There is nothing in this world that drives people more than spite. I recently read about how Peter Thiel, billionaire investor and one of the first to invest in Facebook, took nearly a decade to destroy Gawker for outing him as being gay. Instead of just buying Gawker and destroying them instantly (which he could 100% afford to do), he financed Hulk Hogan's sex tape lawsuit to destroy them publicly, and led to the destruction of their parent company, and bankruptcy of Gawker. People often talk about having "Fuck you" money, but I really think that's the definition of Fuck you money. It wasn't immediate either, it took 9 years, but Thiel waited, bided his time, and then destroyed an entire media empire for what is the equivalent of pocket change for him.

In my case, my spite is towards my work. They've just announced an increased number of days in the office, along with promoting my entire team but me, and confirmed that I'm "Unlikely to get a promotion before March next year" at which point I'll have been there 2.5 years. I'll concede, one of those things wouldn't be enough to kill all motivation I have, but all 3 together make it tough to find a reason to keep going. And let me tell you, I haven't felt this motivated to make something of this game since I first had the idea.

Current state

Here's a screenshot!

Most of what's been done has been code refactoring. As I originally started this project specifically as a technical test for the neighbours mechanic, and then just proceeded to build off of it. Maybe not the cleanest approach to game development, but I am fortunately keen on going "How can I do this better?" One of the biggest challenges I had was converting from 2D to 3D. As I'm going to be adding buildings made by 3DRae for the buildings, they will need to be 3D objects. This then involves moving from a sprite renderer over to a full renderer. I'm still working on the camera position, but to give it a good viewport look, I'm using a very low field of view at a long distance. This gives everything a very narrow look compared to an average FOV with a closer zoom.

I've also introduced a basic load animation, title scene and moving between the two. I'm having to do some work that makes it feel like I'm actually developing a game, and some that's just data doing data things and making sure that the game doesn't run like a snail on sleeping pills.

Currently I'm now working on making the grid dynamic. We don't want to end up in a state where the grid grows off the screen. I'll need to do a bit of refactoring and trickery to reach this goal. Obviously the grid can't be infinite, as phone screen sizes aren't infinite. Plus part of the challenge of this game is to fit within the constraints. I've been playing a lot of Cities Skylines lately (which I also found out recently was built in Unity, which is just nuts to me) and it's brilliant for the freedom it gives you. Throw a couple of mods in there to improve your roads, and a few useful utility buildings, and you're off, making something that can only be described as a civil engineer's worst nightmare. But that freedom is a different kind of game; it's a sandbox with monetary constraints. What I'm looking for is free of money, but instead restricted by the grid.

Going forward, the intention is to make the weird orbs on the side of the blocks more of an emission, or light source, to make them much more distinctive, and blend in with actual buildings a little easier. In addition, the score mechanic needs some tweaking to prevent spamming of building types to just reach a fantastic score. At the moment you can just spam entertainment and shopping for the free-est victory of your life. I'll be adding them to the Trello board shortly, but overall, I can definitely see the basics of a game coming together. I've also reached out to a few musically inclined people and offered to commission them for some game music. Ironically, that'll be the second major expenditure for something that I'm not skilled at in this project. I'm a firm believer in "pay the artist to do what they do best, and then let them do it", so I'm excited to see what they come up with, assuming they accept the commission.

Progress, and how to motivate

As I alluded to in the introduction, spite is a hell of a motivator. My work has made some questionable choices around employees and moving forward lately that I think are completely against what the company stood for and were preaching less than 12 months ago. The other motivator at the moment are small green squares. Not the ones found in the game I'm making, but rather on Github. It's not as simple as "Seeing square go green make me happy", but rather, it again comes down to spite. You see, there's been a trend on Twitter as of late talking about Senior Developers, and somewhat of a meme around "Don't even bother applying for Senior Developer if your Github doesn't look like this", before showing a mass of green squares. Now obviously, this take got meme'd to death because it's a stupid way of quantifying how good of a developer a person is. But then I went and looked...

This is my work's github

And this is my personal

My god, that's depressing. Like, absolutely horrifying. I spend most of my time working at a financial technology company, and yet nothing for myself because ultimately, no one wants to be a programmer for 2 jobs in a single day. You'd rapidly lose the will to live. But as you can see, March-ish time is when the nummber of commits started to go up, and green squares increased in frequency. I'd be loathed to lose that now. Just need to keep my motivation up. Based on how I've written this, it seems like the requirement is people pissing me off, so lets hope people start to really grind my gears. Actually, no, please stop, I want life to be somewhat pleasant.