Ideas are as much a plague as they are opportunities

There is nothing worse than an idea you can't realize.

Ideas are fun to play with, and it's cool to think about how they'll evolve and grow. They are also a pain in the ass, because as soon as you try to make them real you will always run into problems. Some problems are low hurdles that help define the idea, sometimes in interesting ways you didn't anticipate. Some problems lead you to deep, frustrating places, and those are the ones you have to try and fight against.

Scope creep will happen to everyone, even to the best of designers and creators. While it can feel awesome to tackle all those challenges, at some point you have to set them aside if you've decided you want to actually release something. That is the real challenge, and it's hard. Letting go of something that feels brilliant can feel demoralizing, frustrating, and make you doubt yourself and your abilities. It can feel like loss. The time and effort spent on something won't always translate to an improved experience for the audience. They might not even notice, and that sucks just as much as feeling like you gave up on something.

The reality is that this can be one of the most impressive and mature things you can do. It's not a failure, it's an accomplishment. This update is only slightly later than I wanted because I did it. This is mostly me talking to myself, because some part of me still doesn't want to accept it. I'm hopeful (if not confident) that in a few days I'll look back on those efforts and be thankful I managed to pull myself away from them, even if only for a little while.

Maybe I'll get back to them, maybe I won't, but if I want to stick to my goal of actually releasing something I have to step back and decide how important they are to the final experience, and to me. Even now as I look at them, most of them are really not that important.

With all that in mind, here's the limited changelog of what I managed to get in:

• Reduced music stuttering in WebGL builds "well enough". Several things went into this:
• Changes in FMOD to split sound effects into their own sound bank and increase transition time between music changes
• Added a loading screen to preload sound banks and main menu screen (This also allows the game to start faster in the browser)
• Changed the frequency of music changes
• Tweaked various project build settings
• Added volume sliders to Options screen

The music stuttering itself was a huge distraction, but at least the amount and kinds of things I learned made it worthwhile. I hope. Here's some of the other things I started that I had to shelve for now:

• Asynchronous scene loading
• Fullscreen toggle
• Use shader graphs, for reasons

I'm hoping that I can get this project to a more-or-less final state before the end of the year. I may come back afterwards to fix some of the more incidental bugs, but otherwise I want to let it stand as the small, slapdash toy that it is. I hope you'll at least think it's cute.

--Jose