Actions Speak Louder Than Words

We are above the petty bullshit of others, we will not use our energy to harp on paltry transgressions and shallow internet arguments.

Jk, we are absolute fucking neckbeards and we will ABSOLUTELY hold a grudge XD

At least we're honest! And we're stubborn! And we're obsessive!

And guess what?! Those are the qualities that get solid games made!

I think about this quite a bit. You may run into someone terribly insufferable (Hello!), but though most will brush them aside and look down on them, believe it or not, I actually have a bit of respect for people when viewing things in a certain light.

I say this as no joke, I take pride in giving things a fair shake, it trying to find the good in bad things, and trying to take a more introspective view of things and not simply a knee jerk reaction. 

If we were to cast out all annoying, nerdy know it all control freaks, we would lose the vast majority of most all great works in all of human history. Try to think about this next time you're having an internet argument with someone. At the very least they are passionate about something and standing up to defend it. Now maybe that thing they are defending is their own self image, their own investment into an idea. So this gets very multifaceted, as nearly everything in life is!

That's what makes this whole human experience so interesting! Everyone can call other hypocrites, everyone can see parralels between this persons's crusade, and that person's crusade. We ALL have our biases, we ALL have our pet peaves, we ALL have our tribe, we all engage in a certain level of cognitive dissonance.

What we are not so good at gauging are the shades of grey, this all swirls in that raging inferno of warring factions as we stab and clash at each other in this silly dance of anonymous online discourse.

You ever see those videos of 2 dogs growling at each other from their cages knowing neither will face any tangible consequences for being absolute fucktards to one another?

I've been having some wonderful engagements with people lately, and I've learned this neat trick. Just find a TOUCH of common humanity in the discussion, relate to their position and treat them like a fucking human being and HOLY SHIT! Wouldn't you know it? But it can deescalate things and once people see you're not a total fuckwad, they come out of their shell and they're more open to your position.

What a novel concept! Just trying to see your opposition as fellow humans! WOW!

We're in this death spiral. Where no one gives an inch, and we're all so damned tied up, that people don't even know how to react to the slightest bit of respect. It's like we've lost the ability to actually make positive progress in discourse any more.

Link to post.

As for SeaCrit development. It's a mixed bag as always. I got a comment the other day, which almost NEVER happens, and they basically said, "hey this game isn't anything good and no one would pay money for it and you should really consider giving up." And you know why that stings? Because they're not wrong!

We have so much that needs to be added before anyone should bother giving any of their time playing this damned game. And I feel a bit silly trying to put the game out there and get plays up to this point. But this is all part of the process of learning the ropes. This is our first game after all. I overthink about all the years put into this for so little progress. So much of that time was just learning how to code, refactoring, fixing broken systems. Adding systems that wreen't fun, removing them. And being spread thin as hell.

I wish I could at least say, Hey look what I made in just 4 moths time! But it's not that at all. It's like, Holy shit, how long has it taken us to create this dismal bit of refuse?

Whew. 

Got about 5 hours of work done last night. We got so sidetracked by random shit. We are still developing pipelins, we are still fixing up random bugs. We are still making almost no progress as our passion bleeds out. BUT! it wasn't all bad. After a mediocre dev session while on the verge of sleep opened the project and kinda fiddled with some materials and visual elements, and I think I was able to make the game look a good bit better!

I could go down a MASSIVE rabbit hole bitching and moaning about choosing to devote ourselves entirely to the web platform pipeline and what a bag of balls that has been. And how much more optimized and better looking the project would be if it were running only on computer and consoles, or even the android stand alone build for mobile. But I still believe the power of being able to send a single link to anyone on any device and be able to play with mouse, touch, keyboard, controller is pretty friggin' awesome! SeaCrit is especially impressive when playing on a phone IMO. But that could very well be rose colored glasses as I am very biased!

As creators, we become very enamored with the things we are creating, and it clouds are judgment. If every creator were to review their own games there would be way more 10 out of 10 games out there, and it has nothing to do with wanting to fool the audience for sales. We truly do become attatched and brainwashed by the years of toil, from all the satisfaction of accomplishing tiny goals and getting this collasal pain in the bum up and running. We see things from a completely different perspective, much like some fans enjoy films at a much more behind the secnes perspective. Those fans love the medium so much they don't just love the product itself, they become fans of the medium and the process as a whole.

What were we blathering about? I am so friggin' over this blog. I'm so over trying to convince ourselves and others that what we're doing here has some kind of value.

I wish we could just put our head down, pound out a great game 14 hours a day, and let the game speak for itself.

We cannot do that. And that leaves us with far too much time to stew in these salty seas, to become frustrated and to want to lash out in this silly little echo chamber we've created for ourselves.

What else can we say? Dev is slow going, but making progress, I KINDA got the area in the game where the player swims to and gets the pistol and they're told by the NPC some dialogue and story and I think it's OK, but it needs work. EVERYTHING needs work.

I was supposed to be shifting to higher quality level design and everything in that area is just thrown together junk. One epiphany I had is that we can spend more time getting a good look on the environment assets and that we can add more bells and whistles and polish that will allow us to just throw junk together and it will work visually and from a gameplay perspective.

To that end we will be revamping floating flora and destructable blocks a bit. I think it would be cool if you can push floating flora around a bit and it will only be able to be pushed a certain ammount and will always be lerping back to its original positino. The further you nudge it from its starting point, the more it will become "stuck" with a high mass value in its rigidbody. I tried achieving this before with some internal Unity physics bells and whistles and it didn't work so well, but I'm pretty confident in our ability to create this stuff ourselves. I KINDA feel like we're turning into a real developer right now! It's not about coming up with super advanced crap and flexing bizzare processes. 

Good development is about quickly finding an easy and doable solution! Great games are not terribly complex, they are surprisingly approachable! I wish more developers would realize this, but we all love to neckbeard and flex superfluos knowledge and workflows. Too many people taking great pride in their skills without ever producing anything that held any value. Always in a vacuum.

Anyway, as for the destructible cubes, I want to make it so they can take damage based on the force you collide with it with. That'll feel really cool, and they're meant to be an homage to super mario.

Quick aside about Shiguro Miyamota. Firstly, I don't know how to spell his name, but he is a hero of mine in gamedev, dude is probably more responsible for devising "fun" in games more than any other human being alive or maybe even in history. But the thing that I wanted to talk about was that at one point I heard he was kind of an asshole.

And at the time I was kinda crushed, I tought to myself, but he's the fun dude that makes games, games are supposed to be fun. Oh what a sweet summer child I was back then.

I'm older know, been through the grinder a few times, I've seen the decay that sets in when the namby pamby bleeding hearts take over. Just look at this industry crumbling in upon us.

Truth of the matter is, most people are decadent, entitled jackasses that live theri entire lives feeding off the hard work of others, and they don't have the SLIGHTEST bit of gratefulness. They will kick and scream as others cast themselves into the wheels trying to save these industries as they yell into the sky, "HELP HELP! THE MEANIES ARE TRYING TO TAKE MY TOY!"

So yeah. Mr. Super Mario himself can be a bit of an insufferable prick because he gives a damn about making good games.

To all you weak mother fuckers, who claim to be "fans" of great works produced by innovative savants. To all you who have infiltrated these industries and brought the entire market to its knees and subverted and pushed out all the frustrated sons of bitches who were fed the fuck up with your petulant self serving bullshit as everything went to fuck.

I don't know where I'm going with this :D. I hope we all learn to grow and better understand the world we live in! If we can seek truth justice and the geeky way again, I think we will all be much happeir as gamers, developers, CEO's, whatever.

We gotta learn how to work as a society again. We gotta learn how to create these social machines with a bit more perspective beyond, "Hurrr durrrr, DEES PEEPO OVA HERE SCRATCH MAH BACK AND AH LIKE DAT! DEY GIVES ME DAH MONIES AND DA GOOD FEELS AND SOMETIMES DEY STROKE MY.... EGO"

But you know me. I CAN'T COMPLAIN!

Edit: Oh I almost totally forgot the point of this post!

We gotta make a decent friggin' game. The more we shoot our mouth off here and all we have to show for it is a very shallow and crappy demo where you can't do anything. We kinda just look like a loony.

Here's hoping the demo is at least SOMEWHAT well recieved, I think there's a lot of room for the game to get better, but I'm also terrified that maybe this isn't as well recieved as we hope. We've kinda invested a lot into this project, and very stupidly so. Such is the life of gamedevs. Our struggle is nothing special, there are countless others pouring their blood sweat and tears and hopes into this medium a lot more deserving than my whiney ass if I'm honest. Here's hoping we can make something of this project  and if we do fall into success somehow by some bizzare miracle, here's hoping we can be a part of building a more sane, and better, and stable industry for everyone involved where hard work and princple and goodness has a place along with the usual greed and back stabbing, and brown nosing!