It’s been a long established joke that “if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life, mostly because that field isn’t hiring”. For developers, it’s a different punchline. “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life, however after 8 hours of doing it a day, there’s no chance you’ll want to do more”. Developers are in demand, but after a hard day of staring at Visual Studio or Rider or whatever your IDE/editor of choice is, another second of trying to solve these irritating problems seems about as appealing as having a make out session with a belt sander… That has to be someone’s fetish, but I don’t really want to think about it.

I'm trying to make a point of picking my development back up as a discipline. That'll involve these dev logs actually becoming a regular thing, along with actual updates. The Trello board should also become more active. I expect these posts to partially consist of ramblings along with actual information, so try not to take them too seriously. I'll be writing about the puzzles I encounter as well as info about devlopment, tips and tricks etc. I hope these help someone, or at least give some insight into my mind, and the process of turning from regular C# dev to game developer.

So, based on the paragraphs above, you probably get that there’s not been a lot of progress on Simple City. Sadly, the real world comes first, and burnout is a very real risk. I have been mostly working on the core gameplay loop, and some UI/UX tweaks. One of the most difficult things in the gameplay loops was actually adding a pause function. I want players to have a moment that they can think, but with so much of this game revolving around the passing of time, and how each part acts per “tick”, a pause is more complicated than just saying “stop for a moment”. Once all of the work I mentioned is done, I will then need to implement a debug mode. I always love writing debug tools. They’re always such an elegant mess of code, as you stretch functionality as far as it’s willing to bend to achieve things that, in normal gameplay, shouldn’t be possible. It’s always the tools that get hacked together in a matter of hours that have the longest service life. Plus tools help building go faster. Allegedly.

Trying to be more disciplined with development work, combined with the real world becoming inevitably more stressful and busy results in an interesting combination. You have no energy left to fulfil your drive, and any that you do have has to be targeted elsewhere. I’ve been reading a book called "I didn't do the thing" on this subject on my morning commute. It’s a lesson in not punishing yourself, and it’s something I wish more people will take onboard.

The other issue is whether to change game engines. Unity has been embroilled in a million scandals lately, everything from merging with a company who made a malware installer, to major layoffs. I like to think that I'm aware of social issues especially in the tech space, however the irony of listening to anti-establishment songs while working in my cushy fintech job in an office that gives away free ice cream is not wasted on me. I'd like to think that, should any game of mine be successful enough to warrant employees, I'd keep these morals I have. But to survive, I have to play ball with the way society is. The question I now face is "Do I want to found my game development career using an engine developed by a company with conflicting morals?" It's a challenging question, because to just drop Unity would require remaking everything I've already made in an engine I haven't used before, and disregarding a lot of my current knowledge. I haven't fully decided yet, but the longer I postpone, the more ingrained Unity becomes.

So that's where I'm at right now. Hope you're doing well, reading this. I know the UK is being hit with a heatwave that's turned me into a puddle over the last week. Stay safe, drink water, much love.