It's gutting to gut your game, but after a long hiatus and playing the game briefly I'm being hit immediately by thoughts of "What the fuck does this do?" Why are items so convoluted? Why is this mechanic so weird? God damn there are so, so many tiny things to do. I've got the ranged class, the melee class, multiple items for each type, and all the foundations built imperfectly, but so it goes, so many things I wish i could go back in time and do right, but at this point fixing things to be perfect isn't a possibility. But when is it? So pushin' forward with this mass of duct tape.

When you play a game or find a new item you want a touch of "WTF is this?" That invites exploration, it invites the player to wonder what cool thing lies around the next corner. What you don't want is every aspect of your game being bizzare and overdesignd with too many bells and whistles all at once to the point the player just thinks "I'm trying to have fun, I need to just ignore all this overwhelming BS!" This is doubly so for SeaCrit as I am attempting to develop a casual game.

This is currently how it's like when you find an item. It's just a mish mash of random crap, the icons are small, there are too many upgrades, the item stats above are redundant as they are better displayed below, and having so many to look at at a time is really confusing. I've had to weaken upgrades so that many can be attributed to a single item.

SO WHAT'S THE PLAN FOR ITEMS? I'm going to simply make items give only 1 bonus, they will still vary based on armor given and damage, so the player will have to debate if a nice big damage weapon with no decent mod on it is worth having, or if they're better with a lower damage weapon that gives lifetap or something.

SeaCrit simply isn't a min/max game, it's an action game. I think it will be more fun when the items are more akin to what you'd find in a side scrolling shooter that augments the TYPE of attacks rather than massive amounts of stats that slow the game down a ton.

On most projects you've got the UI guys, the design guys, the coders, blah blah, and each is able to iterate and refactor and build things from the start with years of expertise between many people on a given team. I don't have that luxury so when i'm refactoring many systems all at once it's incredibly draining. I wanted to think i had things locked in a month ago, but I've got a few kinks to work out, luckily I don't think anything needs overhauling. Main thing is to simplify itemization, which sucks because i put a LOT of time into developing prefixes and suffixes, but so gamedev goes. I'll say it again, your game isn't done when it has all the crap in it you want, it's done when you take out all the complex BS you thought you wanted that is only serving to make the game worse.

I'm going to greatly reduce the number of spawn camps, or think about revamping them. Having an out of place sign with a timer on it, that does something you're not sure of just isn't fun, or maybe i just need to set it up so that it starts with a creature spawned. I may reimagine them entirely to be more like a cave with a more subtle visual cur for when the next creature is spawning, maybe a pie chart timer in front of a round cave entrance, and have the creature spawn at the start with reduced drop %'s, yes that would be better! And not feel so out of place and tacky. I'm using too many text  cue's in game and it really takes the player out of the game.

Got a solid chunk done today, like 1/8th of what i'd normally get done, but trying to ease back in rather than push too hard and burn out. Tommorow I think i'll do the item revamp, then I'll work on revamping the timers and how points of interest work in the game. All the while I need to think about, "what is the flow of the game? What sort of rewards do players get from ambient fish? How strong and many rewards should players get from chests and large spawning boss creatures? I've resisted it, but I think I may put a global timer in the game and have certain spawn times happen every 60 seconds, this way I don't need a timer at the spawn camp itself that overcomplicates things.

Defining short, medium, and long term goals. I feel I am developing too aimlessly and without a solid, obtainable goal in my head, just pushing in a linear direction towards a perfect game. My goal is to create something that shows promise so i don't have to shoulder this all myself at some point. So I am trying to remind myself what the goal is to reach that demo. To this end I am again defining what the SeaCrit demo is: A few tiny zones with some solid combat and some fun itemization. Nothing more. This is doable and it's encouraging. I keep getting in my head about what a perfect game is, how the story and all components need to be transcendent. They don't have to be, they just need to compete with existing games and excel in its own unique way.

I want the game to be amazing when i fire it up, to pull me in with great combat and clear goals for progression and itemization, and it's a bit far from that point, but I don't think too far. Sometimes I think, "oh god my control system is too complex I need to roll everything back, refactor it for more buttons.." But I take a step back and remember a little confusion is good, I think I have a  solid combination of pick up and play controls with enough complexity to make this a game that in the future you want to play for very long periods of time.

It's always a trip to come back to your game after a long break, on one hand you will never finish your game if you never work on it, on the other hand you cannot produce a game as a solo developer if you just pound through it in one long stretch, you will lose the perspective of the casual player and become too in your own head about what needs doing, obsessed with what is already done and attached to the grind, grind, grind code mindset which puts you far too the side of the developer enjoying various systems working and doing as their supposed to do, not if those systems are actually fun and intuitive to someone who has never seen them before. It's hard to describe unless you've been many months crunching deep in all your systems and knowing every single facet of your game.

Whew... it's back to this maddeningly large throng of issues to sort. Lots of forests and trees to be dealing with, but also excited that I think the game will be finding itself soon, and that it's already not total garbage at this point. And dare I say it again, but I think I might be on the verge of another long productive push, was starting to think the mojo wouldn't come back!

It's deja vu all over again, but one thing changes, the game is a little less shit than last time...

Edit: Got a couple additional hours of work in, finally fixed up the charge attack system a bit, no longer based on which button you let up on, it ALWAYS does the alternate attack once you press both buttons down, hoping this alleviates some of the confusion when using alternate charged attacks. Need to decide how I'll revamp items, too often i just open the game and finagle things kinda on the fly, rather than coming up in my head the absolute best possible way of showing stuff and executing that, going to try to find the happy medium of best possible, and revamping what I have... only have so much elbow grease left in me for this damned project at this point.

EDIT EDIT: Game may be coming together sooner than later, once I get the items and spawns and loot revamped, it should just be a bit of level design here and there and polish polish polish every single day. We'll see, will the mojo hold day after day? Will the game come together? Who knows, kinda flabbergasted that the game is still in such a great state of flux so many years in, but it is what it is, I'm optimistic, main thing I stress I won't be able to get the fire going and get another nice big sprint, I think this is the last one I need before the game really starts coming together. Totally forgot about recording dev session, going to try to get a good "return to form" dev session tomorrow.