I'm really happy with how work has been going, but I have this sneaking suspicion that I am indulging in poor development as I did earlier in the project and I sense that I may be pushing forward in this moment purely to get work done, not because I believe in that work. I want to move forward with confidence attacking the core things that are going to bring this game online and in this moment I want to talk about the elephant in the room, the big thing that when i begin to think about it, my brain shuts off and I can't bring myself to really conceptualize the problem.

There can be a burning truth that we can try to ignore in our mind at the cost of our project's long term health. I have been developing items, level design, progression for some time now, and spawn setups and NPC arrangements, among other random things, but the nagging issue that I haven't been able to nail down and formulate a plan to address is the sense of difficulty scaling and challenge.

When you think of the time honored greats: Mario Brothers, Mega man, World of Warcraft, Dota, etc. There is a defined experience where you encounter an enemy, you dispatch that enemy, and you move on at a measured pace, the game gets harder and over time you develop skills in a somewhat controlled environment.

In SeaCrit I drop the player off in an ocean of new gameplay and UI mechanics never seen before, and I surround them with random itemizations and camp mechanics that are also foreign and somewhat unintuitive. On top of all this the enemy spawns are procedural and difficulty can often be very random based on if you are engaging a camp spawn enemy and if several random spawn scenarios fire at the same time.

While this is a rogue like, and some random level of difficulty is part of the fun, I do worry that with so much chaos that I am having difficulty creating an experience that players will be able to figure out and have that fun without feeling as though they are being crushed by bizzare new elements of play. Maybe I'm thinking of all these things in the wrong way, maybe the camps aren't the problem, maybe it's that they're overdesigned, maybe they have too much crap around them with the visual circle denoting the fish, the sign that gets right in your face with the big #'s, etc. Maybe I just need to tone these things down and let the player just enjoy swimming around the ocean without so much overhead.

SeaCrit can very easily be far too easy, or far too difficult. There are so many mechanics of progression that can have profound impacts on how much you heal and how much damage you do. I'm probably overthinking, it's all a matter of toning things down. I think my short term TODO will be to reduce the effect of all upgrade mechanics so gameplay doesn't blow up so damned fast, and rely on a solid gameplay core to carry the game. This kills 2 birds with one stone, as I need various stats to grow in strength as difficulty ramps up so I can start thinking about which values and item mods will increase as you get deeper into the games' difficulty.

One area I have gone wrong time and again, is going overboard on creating too much content, in this case item mods. And I always dial them up to 11 and then dial them down over time after they break everything. This was the wrong way to go about things, but it's easy to go overboard as a designer wanting to test the things you just made, and wanting to see these mechanics go into our games and have a huge impact and magically make them amazing. Truth be told, if my game is any good at all, it should sink or swim on the merits of its core gameplay, and items should subtly add to this. 

Just typing this out is helping me to come up with a plan to fix all of this. Tone down regen, tone down the effects of a great many starting mods. Develop the core difficulty without this haze of what various overpowered upgrades might the player have? It'll be nice to work from the other direction, once items aren't toned down greatly, I will start unlocking their power adding them to shops and feeling out the game. As is I've kinda just thrown EVERYTHING into the game all at once, tons of upgrades, regen, leveling mechanics, etc. And I have been trying to raise the difficulty and content of the game to meat this chaos. This is stupid, I need to make a solid core with solid challenge, then I can add the awesome bells and whistles to supplement that.

It's weird, we often think how long we think about something is important, that if we have a big problem, if we think about it a TON that will yield the greatest results of our planning. But that's not true, facing harsh truths like coming to terms with what the actual problems is is the main issue, THEN we can go about solving them. Often times it's not a matter of effort or how much we want our game to be good, it is a matter of sucking it up and being willing to admit we have been doing things wrong, and making sacrifices to move in a new direction, giving up what we have invested in. It's hard in that initial instant, but it is also incredibly freeing. Anyhow, looking forward to scaling down the volume of junk in the game tomorrow, and being very selective with the upgrades and weapons and enemies and noise on screen.

Good games are not overcomplicated messes with tons of things on screen. They only put in what's fun. 

(Too many blog entries lately, I almost edited these thoughts into the last blog, but this was an important isolated issue that I needed to really deep dive on so i figured I'd just make my own post.)