"Real" gamedevs often take a lot of pride in how crappy their whitebox levels look, in forgoing fancy animations and graphics and sounds, because they aren't swayed by such pedestrian rubbish! Only the code maters, only the gameplay, the graphics and polish elements are a fool's errand indulged by noobs!

But that's not true, it's all about finding the balance. Particles, animations, sounds, are all inherently tied to gameplay, they are the mechanisms that not only look cool, but communicate to our brains that our game is doing crazy shit. If you're wanting to make a game with lots of fun and innovative rulesets going on, how well you are able to communicate those things to the player will bottleneck how fun your game is.

So there isn't a lot of armor for sale online that's designed to fit fish, but I found some decent looks weapons and what I think is a decent looking set of armor that I think I can smash up to maybe fit the player shark form. It's amazing how much having tangible art can influence the way we percieve the forward trajectory of our games, just envisioning this bulky set of armor in game and eqiuped I'm seeing armor as being a much bigger tuning point, where you can take much more punishment but you're not going to be quite as speedy. I'm going to have to do some tests and see if I can lower various movement mechanics that currently make swim speed irrelevant, like darting about charging up dashes. We'll see, it's not a huge deal, and I don't want to expend too much energy NERFING the player, that's not fun. So mostly I'm going to spend the day getting some really cool new art in, and mixing that art with the itemization and upgrade system that's currently coming online.

As much as I want to put my head down and get these last bits of balance sorted, it only makes sense to actually, you know... ADD COOL ITEMS TO YOUR ITEMIZATION SYSTEM. So really it's not indulgent at all, if anything it just highlights how much i've had my head down getting all these damned systems in that I didn't really think about spending some time to getting some neat items in now. It's really easy to buy a 5 dollar hat pack, and kinda just toss goggles and top hats on your fish... but that just doesn't quite sit right, it's not transformative, it doesn't CONVEY the actual changing mechanics and damage calculations that give you that endorphin hit of finding that new item.

If it's not broke don't fix it, so i'm going to go after that classic satisfaction of finding that cool new look from items from Ghouls n' Ghosts, diablo, or getting the blue or red ring dating all the way back to zelda:

A big part of becoming a competent dev is learning to view the value of something while being able to take into account it's current level of polish. At some point you KNOW something will be worth it and there's no point trying to make something flashy as you develop it until the end. If something is kinda fun, but it's just grey boxes and shitty buggy code, you should really pursue that hard and see how fun you can push it. Too often we throw some amazing art and UI on something and that polish persuades us to keep pushing it further even if it's not that great. It's all ubiquitous all aspects of dev feed into each other so there's no way to try to get good at one thing, it's just one huge complex puzzle, learning how to polish things faster, learning to create systems that don't break so easily, learning to create polish and value that can easily be kitbashed with other elements of the game. It's all an exponential rising tide that makes your game better, less buggy, more polished, and more fun. As always I feel compelled to say, my game could be dog shit, and I may have absolutely no idea what i'm talking about, but as always it's not like anyone reads these anyways! So lets ramble into the void! 

On a random aside, i've become addicted to recording my dev sessions. A couple months back I was in deep writer's block because it was important to me to catalogue this last bit of dev as I closed in on a demo, and while a month ago the thought of recording and being under the gun caused me to really think twice before getting to work, lately I find myself becoming really into recording my dev sessions. On several occasions things have totally broken and though I've been able to fix the problems thus far, it's comforting to know that if anything every does absolutely break in the future, I might have real-time footage of the catastrophe so i can parse it and figure out where things went wrong, or maybe just undo the bits of code and design to avoid it. 

YouTube doesn't seem t like it when a channel with 0 views uploads 9 hour videos every day, so I only push a video ever few days or so, and a lot of times the recording software crashes randomly and the video is lost, but still getting a good bit of stuff uploaded. Sometimes like yesterday I think I'm out of gas but ended up doing a solid amount of extra work getting some new UI elements in that looks pretty spiffy. Here's a session from the other day, been trying to develop the world a bit more and create more interesting engagements with spanners and level layouts and little secrets hidden about: