Content is a prison

If you have content, you aren't free to make your game better you're a slave to not breaking that content. I'm really glad I took the jump to radically chaning the environment. I didn't make the concious decision to start from scratch, I migrated to Unity's terrain because I was sick of dealing with wonky stitched together meshes. While replacing the ground, the rest of the Environment didn't fit. One thing led to another and the next day i found i was working in an empty scene, all the rambling BS psychosis I was blathering about was gone all that was left was the smallest feasible gameplay environment. I really can't describe how freeing this was and it's been changing how I view the project lately.

So often we expend so much brainpower trying to just keep up with how the various imperfect systems within our game work that we lose that perspective of wanting to create something fun that drew us to create a game in the first place. I THINK things are going well again, and I'm allowing myself to make crazy design changes and try to think of the game withotu any sort of reservation towards what was next on the milestone list, or what "isn't possible". I'm finding that it's a lot better to try to do what you think will be fun in the moment, and finagle things to be better than trying to stiff arm things you thought were going to be fun.

It's hard to describe, but you brain gets locked into going through the motions, and you no longer see your project as game, and you're incapable of having the same sort of feedback and foresight for what would make it more fun, because your brain is so hyper involved with the various technical setups within trying to get day to day tasks done. Your brain kind of shuts down so it can make what it thinks is important progress. I've been learning the hard way that the only important progress is making the game the absolute best it can be. Better to have 15 seconds of good gameplay than 5 minutes of bloated trash.

Year after year I think I'm starting to understand what is meant by "your game isn't done when you have everything in it you want, it's done when you take everything out that it doesn't need." As a casual observer we can easily imagine how much better a game would be with lots of excess stuff. More items, more enemies, more areas, a broader story, deeper combat, whatever. What we don't experience first hand is the exponential upkeep these components begin to have when you stack them on each other. Your game will only be as good as its weakest link, and any system that requires polish to be "up to quality" is ultimately drawing quality that could be going into making other areas better.

I used to look forward to moving on to doing new animations, or beggining work on an epic story, or creating new areas to explore, adding more fish types. But lately i've been very content just building up the absolute core systems, and developing the core item system. It was interesting timing because I saw Rhyker put out a video today on Diablo 4 and the Diablo universe is a huge inspiration for seacrit now that i'm working on an item system that harkens back to this classic IP and I figured I might as well talk about some of the design elements i'm going for with my crappy indie game and the lessons I've taken from Diablo 1, 2, and 3.

I'm actually a little burned out from actually getting solid work done consistently lately (so happy to be working) so I won't ramble too too long but here are some issues i'm wanting to sort out and how i'm planning on getting around them.

1. Item noise. There are so many modifiers that serve no purpose otehr than to make the actual decent modifiers more rare. Seacrit is more an action game than RPG, so it doesnt' make sense for me to have the player sifting over crappy items to find a decent one, so i'm not going to be adding modifiers that aren't impactful and interesting. I'm trying to reimagine what combat means from a progression sense, and i'm trying to avoid the single button do everything concept from other games. I want the player to find interesting items that amplify different playstyles they never thought to do before, I want every attack, every item, every fish type to potentially be OP if you get the right random drop, but I want there to be enough sense that the player is able to react to these items and make the right purchase and selectively equip the next item to best pair with the lucky drops they get game after game. I could write tons more about every item mod i'm adding but I don't want to drone on too long, but what i've tried to do is spread the power over many items and many builds and many playstyles so that the optimal play involves mastery of multiple attacks and playstyles and strategies, so the optimal way to play is to employ a wealth of attacks and to play differently each time through. If you want to do optimal damage for example you would open with a charged heavy hitting attack, getting the absolute most out of your surprise crit bonus as you can get, then you would max your poison duration, then smash the enemy with an attack that eviscerates and amplifies damage from other sources, then you would use whatever attack your current build gives the best bonus to, all while avoiding damage in a wealth of ways that i've been trying to flesh out with new movement and charge mechanics. 

2. Perfect builds and bland avenues of progression. Is anyone else getting sick of maxing out crit, damage, attack speed, and lifetap? Lifetap was pandoras box in that once you do enough damage, the smallest bit will keep you alive forever. There is no nuance to pressing one button that simultaneously kills everything on screen and translates that damage into life making you invincible. I get that this is fulfilling and serves as a satisfying end goal, but the problem with games like diablo is the majority of the time you play is in this end goal state so the game becomes insanely repetitive and stale. A huge compenent of seacrit is that it's looking to be a bite sized gameplay experience akin to DOTA and LOL where you can experience a progression arc over a half hour or so, have the thrill of loading up your first set of items quickly and becoming a bit pickier and trying to find just quality rares with solid prefixes and suffixes towards the end. I'm also trying to steer clear of the trap of linear damage gains through the tired means of endless modifiers on items that simply make you deal more damage with no intesting layering of play mechanics. A lot of the power growth in seacrit I see coming from many means, one is how fast you can farm pearls so you can buy up predictable upgrades and items that will scale all manner of stat, as well as grinding levels with various fish types, each one bestowing bonuses for unique stats. You'll want to spend some time with a sniper rifle in a somewhat vulnerable state to get your base damage up, you'll need to spend a bit of time fighting fish as a shark to get your health up, and as a ranged fish to boost up regen which is going to be valuable for bosses when other means of getting health back disappear.

3. Uninspired builds. Take away the fancy particles and the unique sound effects, and the classes and all that jazz and what you're left with is a button that delivers a chunk of damage. It's all a facade generated by 3d and effects artist and sound designers to try to fool you into thinking this new fireball is more enticing than the last one. You can dress up a pawn or rook all you want, you can create complex attack animations akin to battle chess and it won't change the heart of the game, it's still chess. But chess is fantastic and deep, it has incredible positioning depth and nearly infinite states to ensure every game is inthralling and unique. Most ARPG's lack this, most screens of enemies are just a gear check and you're able to hurdle through swathes of enemies, or you're not. Between the lackluster engagements and the bland damage scaling the entire process of playing just feels like a reskinned version of better games from the past.

Games that have too finite a state just aren't that exicting to play. Checkers, tick tac toe, monopoly. You can enjoy them from time to time, but they lack the staying power to be something to truly indulge in. So I'm trying to add more nuance to the movements of abilities, to the secondary aspects of poison slow, attack slow, and damage over times. I'm trying to spread these things around so that play is more interesting and less easy to optimize, while still leaving enough room for some meat and potatoes rewards of just smashing through enemies most the time. It's hard finding the right balance, and keeping that blanace through the multiple dimensions of random items, scaling difficulty and varying player skill of potential users.

4. This has nothing to do with what I was talking about before but it's something i've been thinking a lot about lately and that's our want as a designer creating a game with lots of progression to make core gameplay unenjoyable so we can put an upgrade in the game to make the player now feel as though they're more powerful. I've been fighting the urge to make core attacks slow, to make the player swim super slow, to give them too little health. I've found you REALLY don't want to make the core play crappier to validate progression systems. Diablo 2 notoriously had this annoying stamina bar, that became irrelevant once you got enough stat points into stamina. Luckily the rest of diablo 2 was fantastic enough taht players overlooked this. But what if just a few more things were gimped at the start to validate some progression mechanic? It doesn't take a lot to throw off the core play and make it crap.

Is there a long way to go before this is a full featured game?  HELL YES. But I'm optimistic that i'm getting closer to that core gameplay that is worth pushing to be a full game. And who knows what this crazy ass world has in store in the future, one can go crazy worrying about the random madness and the future it has in store for us all. I've been doing my best to tune out the noise and push forward doing the only thing I know how to do (mind you, I did NOT say good at): make stupid fucking video games.

I'm trying to focus on the core play and not get caught up making content as I did in the past. No new zones, no tutorial updates explaining new features, no new fish, no more blathering my psychosis into the game with random bullshit designer notes. Work is 100% focused on creating the best game possible by feeling out the foundations. It's painful to think about when you're knee deep creating complex new systems but there are some complex ai stuff I want to add in the future. I'd like to get "schools of fish" in, so large packs of enemies that would be fun to mow down, I think that's a big part of what makes an ARPG an ARPG is the diversity of combat scenarios between fighting a few scattered enemies and hordes of them, It should be as simple as giving them a shared destination and agro target, may have to play around with repulsion so they don't bunch up too much. And aside from that, who knows? I've been developing by the seat of my pants lately and I'm pretty happy with hte results, trying to force myself to view my game as the gamer I was years ago who wasn't bogged down by technical restrictions and just wondered what would make a better game. Another thing I need to do is think of way to make it more fun to beat up fish. Right now it gets a little boring just stunning them and beating the heck out of them ad nausium. I'd like to add "critical" areas to fish that are very small, but if hit dead on deal more damage.  I'll also be trying to figure out how to make the game feel more like a fun button masher brawler. Right now SeaCrit lacks a bit of the button smashing goodness of a solid fighting game, where you deliver a string of button mashes, see you fish slam out a flury of interesting attacks, and the enemy get stun locked with great damage taking animations. Considering I don't have animators or designers to help me flush out a full combat system that's probably a stupid idea, but everything up till now was also a stupid idea, so i'm not ruling it out!

Optimistic this won't be dog shit soon. Hoping to have a new build very soon. I'm pretty happy with how all these changes have been coming together. The shitshow goes on.

Trying to have a new build in the next few days.