We add cool new things to our games thinking, this neat new system will give me an edge! But most of the time these ideas don't work, that's generally why they haven't been done already. And we don't recognize they're not working, because we add them to our games and they are our babies, and we go off to work on other things and despite the nagging feeling that something isn't right, because of our attachment to our own creations we brush it off, "eh, it'll be fine." 

These little design blemishes start to create a tangled mess of sub par content that draw from the things that are actually working. And it's crazy that we designers don't recognize we DON'T NEED THAT MANY cool new innovative features, we always think more will = better game! But that's not true, you have to find that magical amount of familiar vs innovation, otherwise the tangled mess grows and grows and before you know it, you're used to having all these broken, unfun things in your game and you're sitting there thinking "This is fine" as the walls fall in.  You can rationalize it as, "I'm the designer, I play this game every day so I'm just tired of it, I'm sure it's fun." 

Trust your gut, if something isn't working, figure out why, and take action. Stop putting off fixing broken things in your game, it's having a sever affect on how you perceive your project, and how you plan to move forward with it.

Waking up today i've had several revelations, and revamps have been going so damned well lately, that I'm going to push through with more. Gamedev is weird, yesterday I was worried I'd never have another good idea to put on the todo list. Today I'm stopping myself from writing too much crap to do.

Regen has been an iffy thing, it's very easy to make it too powerful, which is why it's usually crappy in most games. Currently regen feels weird in Seacrit, you start with 0, so you don't become used to its mechanics, then you have to swap to your ranged fish, take tons of hits, which is totally unintuitive as you try to avoid taking hits as the ranged fish, and finally level up your regen, which is just on all the time and poorly balanced. It also adds 2 overly complex defensive xp bars that muddy everything.

And all at once it just dawned on me, "Wow, this system as it exists fucking sucks". A lot of the design decisions I've made thus far are way overdesigned and I'm not proud of them, I'm starting to wonder WTF was I thinking at the start and am I any good at this at all. There are enough things going well that I don't beat myself up too hard, but at the same time I honestly have no idea why I thought these were good ideas to begin with, I thought I was better at gamedev than this. Oh well, it's my first game, I'm going to cut myself some slack, I was really cocky to begin with, 100% sure these things were going to be awesome, and a lot of them have been trash, so live and learn. I'm curious if in the future i'll be frozen from trying ot come up with innovative things in games now knowing a huge % of them will be failures that you won't know are failures until you implement them, and I'm wondering if having all these mistakes under my belt if I'll be able to better come up with ideas in the future or if they'll still be mostly dumb.

This means the current upgrade "restful" now becomes redundant, because it's implemented to give your base regen a bonus while you stand still. So I guess i'll just change it to give a flat % based bonus to regen? Or maybe i can call it, "RESTED" and give it the exact opposite mechanic, gives you a % of regen at all times as if you are at rest, that'll do!

Also i'm going to fix my lifetap to what I've always wanted lifetap to be in games, which is a % of your max health based, and not a % of your damage you're inflicting, because that gets wildly out of control. I have some reservations here because part of the fun of lifetap is knowing the more damage you deal, the more life you're tapping, which really amplifies that core satisfaction loop of knowing you have that one button that does EVERYTHING, which is just so awesome. So i'm really thinking on this, I could create 2 different lifetaps, one that's damage based, and one that's HP based, but that feels like it would be overdesigned. There's something magical about that good old "+3% lifetap" and you know if you get a good bit of damage you're good to go,  but what ISN'T great is once the player is pounding out 5000 damage per hit and every single damage instance their HP bar just jumps to full, and you're healing yourself for absurd #'s, and the game just feels broken, like the core systems have gotten away from the designers and all the interworking nuance of HP, armor, etc are all broken. My wounds system which inhibits healing including lifetap helps with this, but on the extreme end it can still be a problem with players being able to heal with even 99% impeded healing. I don't want lifetap to be some new balancing mechanism where i'm trying to limit player damage, because they are tapping too much life back. It starts to make design a garbled mess with too many considerations outside of "what is most fun?"

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm... what to do about lifetap mods....

I think I'm overcomplicating all this,  Maybe the answer is that other games let their damage mods get out of hand, maybe if i just better throttle damage growth, as this isn't a min max game with tons of mods, lifetap will remain balanced. Lifetap SHOULD be the path for players going for big damage, and I will tune it accordingly, it shouldn't be the path for players wanting to build tanky, "appetite" is the alternative mod that does that, providing huge bitetap for sharks regardless of damage.

Ok, so that was much ado about nothing. It's so satisfying to realize the best course of action is... None at all! Just going to try to be careful not to let damage setups get too divergent with some builds being able to do 200x more damage than others, which is a no brainer anyway.

Whew, have a solid ToDo list for today, lots to do, lots of what I think will be low hanging fruit, trying to fight the urge to totaly redo all the trash code in my spawn systems, and just get the few little things in that need doing and never think about that garbage, tangled mess ever again.