Developer diary entry #9

Three days ago it was my birthday. I did not really celebrate it, birthdays are not for celebration.
And today is seventh of november, less than two months until 2026, i am not even half-way done with... well, i which entry did i set that task of updating the game before the year's end? Might not happen.

Today i have no tangible results to brag about, because i was doing exactly what i said i would do - refactoring notes, writing lore documents. Despite how interesting and rewarding consolidating plans and notes may be, it still is a dreary task. Have to do it manually, cannot outsource it to AI or smth. It will mangle and sanitise everything + my PC is not that powerful to run that shit locally, while i am not paying money to use any of those bloodsucker's API, they have enough of my data as is.
Anyways, i also took lots of breaks in that time. Learned Vue out of all things to write a certain tool, by the way. But that is a story for another time.

...actually, why not tell it now? Let me finally use my coolstory card.
Take it seriously or disregard as antiwork-type rant, i do not have a substantial devlog entry today.

Now, let me first write a few words about my mindset.
For as much as i would, perhaps, like to be a single-minded obsessed bonghead working on my project day and night, i realise that it simply will not work the way i want. I can be productive, but do not wish to be productive for productivity sake.

I might embrace the limitations, settle into a formula, stop planning and start acting - and have a game with a lot of content, on the level of what i have now, but multiplied in quantity. A profoundly terrifying prospect, is it not?
This is how commercially successful games often work, they are fundamentally simple and have a manageable scope. And that is what the masses like, apparently. At the very least you will have an actual product sooner or later.
That is the kind of treatment i reserve for wageslaving, i cannot treat my genuine passion projects like that.

Time and time again i see the same pattern occur. I create something and i am loving it. Week passes, or month passes, or maybe two - i learn something new, i receive criticism, come up with new ideas - suddenly that thing i created a month ago looks goofy. No problem if i can either improve it or create something better anew.
For example, that may apply to music and drawing - my skills and my personal style can evolve freely, i can produce new works while old "shitty" ones do not get embedded into the foundation.
But videogame is a project on another level, everything gets embedded into the foundation, it is a long-term project. Unless it is a disposable jam title, you cannot scrap it and move onto the next one. So there seems to be no choice but to either plan lightyears ahead, or accumulate insane technical and narrative debts, and i already feel like i am deficit-spending. 

You know, by the day i am more convinced that work is some sort of divine punishment, limitation that prevents us from directly actualising our visions. Whatever or whoever put it in place, created a system in which such limitations become apparent laws of nature, well... now that truly is a story for another time.

I keep notes and lists, i bookmark and write down everything i see potential in. Of course, that potential is worthless without me going through that backlog of webpages, games and books. Guess what, that takes time away from development. That book about history of the British Empire is not going to read itself. And that pile of notes i made along the way is not going to organise itself into lore document or list of tasks.

I draw visuals for the game - sprites, backgrounds. It is half the problem to actually draw them, a quarter, even. You see, i drew good old soviet style apartment blocks all over Grenzen. Why are they there if soviet puppets never occupied east and west Prussia? Well, there is a lore reason for that, but even with that cheat code, i need to firstly write that lore down somewhere, and secondly spend some time actually studying architectural styles.

I compose music for the game. When i am bored i open audio player and tag my audio library full of... mostly untagged audio files. I always organised my photos and screenshots by the year i took them, but never cared to organise music in the same way. That is over a thousand files to tag, especially as i am tagging genres, moods and key of each piece. The key part often requires a quick transcribe.
So many favourites remain unanalysed, so i am once again taking notes along the way.

And that tool i learned Vue for is a little ELO tournament thingamajig. I long sought a way to reliably rank things - applications are endless, even if rather tangential to the development. But, at the very least, in the process of writing character profiles i really needed to sort them by certain criteria. Could do that manually, but where is fun in that?

By the way, about leisure. I refuse to work all day every day even on my passion project. I often relax by the means of gaming. Would a writer who never read a book in his life be able to ever write anything?
So let me ramble some more about videogames.

I bring up Yume Nikki fangames so often that it makes me a bit sad that i have not played Yume 2kki for a long time by now. That ignorance-powered wonder evaporated irreversibly ever since i discovered the official 2kki Discord server, which was in the middle of some typical pedo drama when i joined. Kek, innit? LMAO, even.
Many 2kki authors still deserve the recognition. Seeing how far the limits of a shoddy RPGMaker engine can be pushed, and how beautiful locations and backgrounds in 2D isometric view can be is beyond inspirational.

It seems like that not even once did i bring up Disco Elysium. Meanwhile, that game really influenced, well, if not me, then my friend group for sure.
It definitely is not a bad game. Pretentious as all hell, the game, the devs, the players, the essay youtubers... Somewhat tasteless exploration of political themes, in my opinion. And did i ever tell you that i hate dice rolls in games? Quests are cool and branching, until you realise they are suffering from that "ration your time, do million tasks in one day, use everything in everything" bane of any adventure game.
But all of it is overshadowed by the immense effort they put into worldbuilding. You can guess what kind of bar it set for the lore of British Wonderland.

Lately i got back into Victoria 3. Game's quite time consuming, it is responsible for a few "0 contributions" days on my Gitlab page. Still, Vicky 3 is a good economic sim and a beautiful supplement to learning 19th century history - of course it is no history book (especially with it's lack of historical flavour), but bloody hell if it is not cool and epic to play through a historic simulation and see how outcomes differ from real history.
Also, it is indispensable for the task of drawing in-world maps.

I played Talos Principle 2 quite a long time ago - half a year, no less. Alright-tier existentialism with mostly mid-tier puzzles, but you have to love that Croteam-type environmental design. I love walking simulators, i love traversing vast worlds for wonders and giggles. Bonus points for New Jerusalem, i spent like 2+ hours wandering around that location. Extra bonus points for that beautiful odd time BGM by maestro himself, Chris Christodoulou.

I play quite a lot of garry's mod. The last time i joined some goofy minigames server there legit was in 2014. I exclusively play singleplayer on all them liminal and shit exploration maps, which are actually abundant in the workshop. Absolutely love some of them, many hidden gems. All thanks to Half-Life 2 being set in a vaguely post-soviet setting. That style gets transferred to pretty much any custom map people create. Also making it especially well-suited for creating russian and post-soviet environments, of which there are plenty.
Almost makes me sad that i settled for 2D isometric game... But nah, i already had 3D modelling cripple development to such a degree that current pace feels like lightspeed in comparison.

As i mentioned Source, let me also mention Infra. What did the redditors in steam reviews call it? The "Source porn"? It sure is, beautiful environments, clearly pushing the limits of the good old Source engine. A fun adventure game to scratch both completionism and civil engineering autisms itch, would recommend.
But what truly fascinates me is the insane detail to which Stalburg is planned. Devs designed an entire city with road, underground networks and a respectable amount of lore. Once again, you can guess where did that set the bar for Grenzen.

Tried playing No Man's Sky about a month ago. it is a labour of love, i can see that, but it is not clicking for me. Survival gathering-crafting loop i cannot care for whatsoever, exploration of procedural worlds is kind of a joke, and base-building is, unfortunately, still terrible.

Almost got tricked into redownloading Genshin Impact. Could not bring myself to go back into that chinese time sink. Watched a game movie, though. Full Natlan archon quest or smth.
One of my friends is a proper Hoyo crackhead, i watched his stream as he was playing through various quests in Genshin, HSR and ZZZ. Did not understand what the sigma was happening in the last two, as i had no prior context for both games.
You know, every time i see goddamn Genshin i swear i sense there is some proper black magick hermetic gnostic boogaloo underneath that facade of gacha bullshit and flashy anime cutscenes. Cannot prove it, at least i want to believe.