On the verge of another update and burned out from weeks and weeks of solid work in the best way possible. Pretty grateful to just be here and toiling away again distracted by work and seeing progress on the project.

All the looming mountains that seemed so insurmountable are turning into molehills. The big problems of finding the right combinations of fish for engagements and wondering how many zones I'd need and where the hell the fun is going to be found and how do I extend that fun to last the entirety of a game has slowly been dissipating. For so long it was "what do i add to salvage this project", but I've come to realize that this question has poisoned development for a long long time. It's not about what you add to your project, it's about fixing the foundations. The "superficial" things aren't superficial. Well timed animations, the perfect dash speed, the right enemy projectile speed, the perfect amount of time for an enemy to give up chasing you. 

Each and every little thing makes your game 1% better, you will spend hours and hours playing the same fucking fish doing the same fucking attacks for the millionth time to tweak the smallest aspect of your abilities and AI to make the most infinitesimal fraction of your game better. But inch by inch those little factors add up. Your combat after weeks of toil is 10% better, your AI after months of grind is 20% better, you spent a few minutes adjusting sounds and the game is 3 percent better. Those changes are not additional, they are multipliers, and week after week those hard earned gains start becoming exponential. Those inches you clawed for with your fingernails are yards now.

There is no singular thing stopping your game being great, there is no missing feature you need to creep into your game, you wont have some epiphany, no matter how much you want it, where one line of code will change your project from a failure into something great. The true test in gamedev is one we often prolong, and that is our ability to keep pushing. Keep making that core basic thing your guy does when you press that simple little button better. Whether that's mario making a jump with perfect physics or ryu firing a haduken, it has to be fun and flawless  and by working on other shit to get that high of progress prolongs our inevitable failure if we're not able to hunker down, accept things are failed as is, and rebuild.

Then fail again, then rebuild again, then have a prolonged breakdown and then come back again and finally fucking do it right and stop taking shortcuts.

THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF THINGS wrong with your game, tiny little things, small adjustments, small additions needed. Not big things, not huge systems. "Art is never finished, it's abandoned", often times we never commit to the core of our game, and we wander aimlessly as it slowly dies away.

You need to work on the core experience, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over until your game does the simple and basic things other games do... but better. Sleeker and more responsive, it needs to feel better. Don't fall into standard conventions for standard convention's sake, many things are done for a reason, many things aren't. If you can figure out the difference, it will make the difference. Working on a solo project it's all about picking your battles, where can your small amount of manpower make a difference? 

What can you do that's more fun? Ok great, now polish it more because fuck it, it's the only thing you can do to get out of this hell.

I think we become consumed by the end goal, so much so that we lose sight of the problems that are right in front of us. "This game needs to be a fun roguelike that can be played for years after years and never get old", or whatever "vision" you have for the game in your head. As you develop your core systems, instead of taking baby steps towards an expandable core, you allow your grand vision to muddy everything and instead of setting up your core move set and creating a singular perfect enemy and AI, you fixate on exposing lots of variables and pipelines for content for things that you haven't even proven are worthy of existing yet. 

For a lot of time I fixated on the challenge aspect of things, "the AI needs to do more things, there needs to be more of this type of fish, the engagement needs to be more complex". This wasn't the correct answer, and I built up mountains of excess complexity that made the game punishing to play. Fun does not lie in the player having to deal with complex bullshit coming at them, the fun comes from the player having a wealth of options to lay siege to things. Don't spend too much effort challenging the player, spend your efforts empowering them, confuse them with the shear number of ways they can be strong and have fun.

It's been a real fucking journey to even get to this moment of absolute 0 fucking tangible return on all this investment in this empty void, but a sense of hope that this won't be an abject failure is coming back, a sense that this game is actually not dog shit and might be worth playing soon. So my advice to anyone wanting to create a game would be to not focus on big things at all like replayability, or huge swathes of content. Focus on making one single experience. Don't think about making iterations of content easier for mass content, don't spread yourself thin or you'll end up going down a rabbit hole of failures, you'll spend untold hours making shit that's worthless, then you will spend even more time extracting that shit and the real cost comes in the form of dead motivation. You will have found too much joy in spinning wheels in mud and in creating things for the sake of feeling good about creating things. You will create nonsense from a fiction in your head, perfect only in your imagination, not tuned from rigorous testing to to shape its form to its function. This is all advice we've heard before. "polish is everything", "the last 10% is 90% of the work", "save it for the sequel". But I've always had to learn the hard way.

As Bruised Lee would say if he were alive today and a game developer: 

"I don't fear the game that produces 10,000 hours of content, I fear the game that produces 10 seconds of content that I want to experience 10,000,000 times."