Making progress:

There is still more to be done, there will always be more to be done. But for the first time in years I feel as tough I have pushed this game to be something that shows its potential, I've been thinking of this as achieving "powder keg" status. I hope if the right eyes see it, if it reaches the right community, if I send this off to the right publisher, it will show its potential, there is a snowball's chance in hell now for a future. This long decline will erupt spectacularly and everything will change in an instant blowing open this damned cave-in.

Anyhow, doesn't matter, life goes on, I feel a bit of peace today knowing I have pushed this game so damned far as of late, and I'm taking a breather. A nice deep breath to just enjoy this moment, no nagging feeling of inadequacy, no sense of dread that everything is bleak and insurmountable.

Not going to do my usual thing and blather on too much! Going to enjoy today: do some BBQing, get some much needed sunshine, smell the roses.

It'll be back to the grind soon enough, Lots to do! The game is hardly perfect, I've BARELY begun to tune items and zones and create more content, but not going down that rabbit hole right now.

TODAY WE BREATH! Oh and I submitted to the OTK competition, twice actually because f-ck getting lost a pile of papers. Hard to believe that this game will ever be selected or get any attention after so many years of obscurity, but who knows...

Late night ramble: Had enough of a breather, I need to keep pushing. Thinking about what the plan is to make the game better. Definitly need to tweak and tune and feel out spawn camps. As they stand you can sorta fart around at one and fight the fish there over and over and over and it seems kinda dull, OR the spawn camp is 60 seconds long and then a fish finally spawns and it's easy and just drops kind of a boring item. Neither type is good. I need to think over what's going to work. One idea I have is adding a mega boss spawn in, deep in the zone, and that spawner will go down every time you defeat a fish, and mini bosses will drop the timer by more. I'm thinking I'll make the spawn timer of these spawns something like 40 seconds, and not disable their countdown when the player isn't near, and at that point the player is incentivized to swim about and farm each spawn point to maximize their farm.

Another key thing that's been haunting me lately is the weapon swapping... it just doesn't feel right, I want that swap button to just have 1 thing to do, swap between melee and ranged, having extra weapons feels like it's overcomplicated thigns in multiple dimensions. For one, it muddies the waters on swap, I'm constantly second guessing weather tapping or holding the swap button will either swap fish, or weapons, and in that confusion the entire point of swapping is lost. it's rendered meaningless. On top of that, by having weapons to swap to, the player now has 4 friggin' weapons and modifiers to keep track of and to swap to in the heat of battle. And that's a crazy ammount and I just don't think it makes the game fun.

I keep thinking of old school megaman. Great game, but it had this inherent flaw, that the alternative weapons always felt clunky, they required a resource, and they were either SUPER strong, OR DOG SH*T. Selecting them was a pain to boot, so they always just felt tacked on, some gimmicky thing you equip at the right time to fight a boss but generally forgotten during regular play. And that's kind of how I feel my alternative weapons feel right now. I have this sword item the player can swap to and use, and it's fun, but it just feels like excess. Exact same thing with the alternative pointer weapon, that one especially feels like too much, or could just be a weapon the player swaps to. But I hate the notion of just removing them, because I've put so much work into these weapons and I'd like to think there's depth to having all this junk, but if the player isn't able to artfully access them by reliably pressing the swap button, it's just excess junk that pollutes the core game, I may have spent a ton of time adding swapping and multiple weapon types, but in the end, that is extra time to add something that makes the game worse in the end. I want swapping to be purposeful, lightweight, and something that empowers the player, a button they press and feel a sense of exhilaration to become something tanky or lethal, not to fumble around with trying to figure out if they're going to accidently swap to the wrong weapon and accidently die.

So here's the thing, I've been thinking I need to keep bite, because it has lifetap,  that is a core ability that the player utilizes to stay alive, it's a key feature of the game. I don't want to remove swords, because they have this big AOE spin attack and stun that feels really fun.

Is the game more fun if the player jsut builds around 1 weapon, maybe 2 if they like swapping? I kinda think it is...

It's tough making these overarching big decisions this far into dev, because you're not asking a group of people to step up, you're not going to wake up in the morning excited to see what others have done and "I wonder if these changes come together". NOPE! You wake up in the morning, and you think to yourself, "dear god, I Have to deal with that dog sh*t code I wrote years ago, and remove all those systems I spent months developing." It always feels like you're spinning wheels in mud and will be forever as time just slips by...

Ok, so tommorow is going to be trying, so will the next few days as I deal with this tedious technical shit. But a week from now there will be tangible gains, the game will be more fun, more areas will be coming online, and the overhead of htinking of all these things will actually get smaller as I reduce the scope of these systems.

It's painful but it's going to be worth it.

So the plan!: remove multiple weapon types for both ranged and melee. The player will now have access to two weapons at any given time, their ranged weapon and their melee weapon, that's it.

And if the player decides to pick up a sword before they have reliable ways of staying alive with lifetap or other regen, well... that's just part of the game now! I need to stop treating the player with absolute kids gloves, it's fine if htey die. I actually get excited when I die early in the game these days, which is weird because it used to be tedious back when the early game was boring and there were no items or interesting things to discover and experience game to game. So I'm kinda stuck in this mindset that player death must be avoided at all costs, but as more fun stuff comes online, I need to let go of that notion. I ALMOST decided to add innate lifetap to swords... but that dilutes everything instead i'll be letting the weapons have their own flavor. If I find having no innate lifetap for swords is too big a disadvantage i'll just up sword damage. There are plenty of other survival mechanics in the game that lifetap is not the end all be all.

SeaCrit is becoming more of a live by the seat of your pants action game, it's not diablo, you don't play for hours on end without dying. I'm going to go ahead and embrace that. So moving forward, it's time to embrace the random, embrace the action and twitch, Seacrit is not about stressing over bland #'s and builds and piecing together something so you never die, it's about exciting item upgrades, cool purchasable bonuses, random crazy enemy spawns that can kill or empower you. YOU WILL DIE, the darkness encroaches on us all, it's time to spice things up so each play is worth a play.

So to reiterate moving forward: 

1. Streamline items down to just 2 archetypes, this will make the game far more twitch and easy to pick up and your weapon choices will be far more impactful and affect how you play, which is just good all around. 

2. Feel out the spawn camps, make rotating through the level and exploring more involved and exciting, give them a truly interesting flavor of play. Some will deal BIG damage, others will be VERY tanky. This flavor of enemy will drive home the permanent bonuses they drop. Add spawn fish that insta spawns any spawn camp it's killed near to allow for strategic play. Big boss mob that drops top tier item after a LOT of killing in that zone, bolstered by fighting big tough camp spawns.

3. MORE PLACES, MORE ENEMIES! MORE ITEMS!

4. Add more unique nuance to zones. Right now each zone is kind of just a hodge podge were though there are unique enemies per zone, there is little strategic depth outside of that. I want the poison zone to be the place where players find neat poison upgrades and poison items, and other areas to be places where the player finds other rare bonuses. I want to add unique little mini bosses that always drop some pretty great set of potential items with the same flavor. I'm giong ot add this to my todo list right now! Mini boss in zone 1 that has tons of regen and is hard to kill, but if you kill them you get a very solid regen item. (this will be my first creature with a unique drop list that isn't just some single potion.

5. Feel out difficulty more: This has been ongoing process. It's REALLY coming along, I've got zone specific difficulties in now, i'm debating if I need to add a global timer, where if you spend an hour in zone 1, it ups the difficulty timer elsewhere a touch. I'm not sure how best to this, I just know that If it's totally independent, the player is going to feel this sense of whiplash, where they spend some time in an area, then leave, and the enemies will be WAY too easy in some other zone now that they have powerful items from hard enemies elsewhere. So I need to sort this out conceptually. There's so much crap going on to keep sorted in my head that I can't even really think about WTF this difficulty stuff should be doing. so this is going to go on the, "think about in the future" as I have plenty of other shit to worry about rith now with spawns and items and content.

6. FUCK: I'm spread so friggin' thin. BUT IF YOU WANT SOMETHING DONE RIGHT, DO IT YOURSELF DAGNABIT! It's a blessing and a curse, I'm so damned tiring of slaving away in this damned cave, but at least (as my younger testers would say) the game isn't dog water any more. I'm so tired of adjusting these core system time and again, but I think i'm in the home stretch of unlocking the core loop. Before I know it all this stress of managing several overly complex and messy core systems will be a distant memory and everything will "just work".

I'm melodramatic as fuck, whiney as fuck, whatever, games coming along, it's nice to regurgitate these thoughts, get them out there, and then I can get to work.