others or the tools or whatever is constantly there. Managers wanting to blame employees, employees wanting to blame managers. Wanting to blame the crazed world we live in. Wanting to rely on messaging and politics to try to stiff arm your product into the market.

And when you do these things, you POISON the fields, you destroy this medium, you ruin others' chances to succeed for your own childish wants to place the blame elsewhere.

This is where we're at with this industry. Surrounded by barren fields, surrounded by soil that if anything were to spring from it, would be lacking in nutritional value.

So while everyone else was growing the same putrid and parasitic crops that suck up all that was good in the land, and destroying the good will from which games were once made, destroying the honest and meritocratic environment to serve themselves and their compatriots who had one anothers' backs in the self indulgent lies and the collusions. We are in the belly of the beast, in the bell of that great white whale.

I know when I start throwing this game together, many elements will be wacky and buggy and unpolished. And i'm burned out and I would much rather open a system I've been tooling with for months all end and I know I can make tangible progress on.

But games aren't merely technical thingamajigs. They are iterations of creative brushstroke. And though it pains me, I've decided it's  FINALLY time to start piecing this game together. Not in some test case, not to see if this new fish or system is working. It's time to finally start building the demo.

I would like to think I am building the game here, but I know deep down that I can do so much better. The art, the animations, the world, all of it can improved a thousand times over. Those DAMNED FORCE VALUES I TWEAK AND TUNE 50000 TIMES A DAY!

Spread thin as fuck.

BUT! No game is perfect, we don't have to be perfect. We only have to be decent, in this sea of dick drivel mediocrity... but I didn't start SeaCrit to just be decent. I want SeaCrit to be FUCKING AWESOME, and that's where we get burned out, because this is a REDICULOUS task to take on in your lonesome. And then your mind wanders to all the opportunities and resources that were afforded those who were weak and wretched. And you start to get angry and lose focus. So let's try not to go down that road. There are good people in this system too. And there are decent people who have been brainwashed and have no idea what they are doing in all these various echo chambers.

Whew. Feelin' ok. Didn't sleep the best, but that's no reason not to at least get SOME work done today. Honestly, today feels like it will be a "rip the bandaide off" day. We will have to delete lots of content we spent months on and start building the world with a fresh slate. And as we add fishes and items, and bonuses and seacrits, and all manner of tertiary things like sounds and materials and blah, blah blah, we will encounter bugs, we will see certain things will not be as fun as we wished they were.

And what will our response be? Will we gut systems that we are convinced just need a bit more polished to be good? Will we lose confidence in ourselves and abandon the project? Will we simply become burned out working day in and out on such a massive game with so many elements that need adjusting in this crazed world that loves to shove others into the mud?

Probably! And that's fine, that's nothin' new.

Life's not about hard you can hit, it's about hard you can get hit and keep moving forward

Hey gaming industry. GROW THE FUCK UP

It's fascinating to learn about the background of bands like Journey. You'd think you'd hear about the band and hear about how the band members were super grateful to be working with such an incredible talent in Steve Perry. But it's depressing to hear that none of them really liked the dude and a lot of problems stemmed from that. Once you get into the world, you start to learn that people aren't competing to better the world, to better the medium, to create great things and sacrificing to build a better life for all. 

Most are out there fighting for themselves, their friends and their allies for petty nothings. They don't give a shit really about the task at hand, why should they? Everything comes easy these days... as everything goes to shit. Hope we can turn it around, hope we can become grateful and strong, and principled again and not fall so easily to the backstabbers and brownnosers.

Enough blatherin', gonna try to clear our head for a bit before we get back to bleedin' into dirt.  It's ok if SeaCrit isn't the best game ever, we've got a lot we can improve, we've come this far...

Edit: We need a break. As much as I want to work on this, to carry this across the finish line right now, there is SO MUCH COOL STUFF just begging to come online finally. We have been pushing ourselves to work through burnout for weeks and months on end at this point.

Working solo is a special kind of slog. You never get to open up the project and see some cool bit of work done, some neat art someone made you're excited to get in, some great level setup your designers made.

The only days I'm pleasantly surprised any more is when we open the project and we actually have any damned gas in the tank.

I don't want to give the wrong idea. I am so f8cking excited for this project right now, it's totally kicking ass and all the hard work seems to be finally paying off (I say this for the 100th time). But I don't want to crawl across the finish line of this demo and dread every moment of working on it. so no work today. Deep breathes, there's no insane hurry, the project isn't going anywhere.