Around 3 years ago, something incredible happened. 2 of my testers fought over the controller because they really wanted to keep playing the game. That was a pretty amazing day, but it was pretty short lived. It's one thing to make a singular moment, to dump some money and art into a game and throw together a little level that has some level of immediate pull, it's an entirely different beast to get players to want to play again for a cohesive gameplay experience. There have been many playtests since then, none of them were all that groundbreaking.

Today after a very long slog, I finally got some feedback on the project, and it went really well. We kinda agreed about what could be made better, and they even came up with an idea that I implemented today to help with the readability of upgrades, when you level up, a tooltip flashes on the screen that shows what that bonus is. Speaking of, I should probably also show the item type that gave it, adding that to my to do list now. It feels very vampire survivors and I really dig that, because that game is awesome.

Moving on to actually getting work done. Holy crap, can I just say I haven't been this much of a work horse in YEARS. I've been feeling like my old self that felt he could actually make his own game with unlimited gamedev energy these days, 10 hour day after 10 hour day lately. Brains been turning to mush, it's weird how much sitting at a desk can take out of you when you're brains firing off in 10 different directions managing to do lists, writing code, and doing design for hours on end. I'm trying to at least get a little exersize every day so my body can keep up with the mental strain, been getting light headed while working lately and it really sucks.

Code today was an absolute sh*tshow:

UI is not my forte, and I know 100% that a lot of my code turned to spaghetti, it's especially bad when I interface with old code I wrote when i was even worse of a coder than I am now, and I'm just knee deep in the noodles of sh*t logic and systems, so there's no point in trying to be clean I just try to get that shit done so i can call it done and close it and never look at the pile of trash again.

It's funny how incompetent I am at a lot of things and here I am trying to make a full fledged game. The video's pretty embarrassing, I mess up almost everything and everything breaks and it was a total slog, but whatever, you just put yoru head down and you get the crap done, because it needs to get done, you just beat your head against the wall till things work. That's gamedev. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to work.

It's been such a crazy road getting this far, never thought I'd get the items in, never thought i'd get the bosses in and the upgrades, and all this crap. And here they are! And I'm even adding sh*t I never thought of, spawn camps, new upgrade types, shops. It's pretty nuts. I'm pretty limited by how much polish i can put into them, but I'm pretty happy with the hodge podge of cheap as dirt assets i've thrown together over the years from the unity asset store. A universal sound pack, some UI bars, a hat pack, some very talented and modestly priced contract artists I was happy to work with all those years ago back when I had a little pocket change...

Most days I curse this cave, it's groundhogs day all over again. But lately things feel different, it feels like the mountain grade is starting to level off, and things are coming together, and i'm nearing a state where i don't have to obsess over dev so friggin' hard like it's life or death day after day. It's starting to show it's promise. Is that promise good enough to garner any success? Who knows, but I'm so damned glad to finally be putting together the game I always wanted to. I will have the satisfaction of knowing I made my game my way and I pushed it to a degree that I was ok with. I'm not just saying this when I say I think I could be ok with failure. More than ever I see the world for the mad house it is, and we're all crazy. So maybe i'm just mad, or maybe the world is bonkers, and maybe nothing comes of all this, but despite all that craziness I put in a lot of hours and put this mad little experiment together.

The trek isn't over, but I feel as though I'm over the hump. Time to bring all these damned systems together.  It's been almost a decade since I started this damnable thing. All because I thought I could create  a few weapon mods better than what was in Diablo 3. It's like starting your own meat factory because you like eating hot dogs. I SLAUGHTERED ALL THE THINGS TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

Edit: Big brain happy accident time. So i went in really quick because i remembered i wanted to differentiate spin dash from stun dash, so i was trying some new animations and sounds, (it's so weird when you make something better in your game htat's been a certain way for years, you know you will never see that old thing again) when I randomly got a level up for stuns with the new overlay setups, and it just so happened to be while I was using hte stun attack . And my brain registered it as "hey you were stunning thoes enemies and you leveled up your stun!" And that was WAY better than the convoluted system of before where you never really knew which weapon you used and why you were getting power. It was TERRIBLE f*cking "conveyance".

(11 minute mark)

So one thing we do as game designers is we come up with these crazy new rules about what's going to be fun, and especially when we're working on our first game, we tend to overindulge in trying new things because we haven't leaned the hard way what works and what doesn't. I had this idea "i'm going to make each weapon have its own unique exp type, and every time the player does damage with it, that weaopn will give bonuses for a different type of power and this will encourage the player to use lots of different weapons.  AND EACH CLASS WILL HAVE THEIR OWN DEFENSIVE EXP TYPE! being a shark will grant more HP, being a poiner will give regen! Players will be able to farm exp by taking tons of hits, it'll be a total inversion of the normal exp model. Players will gather hoards of enemise and just sit there taking hits! It'll be wild! It'll be loads of fun and something different.

But here's the problem we don't get until we put the system in and it's not working. It doesn't "fit" the rational structures in our brain, the way we learn the world and the way certain universal constants can't be undone, nor should they.  We innately know that if you do something you get good at it, it doesn't matter if there are arbitrary systems designed to be more fun by encouraging you to do other things so other things get better.

But here's the thing, because of hte itemizations and the mods, these weapons all inherently synergize with each other anyhow! So since the sword has the best stun, it inherently allows you to stun best! Items that have camo and let you sneak up on enemies or that have speed will inhernetly let you do more crits and get more crit exp. These are all way more interesting and sublte, and more ineresting than I planned in my head. It's so nice when the overall nuances of position and speed, and abilities all already have an organic equilibrium and synergy about them such that a lot of the design just conjures itself out of thin air rather than you thinking you're going to think of something obtuse and clever and with a lot of overhead to do something new.

P.S. I'm keeping the inverted exp farming, hits as sharks will grant more HP,  hits as Pointer will grant regen. The system wasn't a total bust. Cut the bad, but keep the good!