I never try to plan ahead too much for a variety of reasons, most importantly you never know how things are actually going to fit into the game until you get them in, so if you plan too much, you end up either perpetually scrapping ideas that are no longer worthwhile, or worse yet, you stiff arm systems that are going to suck.

This is how the upgrades in the game currently look:

While I believe the systems are now intersting, and the gameplay is getting better, The means by which i communicate the player's growing power is really lacking right now.

If I were a big triple A studio i'd probably ask several teams to create neat icons, and unique UI panels to sift through and soon i'd have this nice looking UI with neat buttons, and expanding scope. But from the start i haven't wanted to deal with UI and part of the apeal of SeaCrit is that the player DOESN"T have to navigate ui, EVER. The player is literally a pointer fish, the player is the mouse pointer.

So i'm going to be "lazy" and try to think of new ways of showing what items do in a more iconic sense. This is also going to heavily affect how I partition upgrades on items, and I'm going to be putting a lot of the "meat and potatoes" of specific bonuses on Unique items. Unique items if you've played Diablo, you will know are the item mods that are not randomized, they are the core sets of bonuses that are hand selected by designers and added to items to give them their own unique flavor. Because these items are non random, I will be able to assign them aesthetics that match their bonuses. I can put a green aura around items that heal the player greatly. I can put spikes on items that give damage shields, etc.

I'm hoping that once I give each item a proper look and color, and fancy effects when they're special, that the player won't feel as though they have no idea what's going on, that they can see spikes on an item and know kinda what it does, and if they want to dive deeper into what "backswing + 1" does, they can open the stats screen and find out.

Don't really feel as though I'm procrastinating with this post, i've gotten so much work done as of late, need a little break. I've been writing lots of cringe blog posts lately, going to scale back the blathering write posts that aren't so spastic.