I've had ranged fish in my game for a long time, have had janky keep heading mechanics for a long time, and for a very long time I think they've been just that, janky, not fun. I HOPE that they are finally crossing a threshold where they are actually a GOOD thing to have in the game, that now having ranged attacks AND Melee is making Seacrit better. It's crazy how long we can spend working on lots of content that makes our game worse until we are able to finally push them to a threshold that they make the game better for having them.

This IMO is the biggest hard learned lesson in gamedev, learning that more things means your other things wont be as good, not just because of resources put elsewhere, but because of a falling quality bar as you add more and more mediocre things.

If I could do this all over again, I wouldn't do so much extra stuff, phone controls, controller controls, gamepay, mouse... I had to solve an edge case today where the controller wouldn't allow you to turn left or right, because it tends to default to a perfectly left/right or up/down state, and when i normalize these directions the game deosn't know how to wrap around to the left or right, so wrote a workaround where if the desired direction is perfectly in one direction to offset things slightly. This is just one random edge case that starts poluting your code. As you start making more complex movement and combat mechacnics more and more issues can pop up that make you wonder WTF is going on and why they're happening. The only way to get decent at solving and preventing these issues is to run into them and to get better at creating these systesm, structure them better, name them better, plan for future mecahnics better, all that jazz.

Sometimes I wish my codebase would just get nuked for these core systems, and I'd be forced to start from scratch now that I know WTF i'm doing, but they're working and they're mostly doign what I want them to do, so whatever.

As always I'm hoping that maybe the game is starting to not be dog shit, and not a lot of random subpar crap strewn about.