So I've been working like a crazy person lately so I took a break today, but ended up just working on random secondary things.

When you push forward really hard, and you make a ton of progress across several systems, there is always a piper that needs paying. Lots and lots of little tiny things pop up. One tiny example, I added this tiny functionality that turns regen red when it's negative for whatever reason. Well  I had inadvertantly said turn back to "white" when positive, not thinking becaues positive regen is green in the UI. So I spent a few minutes hunting down the text, sure that I had simply changed the color, only to realize that that wasn't the case, and had to find the little code snipped that was wrong. This sort of stuff always takes more time than you think it's going to. You really think in your head "My game is going to be better than other games, because I'm going to spend more time on the stuff that matters." but over a long period of time of making a crappy game, you come to realize, "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu-, if my game is going to be even decent I have to pound my head against the wall fixing annoying tertiary shit."

I find myself making all the same mistakes other games make, and it kinda drives me mad at times, because if you want to be better than those games, you have to fix those mistakes. Realizing certain upgrades aren't that fun, or that certain upgrades are very powerful and must be nerfed, and this often throws off the entire balance of the game, and every time you add something there's that nagging feeling of "THIS MUST BE MADE MORE POLISHED TO BE WORTH HAVING!". 

You can never just make something great as a solo dev. I envy people on larger teams often when it comes to having the time to just make something great and polished and clean and well ordered so that if you ever come back to it you're greated with well named variables, tidy layers, comments that make sense, meticulously laid out orders of operations and logic, well named files, etc. SeaCrit is a mish mash of violent mediocrity in most areas as I scramble to make this above decent before I burn out and die or who knows what ends this project.

I'm juggling so many things right now, and it's draining just trying to keep track of it all and figuring out the best order in which to do things... Should I finally hunker down and clean up the damage #'s so they actually make sense in my head? The items and their scaling i've barely touched on, but enemies aren't balanced either so if i spend time balancing either it'll just break how the other scales. Better to just keep it looes and bring other large systems online and sweat the details later. Huge UI elements have just been added, lots of spawn stuff, lots of content creation for NPC's that can drop items.

It's mind boggling how easy it is to gloss over the "tiny details" that support a full fledged game, espeically an RPG. When you're starting you're thinking, "What overarching mod would I add that would be really fun to have on items?", what you dont' realize is you're going to spend most your time steaking the particle spawn rates of the bubbles that exist on the potions that drop from enemies, then you'er going to see that those bubbles improperly sort through your item text making it hard to read, so you lower the sorting value of the bubbles but now it's rundering behind the potion itself so you open the shader of the bubbles and so some crap in there and now it's sorting properly, but you forgot that those bubbles use the same shader, and now all yoru projectile attacks aren't working right, so you need to duplicate the shader, but you didn't name it right, and accidnetly overwrote the main shader, and whatya know, UNITY JUST CRASHED, GOD FUCKING DA-. This is just a hypothetical situation, but there has been worse.

Anyhow, blessing and a curse as always being a solo dev. No support to pick up the slack and help polish things and make systems that are great, but at the same time, "If you want something right, do it yourself". I'm able to work on many systems at once, and there is inherent value in being able to track down bugs and keep the overarching pipeline moving forward, I can make lateral movements WAY faster than larger teams, and I can take shortcuts that I don't need to document or come back to. It's an absolute shit show madhouse but it works, and the game is getting better and more coherent and finding its identity every single day.

Oh and I did a good bit of little polish elements to hit animations, sounds, and overall post process graphics and some tweaks to how ocean colors change as you dive deeper into the water. All those little tiny things you iterate on hours and hours a day for years and years on end really seem to make all the difference in the world, the "je n'est sais quoi" of polish that you can't put your finger on but makes a game enjoyable to play and just stew in. All the damage numbers and systems are crucial, but so are the little tiny "superfluous things". 5 years into making this game and it's enough to drive you mad if you think too much about just HOW MUCH WORK is currently sitting in there. How can 1 day of work affect that pile of duct tape and broken code? You set to get work done, get side tracked, and 9 hours later you can't even remember what you worked on and the TODO list is longer than yesterday, but inch by inch the game gets better. I was enjoying getting smacked about after fixing up some broken bits of the animatino system that I had totally forgotten I was going to fix some 6 months ago. Also the animations were shit, so I threw together some really fast ones. I often wonder how badass the game would look if I had a few thousand to throw at some really top tier animations above the 5 minute abominations I throw together between fits of code and some really top tier floating corals and seaweed. Eh, I don't think what I'm working with is half bad either... something to look forward to in the future should this project ever find success. 

I'm finding it's really hard to relax when you're going a hundred miles a minute most days for many hours on end and writing this blog post it's like I feel the need to regurgitate every miniscule thought I had regarding the game.

Anyhow, gamedev is weird, it's so damned demanding that writing a long winded blog post about how much of a pain in the ass gamedev is is actually kinda relaxing in comparison.

Alrighty, enough blathering for today! After a solid day of not taking a break and getting a solid chunk of work done, I am still EXACTLY one days worth of work away from this all coming together, as has been the case for about 3 months now.

Edit: OH! And shoutout to Cain for somehow stumbling on this game, trying the demo and leaving a comment! 2 YEAR streak of being a total marketing failure broken! (kind of)