I'm kind of dumbstruck by how little I had planned for this game so many years ago, I figured i'd make some fish, throw some stats on them, add fish parts and everything would come together. I thought I'd just smash genres together easily and have the best game ever. There is a lot of hubris in armature ignorance.

Anyway, over the years i've thrown many systems in and now SeaCrit is a strange amalgamation of mechanics that worked and didn't work so well, but I'm hoping that I'm learning along the way. I'm trying to tread the razors edge of adding new stuff, keeping forward momentum, and not burning out so much the project dies.

Damn I'm a broken record.

To the subject at hand, I'm pretty happy with how things are going, and I think I am finally piecing together what I hope can be the core identity of the play of seacrit. I think poker is a great analogy, a lot of times you can just bank on getting a quick pair, a very simple hand that wins a bulk of scenarios, but then you have 3 of a kind, or full houses, and the path to these hands starts strong, and can build into something even stronger, we can think of this in the sense of getting your standard damage amp, crit amp, attack speed, etc. etc. But I also want to add some curveballs, maybe you know of a chest hidden deep in the game where if you can get enough armor or stealth, you can sneak in and get a big cash bonus, and use that money to farm up in a path alternative to the run of the mill grinding. 

It's imoprtant that these random spikes of power aren't just mindless, I want these to tie into play in intersting ways such that if the player is to maximize their potential they must identify their strength and then supliment that with their play style and suporting items and purchases which FURTHER augment how they play and progress. I want there to be ebbs and flows to wether a player goes off to some far away area to try to sneak into a shop to buy an upgarde ahead of time, or fighting a rare fish in one area to get some quick bonus and returning to where they can comfortably farm exp bonuses.

BUT! It's important that I do not subvert expectations too much, the meat and potatoes of fighting enemies is absolutely teh core of this game, the thign that the vast majority of overarching systems tie together to do. Action RPG goodness is the core of the game, i have spent years building up those foundations and learning the concepts of creating that experience, if I try to change direction on a dime and indulge in exploration or story in this moment, I'm spreading myself thin and abandoning what I hope I am close to achieving,  a fun game. 

I need to build up interesting potential paths of power within that overdone sphere of damage, crits, and haste in this core set of play. SeaCrit is all about finding a fun new weapon, or piece of armor, getting lots of pearls, and buying cool new upgrades, and feeling that satisfying growth of power, while discovering "seacrits" in the ocean that you can peice together in your mind better paths to power. What I am trying to build upon is the active play style to make these paths to power optimized. In diablo you find the right weapon, rings and armor and nothing changes, you use teh same tired whirlwind and everything devolves into absolute dog shit. It's absolutely uninspired. When the player equips items in SeaCrit, I want the player to read over the mods and go "Oh interesting, that's kinda cool" to "HOLY CRAP THIS IS FUCKING WEIRD, I KINDA LIKE IT."

More and more i am finding seacrit s not about the boring 10% armor boost, resist boost, or damage boost of games prior. Seacrit is about finding compelling mods and learning to master them to get even cooler more interesting mods while vastly increasing the player skill ceiling, not decimating it.

Been doing a lot of tooling around with secondary systems lately, Poison, stuns, and wounds. And I'm VERY happy with how all the nuance from these mechanics are adding up.

When I first started my head would break trying to keep code working while creating features like knockback, and stuns, and the overly complex architecture I created. But over the years, just like anything else in life, you just start to get better at it. And all the perfect oranization and code standards I should have imposed... I don't think it really matters too much. At any given time as you get better, you're goingt o think, "I hsould have done this differently" and with that in mind, I think fast and loose is the best way to develop these core systems. If you can't keep up with that, then go beat your head against the wall creating these systems until you can. I'm glad the code is sloppy as hell, it's scattered, it's stupid. And at any given time I can attack it violently, improve it, and not feel bad that it's being massacred. I think I finally feel like I'm kind of a coder. And it's not because I write fantastically well kept code. It's because I feel as though I am finally able to create systems without much fuss that do what's needed without breaking. It is FAR MORE IMOPRTANT that you can push something to be "done" such that you never have to look at it again, rather than to write it neatly so lots of people can access it and break it many times over and over as the project spirals out of control with too many cooks in the kitchen. I mean, I'm a total amature, I've never even worked with other coders on a project, but I feel like things could be going worse. Fuck it, i'm just going to keep going forward writing my dog shit lines in broken C#.

Working on SeaCrit is akin to working out when you're tired and feeling bleh, you REALLY don't want to do it, but once it's fired up, you have the tasks going, you've got some rockin' tunes on,  you start making progress and before you know it the tasks are done. But I'm fast approaching the point I need to stop checking off tasks and just go in and play the game, like ACTUALLY play it from the start and feel what needs improving and that's a really scary thought, because I am SO FRIGGIN TIRED of playing this damned game over and over and over.

Who knows maybe the game is almost good enough that I can find outside support in some shape or form, even if it's just a few people I can send the game to and they give in dpeth feedback on how the game should be played or what needs balancing. I dunno, my headspace has changed a lot. 2 years ago I would have bowed down to any entity that would give me the smallest ammount of crumbs to keep working on this without all the decay, and I'm so glad that never worked out. I am much more keen to create this project on my own terms, I don't want to feed that mad beast any more, I don't want the madness to destroy this project before it ever has a chance of success.

Quick edit: going to try to come up with an upgrade or two before getting to work that I think will be very fun and create some interesting build options. It's a fine line between adding more and more crap that starts making the game overly complex. Wounds should be fun but not mandatory, same with stuns, same with ranged, same with melee.  The trick is finding that cool new thing that makes the overarching systems of the game more intersting, some deriviative dimension of these systems where some new possibility exists of play and progression that is BETTER than exists already. More content does not = better. The goal is building up a chunk of mechanics that build to be greater than the sum of their parts, and if you inundate it with tons of crap, that castle in the sand you're building glides into the ocean. Not sure what these will be, need to think on it a bit, maybe they will come to me as i implement stuff and test things mid combat. I think this is often the best timet o come up with no idea, when you are in the game in the moment. Is this too boring? Is this overdone? Is there some gap in the tempo of combat that needs filling? I would love to add awesome combos and glitz and glamor to the combat, but i don't have the budget for taht, so I need to be more tactful in developing the core mechanics. And I think this is a blessing in desguies, because once you indulge that glitz and glamor of combat, you're basically locking it in. I still have a very bare bones system that is easily expanded upon...