When you have an idea for something cool and new in your head, the first thing you need to do is implement the damned thing. When I started this project I had this cool idea in my head that i was going to get a lot more out of just 2 buttons than most other games, and in persuit of that I have added multiple charge levels that reveal new attacks as charge level increases, i've added secondary inputs so if you're charging with button A and press button B you will execute an alternative attack. I've got charged attack and combo attacks and scaling attributes based on charge.

Sometimes we become too satisfied with simply getting systems in and working with other systems and we become influenced by our own creations to want to keep them in the game because we don't want to waste hard gained systems that took a long time to implement.

As I was testing the game today I had a common nagging feeling while charging attacks, I could never quit remember which button would execute which ability. I attributed that to the fact that I was constantly changing setups, and told myself that new players would be able to figure it out since things will be "stable" then. But I thought about it, and i decided that that was a white lie I was telling myself and the dual input system was simply confusing. So i decided to take it out.

The controls are now a lot simpler, you have your combo attacks per button and a charged attack. That's it. And now that I've taken it out, I feel like everything "fits". It feels like a coherent whole now with no excess random crap for the sake of having excess crap.

I used to always wrestle with balancing the combo attack and the other 2 charged abilities. On the shark, the combo bites could deal damage and lifesteal, and the charged attacks would either deal damage or lifesteal. It was muddy. I was always trying to tweak them so they were all relevant, but you ended up with 3 attacks doing 2 different things, not to mention always being confused about what ability you would end up using while charging.

It's so much cleaner and easier to figure out now. Your tap combo attacks lifetap a good bit, and do a fair bit of damage, and your charged bites now just do heavy damage. Bing bang boom, very simple. If you need life back you combo bite by pressing button B rapidly, if you only want to do damage, you hold button B to charge it.

The potential for dual charge attacks is still there, and the ranged fish still maintain this nuance, but dashes have been made simple, as has the starting fish, and I think it feels really good and I think it's starting to be a much more pick up and play game now.

This has also allowed me to really embellish the difference between the low charge attack and the full charge attack. The dash stun does almost no damage and 0 charge, but does a ton more stun, at full charge it does almost no stun and lots of damage. Just having one dynamic attack per charge button is enough to make combat strategic and interesting and the gameplay just feels "whole" now.

I think I've FINALLY locked in the core play mechanics for the player. I also finally got in a "dumb" fish that's easy and fun to fight. For a long time i've been meaning to get my "Gumba" in the game, and I think I've finally got a start on it that i'm happy with. Until now i've been creating way too advanced fish to spar against and to create the spawn lists. We tend to fixate on fully featured enemies that are super smart  and do advanced crap to try to make our game interesting, but that's the wrong way to go about things. We want a really stupid easy to attack enemy to develop our core play with, when we have that, then we are free to fixate on what makes play actually fun, how does the player unleash on enemies? Golden eye is a good example of this, the enemies were really dumb and they were tanky as hell, and it was so much fun to fill them with bullets and see them ragdall as they try to compose themselves to fight back. 

New build is really close, keep getting sidetracked fixing things i'm only just coming to realize are broken. I'm burning out a little faster than the past few weeks, but still making really solid progress every day so that's really damned satisfying.

Only things left to do before I put out a new build: get rare loot with cool modifiers working and maybe some spiffy particles and crap, and I need to revisit upgrades and tune them to work with item stats as well as do a pass over them and see which ones are worth keeping and which ones need the axe. Also have some ideas for some new upgrades/ item modifiers: swap timer, damage and health exp, lucky (more likely to find items with modifiers), Backswing (longer charge time, but higher stun/ damage), dash charge/ ability charge reduction.

I'm also going to do a twist on how items work, in most games you have Unique items, with their own stats and those exist apart from items that are given random prefixes and suffixes, but I'm going to try making "unique" items the standard, and i'll slap prefixes and suffixes on them and I think this is going to make itemization a lot more exciting and fun. Some items will be very rare and powerful, and some prefixes and suffixes will also be very rare and powerful, and I think that's going to make for some really fun item hunting.

I'm anticipating this will take about 2 to 3 days, barring running into other random things that I decide to revamp on a whim.