I Quit My Day Job to Spend Two Years Coding My Dream Game It Sucks, Please Help

I made "minecraft but you start on your own tiny-prince style asteroid in an asteroid belt, play around there then eventually maybe work to make some sort of propulsion for your asteroid so you can go bump into other asteroids and get bigger and meet your neighbors and eventually colonize really big ones, sort of mostly cubical asteroids where I fudge gravity so you can stand on any face and sort of smoothly roll around as you cross the edges".

Frameworks annoy me so I just used OpenGL on macOS and iOS. Likewise I built my own multiplayer networking. Physics is just physics, so that isn't a problem once you discover quaternions, except that I had to change it to make things work better. Spectral harmonic lighting with ambient occlusion made a nice looking world. Bump maps are hard to paint, so I built a rig and wrote a bunch of software so I could sculpt a bump map tile in modeling clay, lay it in the rig, let it cycle through 8 different lighting directions while taking pictures, then compute the bump map for the game to use.

Eventually we could run around and modify my little 128^3 starter asteroid. And I had a bush (well tree) which I made in Blender. It was the test case for the 3d models for non-cubes. If you stood real close to it you could hear me saying "I'm a tree…" over and over. Had to test my ambient audio system too.

And there it stopped. I still feel badly that if you manage to find it, run it, and the server, and mine to the center of mass of your asteroid, and pass through just the right spot with your little person you will be flung so far into space you won't even be able to see the sun. Darn that 1/ϵ hiding in the physics code.

I can't imagine how insufferable a job it is checking that mailbox every day.

(But nobody is willing to pay editors anymore, so everything we read tops out at level 1. Sigh.)