Tiny Steps, But the right ones.

  Getting back on the train, not by a lot, but enough. This week was harder on me mentally than I realized it would be. I think I'm going to move this section from scratch notes to some kind of daily devlog series. Where I'll either talk about the latest updates of the game or what I'm doing and how its influencing me. A big part of this is that those influences impact the design of the game, they have to. The only time that a game is unchanged by the experiences of the creators is when the process of creating is not driven by the creators.

  When a game is a vector for profit over experience, that's when it will live on regardless of the internal conflicts, the ups and downs, that shape the people that shape the game. This homogeneity, this safety, I think is what makes so many series become stale. They become a product and that product has a "thing". It does X, and X is what defines it. Because X was found to make the most money and thus is the best thing to do. So many things now are designed with this goal in mind and I think we've all seen the result. How many things actually come out anymore, in any genre of experience, that people find exciting?

  I know for me the answer is quite slim. I spend a lot of my time just shrugging when news breaks. Large Language Models, new games, new graphics cards, new cars, its almost all kind of bland. A lot of it is solving the wrong problems, or providing the same solutions we've seen for my entire life (and beyond).

  But I'm getting a bit off topic. I need to know my limits, and trying to do things daily for this just won't jive with work occasionally being out of its mind. And when work goes off I need to ask myself if I need a break. Do I need to play games, to stream, to read, what would help me feel whole and invigorated. That way the time I'm giving to the project is happy and healthy.

  I've got the new user screen saving your name, your birth month, and birth day. I will need to do some adjustments to save the creation date since this will be used for random seed generation in some manner (keep things interesting). Once this is hooked up the next step will be the introduction. I suspect at the start this will be you standing at the end of the manor plot. I'll place things out with cubes for now to get a "feel" for what we want. I'm a bit excited to do some genuine world building.

  We'll see how long it takes and how much energy I've got. The best case and worst case scenarios are not too far off from one another. You either live long enough to accomplish your goals or you end up dying before you do and it isn't your problem anymore.