Seriously who the fuck is even here

I see a whole lot of "why bother" going around and I am just going to shout into the void about it. Nobody is here. Nobody is reading these. I do not have a single comment or like on anything I have ever posted here. It is a desolate wasteland of tumbleweeds and parched earth. I tried to look up a stock image for this but literally all of it was AI.

Why bother indeed. Why bother with art. Why bother with music. Why bother with writing. Why bother with programming. The garbage-farting computer machine is faster and better than you. Why don't you just... quit? What is the point?

Because I am John fucking Henry.

Maybe you don't know the story, but I'll fix that right now. John Henry was a big strapping black man who worked for the railroad, swinging a big old sledgehammer and driving the nails for the big steel rails. And one day along came some white motherfucker with a steam hammer that could drive more nails faster than any man alive, and John Henry went "the fuck you say" and challenged that white man to a race.

So they set up the steam hammer on one rail and John Henry on the other, and they fired up that steam hammer and yelled "GO" and off they both went driving spikes fast as hell. And sometimes that steam hammer would pull ahead, but John Henry would swing that hammer and drive those nails and catch right the fuck up.

And in the last few yards of that race, John Henry managed by a matter of SECONDS to drive that last nail before the steam hammer did, and he WON, he beat that Goddamn infernal machine and proved the indomitable human spirit was the eternal victor against any bullshit machine you might build, and then his heart gave out and he fell over dead right there on the tracks.

So you might go, what the fuck is the moral of that shit.

What's generally presented to me is that it is noble and human to absolutely destroy yourself and fall over dead just to prove a point, so long as your point gets proven and you were right. I think there are a lot of people leaving comments on the internet who can agree with that.

But the thing I actually took away from it was the thing they kept saying every time they told the story.

John Henry, you see, was a steel-driving man.

He didn't drive nails for the big steel rails because it paid good money or provided some kind of social benefit to the community. John Henry drove nails because that is who he was. That was what he did. John Henry was a steel-driving man, and he would drive that steel until the day he died no matter what bullshit machine you stuck on the other rail. He did not give a fuck whether that machine was faster and better than he was, because at the end of the day John Henry was a steel-driving man and driving steel was what he was going to do.

Well, I am John motherfucking Henry. I am a steel-driving man.

Why should I make art, when the garbage-farting computer machine makes it faster and better? Because I am a steel-driving man.

Why should I make music, when the garbage-farting computer machine makes it faster and better? Because I am a steel-driving man.

Why should I write, when the garbage-farting computer machine does it faster and better? Why should I program? Why should I make games, or record videos, or make blog posts?

Because I am a steel-driving man.

This is my steel, and I will drive it until the day I die,  because I am a steel-driving man.

And every stupid little shithead moron out there with the garbage-farting computer machine, feeding it their prompts and waving their slop output at me?

What are THEY?

What dream are they selling me? When they send that steam hammer off down the rails and say "I ain't even swing a hammer once," what do they do with that time they save? With the energy they've conserved? What fucking good are they ? At the end of the day, what do they have to show for it?

All those nails? They ain't drive those. They set the machine to do it. Any dumbass could do that. What did they do?

What can they do?

These little fuckers can't even write an essay. They need the garbage-farting computer machine to write their emails. Hell, they need it to read their emails.

They don't do shit. They don't know how to do shit.

They are selling a dream of being nothing to nobody.

But I am a steel-driving man.

I do this because it is who I am, it is what I do, and no lying sack of shit with their garbage-farting computer machine is going to entice me into a life of being nothing to nobody.

I am better than that, and millions of others are better than that, and we will be out here driving steel until the day we die. The shitsacks can point and laugh all they want, the world has always been full of worthless losers pointing and laughing at the people who actually do something. It will not sway us. It will not move us. It will not stop us. 

Cry God for England, Harry, and St. George. 

https://youtu.be/8LhByWfY8Fw

Y'all worry too much

https://youtu.be/clay-DFWzeM

Yeah, yeah, nobody cares. I know. 

https://youtu.be/OAfbZspZRl4

This video sucks

It's a great way to learn.

I have on many occasions advised people to copy existing games, so they can learn various mechanics. You should build Tetris, so you know how to make a game in general -- it's a pretty basic game, most of the hard part is all the ancillary stuff like scoring and options and menus and whatnot. Then you should build Space Invaders, so you have to track shots and whether they hit something, along with the deteriorating barrier blocks. Then you should build Breakout, which has some basic physics, and then Asteroids which has slightly more complex physics and movement that wraps around the sides of the screen.

I've done all those, but I have never built Pac-Man... which introduces enemy AI to the mix... or Super Mario Bros, which introduces scrolling levels and platforming. I'd recommend building those to anyone making games. But I, myself, have not done them. This is mostly because I am not interested in making these particular kinds of games, but also because I have learned the elements of those games outside of their context -- I have put enemy AI in several games, and I have built multiple scrolling platformer levels just as a test to see if I had a good idea for a platformer.

Invariably, I have not, and my platformer idea is stupid and boring. I chalk this up to not really liking or caring about platformers. It's hard to come up with a good idea for a kind of game you don't like. It seems like you could do it, because you go "I would like this game if..." but then you run into the reality that as a player you do not actually know what you would like.

You'd think that being a game designer and developer would make you better at this, but it actually just makes you better at saying "no, I'm almost certainly wrong" without making you any better at knowing what would be right. The big takeaway for me has been "stop trying to make games you don't like into games you do." It's way faster and easier to just play (or make) a different game.

Which leaves me, as a designer and developer, leaning into the idea of making variations on games I already love by tweaking and torquing different systems. I love horde survival roguelites. Always have. Even back in the days of Berzerk, which wasn't much of a horde, and then Robotron 2084 which absolutely was.

So making a horde survival roguelite is just tacking the "roguelite" part onto a game i already liked all the way in the beginning. 

The thing is, once you've made a few complete games, you stop needing to copy entire games. You start copying systems and elements and ideas. The horde survival genre is composed entirely of a player avatar that can move and fight, and an ongoing supply of enemies that can move and fight, and those are actually the same thing: it's just that one of them hooks up "move and fight" to player controls, and the other one hooks them to an automated process. 

So you don't need to build a whole bunch of stuff. You just build "move and fight" and hook it up to some animated sprites. And if you do it properly, the next time you need "move and fight," you just grab it out of a previous game and you're done. As you build more and more games with more and more systems, making a new game becomes less about implementing from scratch and more about snapping the systems together like Lego bricks. 

So I'm primarily interested in building more reusable systems, so I can have a sort of personal framework for making lots of games, rather than just a little collection of games that aren't modular enough to pull apart and rearrange. And I find these by poking around inside other people's games. That, I think to myself, is a mechanic I could pull out and add into something of my own in the future. 

The goal, in the end, is to be able to prototype new games VERY QUICKLY. So I can test more games and try more games and ultimately release more games. 

https://youtu.be/cw1I7l3BY1o

I am generally in favour of fetishes, but not this one.