Posted November 21, 2024 by illtemperedtuna
In this moment I'm a little tired of coming up with clever titles and finding the perfect song. What's the point? The world uplifts and demonizes you depending on who's circle you're in, if you're a oiling the cogs in the machine.
I had this idea to try to detail the complex mechanism that is a video game, the many parts, and how each and every feature creates new connections and mechanical interactions with each and every other system. How will your spawn systems interact with the enemy AI? How will unload system mess with NPC's that spawn and are currently chasing the player? If you have unique logic that governs fish in a certain area and that logic is tied to the zone for instance you now need to decouple that logic and store it somewhere else.
Often times these logical restructures are not optimal, and we are constantly fighting the ever increasing "feature creep".
What many don't understand is feature creep is not a linear growth of features, it's EXPONENTIAL. Each and every feature must live amongst every other one, each spinning wheel of your mechanism of fun will in some way connect to each and every other cog. This mechanism will influence this one which connects to this one and so on and so on. It's enough to drive you mad.
So we've got this infinitely thirsty machine below us demanding every moment of our time to fix and fashion each and every element of our game endlessly to infinity as we try to get a decent ammount of sleep and fight through the burnout.
And we've got that damned machine above suppressing and outcasting and canceling and patting itself on the shoulder for sustaining itself as the world burns for the greater good. Seems the only things that want your attention are trying to take things from ya. That's just life I guess.
So yeah, I guess we're just whining about the same old shit today. I could complain more... what else is new? But I do want to save at least a little energy for the project today.
Today MIGHT be the final hump. It hasn't really registered to me really, but if today goes well, it might all be downhill.
All these years biting the bullet and feature creeping.
It's funny, everyone screams, "Don't feature creep it will ruin your project!" But honestly I think our game would be boring as hell if we didn't expand on the item mechanics, the bonus mechanics, the shop and economy stuff. And none of these things are really in the game yet, but they will be soon!
And that's what's so terriffying, we THINK they will be good, we HOPE and PRAY that we will find a glint of success or some kind of lifeline after all these years of fruitless toil.
My great fear is we finally get this stuff in and the game just isn't that fun :/
But what good is sitting around pussy footing around it dreading getting it online going to do?
If I'm honest I think it'll be pretty fun. But there will be a huge amount of things that need tuning and fixing and refactoring. I can already think offhand of a throng of annoying bugs I need to work on, mostly having to do with the unload system.
We might have to add new weak fish that are damage sponges and easy to smack around, we will need to create more weapons and armor and fix up the bonuses as we go and each and every creation will mean more folders, more materials, more adhering to naming conventions and organization standards.
It's enough to drive you mad if you think about it.
So best not to. Best to tune it the hell out, and prepare for more fruitless toil in this thankless, petulant world of smarm fucks who wholly would like to see us fail to justify their self serving bullshit as everything goes to fuck.