So one of the streamers I indulge in from time to time, Asmongold  is doing this OTK game showcase, I don't really know much about it, I just know it has the potential to give a bit of exposure for games that are under the radar and hell yes I'm going to submit this game to that thing, so that's been on my mind the past month or so as I try to tie things up. 4 more days till the deadline! I don't want this to be under the wire so hoping to have things mostly sorted in the next couple days. I need to remember to do a web and phone build once everything is good to go (fingers crossed the phone build works, I know for a fact all my new UI elements are going to cause issues with touch controls, so im going to make a to do to remove "raycast" on these panels so the touch controls still work)

ANYHOW! Let me do my usual and blather about some gamedev 'fore I go!

I've been gearing up to add TONS of secret areas to my game, I figured it would be fun if almost every single bush in my game had the potential to be a secret, like a random chance, and I could have all these potential prizes inside! Rare items to buy with reduced costs, chests full of pearls, or maybe a deadly fish surprises you and kills you!

But the more I think about it, I realize that this thought is counter productive, it goes against the heart of what this game is. Every fish is a pinata for you to bash the crap out of. It is tied to combat and it creates the core loop of the game which is KILL ALL THE THINGS and then REAP ALL THE REWARDS for that mayhem. So if I start going down this road of adding all these secret shops, and you can pay for items in them with pearls you found in chests... I'm kind of subverting the core interaction of teh game, I'm now creating a secondary game within the game that exists apart from the core loop of fighting enemies, growing stronger and fighting new stronger enemies that can make you even stronger.

It's that constant allure of chasing that new white whale in your head, that allure of adding that flashy new thing that exists in your head alone and is perfect, it's no riddeled with poor code, or sub optimal designs, it's free from all the impurities of our pipelines and you are SO SURE that it's going to be amazing.

But every ounce of energy you expend chasing these side quests is energy you are not spending developing your core. So today, to the ever growing to do list, I say, "No".

I almost jumped the gun to make heavy armor make you slower, and I was going to balance high damage mitigation against slow speed, and that was gonig to open up this whole can of worms because movement is pretty complex in SeaCrit, it's not simply a "max speed" value, there are charge speeds, movement speed while attacking, and basic movement speed, and tweaking and tuning this system to feel right is a big headache that is rarely worth it. It's working pretty good now so I generally just leave it as is. I'm now of the mentality of "f*ck it" im just going to have some pieces of armor give good mitigation , and sometimes not. Not everything has to have a downside, sometimes it's nice to just say "here's a kick ass item, enjoy". We make our job way too hard as designers sometimes. One of the hardest things as designer is not over developing stuff, figuring out the meat and potatoes and not overcomplicating it by throwing every seasoning you have in the pantry. 

Not even sure what else there is to do today. JK, THERE ARE BILLIONS OF THINGS THAT NEED DOING. 

So what do? Let me look over the to do list...

Methinks today will just be a polish day. I need to play this damned game that I have debugging and adding features and allow myeslf to look into the void of what the game actually is and what the experience is. It's hard to describe, but as a creator, it can become very hard to play the game and face the music of what it is, not what you want it to be. It's hard to be honest with yourself the sort of revamps and overhauls that might be necessary in order to improve the overall experience, or the things that simply aren't working and aren't fun. Your game is not realized when you've added everything you think it needs, it only achieves its optimal form after removing what it doesn't!

So screw it, today's jazz. We play the game, try different items, equip various weapons and armor, and figure out what values and knobs we can tweak to improve the experience. Maybe we come up with new upgrades, maybe we add a few, WHO KNOWS! 

Todo lists are dumb, don't let ignorant plans you made before your game revealed itself to you what it was dictate how you develop it in the future.  So play it and  listen to your heart:

RANT: I was really excited to be doing some art kitbashing the other day and i was going to record it, and I was going to retrofit armor to fit the fish and get it all on video kicking ass in 3ds Max when I was more an artist than a designer and I kept checking the recording feed and it said it was recording, BUT!.. Turns out my hard drive was full, so I only got the first 10 damned minutes. Kinda sucks, I usually just record myself doing code and design stuff and that's not really my forte, and I was hoping to have a video of myself doing something i'm actually somewhat competent at, but my damned hard drive was full. OH WELL, who cares, it's boring technical labor anyhow.

Enough blathering, time to gets to work.