So dev has slowly become more steady as of late which seems bizarre as i've kinda been wallowing in writers block for too long and getting a solid day of work done feels outright amazing and outlandish. I'm hoping it becomes the norm again as it was long ago.

It's deja vu all over again as I think the game is finally becoming kinda good. It's crazy to think back on all the iteration and how much was implemented and extracted as wheels turned in mud, but finding the proper setups for innovative new things ins't as easy as you think it's going to be when you're wearing many hats and wanting to will a fun little time waster into existence so badly.

Anyhow, i'm rambling (deja vu all over again). I felt compelled to write this as a funny happy accident happened recently. One of the playable fish had "spin charge" enabeled for the dash attacks, which I usually reserve for ranged fish on their attack charge up. But it seemed to fit really well and I thought to myself, "maybe I should swap the spin animation to be global for all fish when they charge their dash attack". So I did that, and it felt really good, but then the charge up for bites on the starting shark just felt empty.

So I decided to add a "slowly open your mouth" animation that would play when you charge up your bite with the shark. And for whatever reason this purely cosmetic change just really fuckin' tied the 2 button setup together, and helps convey that you're either charging a dash or a bite and locks in your head what the 2 buttons do. Really feels cohesive and like a real organic, fun input system now (I hope). I've also fleshed out a bit the identity of bite and dash, and tooled with combat a ton. I'm leaning towards taking out stun, because as I add more nuance there's more back and forth in combat and just perma stunning fish and walloping them mindlessly feels like a cop out. 

But who knows, a lot of the stuff I was excited for in the past ended up being dog shit so this is all just an insane adventure in development craziness.

Anyhow, lots of big changes and polish going on. I was REALLY fucking stupid to make so many types of fish, abilities, ranged combat and melee combat, multiple zones and shit this early on with no prior successes or any form of backing, but fucking whatever, it is what it is. 

I think it's starting to come together despite it all which for all i know is typical delusions of grandeur that's all too common in gamedev.

I've inadvertently been developing some spawn systems that i I can tweek a bit and allow testers to setup various spawn setups with different arrangements of fish, and I think that'll help me envision what sorts of combat environments players will enjoy. Right now I've just got tons of random fish and i've been adjusting and tweaking them for so long I don't even know what's fun any more.  

I've also reworked block to reflect enemy projectiles and have an offensive component per feedback and will be augmenting it further to diminish in power over time if you do it too much.  I'm pretty happy with block being worth using now.

So 1 year since my last post and it's "LOOK GUYS, THE SHARK OPENS IT'S MOUTH! WOOHOO!" Kinda rough to think abouyt how slow dev has been lately, but at least things are picking up.