It's been a very productive week, but today i'm giving myself a little bit of a breather as I gear up to hit this hard again tomorrow.

I can't believe that I'm actually looking forward to working on the game again. This isn't how it's supposed to be, you're supposed to get more and more burned out and the game is supposed to be harder and harder to work on as it comes together.

But I really feel as though things are coming together, and i'm excited to do balance passes on item mods.

Item Mods: I'm fast finding out that small mods for things like backswing (increases charge damage but increases charge time required) is really boring, and you don't "feel it" and your brain doesn't register that it's a "thing". So i'm going to be going through all the mods and ensuring that if it's on an item, you "feel" it. That will likely mean i'll be toning down the max values as well, so instead of the current range of 10% - 100% bonus, it'll likely be more like 40 - 70%, I think that'll be a nice range, with some decent highs and lows without blowing things out too much. It was my intention that having a range of 10- 100% would add some interesting randomness to the game, but really it just makes the low end feel like trash and it's inherently not fun, and just confuses the player so that's getting gutted. I'm going to have to play with mod rarity now since mods are going to be much more powerful much more often, which i like, because I have a crapton of mods and I shouldn't have to dilute the item pool with crappy mods to make the good ones more meaningful, if I just have a ton of mods, they overlap and the game becomes more interesting.

I want to deep dive on just one item mod, and speak to the innate synergy of the systems i've been developing. So you might find an item with the "hurricane" mod on it. This enhances how fast you hit enemies when you spin dash attack them, as well as the sword spin move, so this mod will ensure you hit very often against many enemies, meaning it synergizes well with mods that trigger attack mods like blackjack and unkempt apothecary (it feels so weird to be typing these mods out now that they are ACTUAL item mods spawning in the game, and not just a hypothetical on a spreadsheet), it also synergizes with a mod that gives you a flat exp boost per hit regardless of the damage inflicted. It ALSO pairs well with +damage items as it will apply that raw damage very quickly. Comboist would also pair well, since this attack will allow you to kill lots of tiny enemies very quickly in rapid succession. 

I'm really liking the multidimensional balance that the various paths to power allow for... you might find an item that allows you to gain pearls very fast, so you might gear towards stacking pearl bonuses, which will allow you to buy an item that enhances your exp gain, everything kinda feeds into each other.

I liken the builds that come to mind to a game of poker. Some builds rely on many items, like maxing your damage, but for things like increasing pearl bonuses, it's more like trying to get a "pair" rather than a straight. Some bonuses are peripheral, gained from random drops from enemies and can be layered on top of the random items found in a run, and itemization is that intersting randomized element that makes

I'm thinking of adding "item rarity" and even "item mod rarity" in the future as potential upgrades you can find on items and in shops. Every single new upgrade creates exponentially more build setups and interesting mechanics within the game as they work with each other.

Another thing I'm looking forward to creating are little mini "spawn machine" setups, where several spawn areas exist near each other, and the player can figure out how to best min/max their farming by exploiting these farms. So lets say there's a spawner with a 30 second cooldown, that spawns a big tanky fish that will reduce the spawn time of boss timers by lets say 60 seconds. If the player kills a random NPC that spawns in the level within their spawn region, this would accelerate their spawn time by 6 seconds or so, so very quickly the player would be able to get these fish to spawn, and if they pull them to the boss spawn areas, they will be able to quickly accelerate the spawn times.

I'm really happy with how the spawn setups work to add more nuance and timings and rewards to the game, it feels so much more like a coherent, full gaming experience now that you aren't just swimming around in a void with all the content coming at you randomly from different directions. There is a "world" now to build, there are systems and rewards to design and implement. There are so many ways to inject fun and progression and my mind spins with all the ways I can add cool new upgrades and bonuses. Like I could add more rare potions that drop from fish but make the VERY RARE and make them give some really nice bonus like innate +backswing permanently until the end of your run. I can create all sorts of mish mashed spawn areas, maybe in one area i just add a ton of spawn camps, and the player can swim around and clear them, hoping to get fast enough that they can clear them all before the initial camp respawns at which point they've "maxed" the gains they can get in that area. I can add another spawn camp setup where a fish on a long timer ALWAYS provides a permanent health potion, but maybe every time the fish spawns, an additional 6 seconds are added to the spawn timer, so it starts to become soft capped after being farmed several times. BUT I could add a new powerup that increases the spawn time reduction from killing fish in spawn areas, and this creates entirely new builds that pairs well with other new and emerging builds.

I could very well be crazy, and this game may be crap like before when I thought it was good, but I kinda feel like everything is coming together, that I am actually doing pretty ok at game design, and that all this hard work is finally paying off as the game is "fun". I never in a million years thought I'd be saying this, but i'm actually looking forward to playing the game after I add some of this new stuff. That's f*cking bonkers.