It's Time to Move On

So I couldn't decide. Do we want to get really angry and shoot our mouth of about the usual nonesense as we grind ourselves to paste trying to make this game? Or do we look on the bright side? On how we've had our health back for some time now, we have purpose again, and our project is going well? Well, WHY NOT BOTH!? So the question becomes, which one do we start off with?

Well let's start with the good stuff, and if you want to watch me shoot my mouth off you can enjoy that later.

SeaCrit is in a REALLY good spot. Each time I open up the project thinking we've got all the key systems done up and we're ready to push forward, some little issue baits me down a rabbit hole and I find myself refactoring an entirely new system.

Off the top of my head we have totally created the pooling systems from  scratch for damage #'s, npc fish loading (more on this later), particle effects, and projectiles. Each of these systems has unique functionality and considerations, living in different areas of the game and UI, loading and unloading in completely different ways with totally different optimization considerations for each. The fish loading and unloading was far more complex because I added the new variant system. So instead of preloading an pre pooling tons of different type of fish, I just initialize one shark, and then the variants generate the unique items and materials on the fly.

New material system that instantiates material variants and applies the proper diffuse and normal maps appropriate for that fish. This means rather than having to make unique visual types per fish type, I can create global fish color varieties with other unique material properties and those materials will work on far more fish without having excess and overly complex #'s of materials or organizational structures.

Total cleanup pass of old files an unused materials. So much of this project was scattered all over the place, and there were hundreds of old unused materials all over I was terrified to delete... because what if we deleted something we needed!? So often we just sit with hundreds of legacy files bloating our project because for every 10 we cleanup we accidentally delete a vital file we didn't realize we were using and that is one our biggest nightmares.

Revamped the item visualization system so that if an NPC is going to drop a unique item, it will show it on spawn which I think really adds some pizzaz to finding cool items. There's just something really cool about seeing an enemy, seeing htey have a big glowy swoard and getting that dopamine hit of "OHHHHHHhhhhhhhh! I want to murder that clown(fish) for his shit!"

Cleaned up a ton of internal NPC fish structures and visual connections that were super confusing and giving me huge headaches. Art assets were often garbled with gameplay prefabs and not always adhering to the right folder structures, which led to lots of assets we weren't even using being strewn all over the place. I doubled down and cleaned up all prefabs and references and now we have a very clean and well organized system that puts all the visuals we use for NPCs in one area, and the player parts in another and any revisions or additions in the future will be much easier to create,

I could go on, but the point is, we dug deep, worked a ton on  lots of tedious and not very glamorous elements of our pipeline, and now more than every I'm ready to get to making this game FUN! And I couldn't be happier about this. We EARNED this, we didn't crack a whip on anyone, we didn't gaslight or play politics and grind anyone to dust other than ourselves. We had laser precise knowledge of the tasks that needed doing, why, and how we were goning to achieve them.

And now every piece is fitting together with pure satisfaction. The gameplay is a precision assortment of machinery with no foreign gadgets outsourced and rigged with duct tape. 

SeaCrit is whirring up with nary a sound, lights glowing, cogs spinning to steady hum. The framerate continues to rise as we squash each and every performance issue within our control. 

Every inch is now covered in our fingerprints, every system fully online, begging to have assets put into the game as the overarching systems of progression and infinite combat scenarios that have been lying in the dark cloud with the rumbling murk of the shaking sea floor.

While this industry has fallen, the fools did their brown nosings and their reach-arounds and the unconditional praises. Our bones once broken in this mad machine were healing strong. We were fighting in an arena where we had to push 10x harder for each and every inch. We had to bleed 10x more to tend to our fields. We grew agile, hungry, independent, and strong as they grew fat, dependent and weak.

Are you feeling this intense whiplash? This neverending sensation of falling, that momentum towards obscurity in a blink 

*SNAP* 

...and in a MOMENT FWOOSH, terminal velocity towards the ether has countered by several magnitudes

rigidbody.Addforce(rigidbody.velocity.magnitude * -999f);

And as if connected by spiritual elasticity, the soft handed virtue cult, catapulting to the tops of their ivory towers are experiencing a new sensation. That ethereal bubble of praise and superiority beneath them that they have huffed so hard, for so long, high on its fumes, has evaporated, and that high they  thought would never end has popped. *BLIP*. And for the first time, the universal forces are taking their course. 

Reality cannot be escaped forever.

This is not a shock to some of us, we knew this would happen in due time. It's just amazed how quickly the re-calibration is taking place. I thought this would take a generation or two, thought we'd bleed into the dirt and maybe the coming devs of tomorrow could sit in the shade of the trees we planted fed with our blood, sweat, and tears.

We will not return the "favor", we will not stoop to their level of depravity, the cycle of vengeance must be broken. But I can't say I can muster sympathy in this moment, we have bled too much for too long without a single shred of care from these vandals. We have been pushed into dirt, laughed upon, spit on, censored, dejected, law-faired, exploited, abandoned, ignored, shamed, and loathed for the entirety of their pitiful reign.

And for what? What did any of these shit stains give back to this world for all their self serving manipulations? What did any of these assholes provide to the world but division and decay as they took, took, took?

It's been a long time coming, and one of us is going down.

It's a sick joke that this song auto plays right after listening to "Time to Move On"

Going through so many emotions of late. So much change and so many new possiblities in such a short period of time. I know what we need to do. We need to ignore the anger, the sadness, the bitterness and let the optimism and this rebirth swell. We have a lot of work to do. SeaCrit is only the beginning in this truly Brave New World.