Today I finally got a decent session of dev done (video is uploading at the time of this post) and I think it will spill into tomorrow

Took way longer than I care to admit to finally get back into the groove, WHAT ELSE IS NEW!? It's deja vu all over again as I ponder why the mojo is back, as if somehow I can solve this puzzle and hasten the recovery in the future. 

Sometimes I wonder if I'm an NPC in a deranged game of the sims for some deity having a good laugh out our expense. Whatever, things are inching forward as I'm touching and tweaking lots of little things. 

Another thing that bewilders me is how I tend to have a never-ending energy to just blather and blather about gamedev on into eternity as if it comes with absolutely not creative cost whatsoever, but doing gamedev for a few weeks on end puts me into a coma. I suppose it's that run on sentences don't generally set off the spellcheck and cause reality to come crashing to a halt like some benign syntax error buried under months of poorly devised fits of logic in a dumb violence simulator for fish leading  to weeks long nervous breakdowns.

Oh right, I should probably talk about the game and what was actually done because there are SO MANY DAMNED THIRSTY VIEWERS OF THIS BLOG. Basically I got done everything I said I'd get done in the past few entries where I repeated a lot of things I was going to do, rather than actually just doing it. Items UI and pickups have been revised pretty heavily. 

(New layout is on the bottom, I think I'll do a few more tweaks to the top to explain better what damage and armor are and remove that unnecessary lvl 0 by the shield icon) I hate that i look at these numbers now and think, WTF does damage do? What does flat damage do? I used to hate these confusions as a player and I would wonder about the competency of the developers, but now as a dev, you're just so thrilled when things sorta work and things are constantly in a state of flux so you rarely polish things until some day you have to say, "OK this is it!" even though you know the game could be infinitely better if you didn't lock things in and kept iterating and in this state you cannot spend the time to expose exactly how all this mess is working. I finally get it now, I finally get why most games have terrible conveyance and everything is a crazy mish mash. Because developers get burned out just trying to make the core game fun, let alone communicate well at some point, and if you ever DO communicate it well, if you ever change it or try to make it better in the future, you will have to spend MORE time just getting those UI elements out, so you can add more back in! It's a never ending cycle of frustration and busy work leading to more busy work that gets in the way of forward progress. Can you see why it's so easy for half assed creators to stew within game studios and point fingers at others as projects fall apart and everyone is stepping on each others toes trying to create the secret sauce? 

Gamedev is a real mother fucker, more than any other profession you look far more competent the less weight you pull, aside from maybe professionals paid to not pull things.

It's not a huge thing, but they say the last 10% is 90% of the work. I think about that bit in breaking bad, where they're talking about how there's a huge disparity between 96% and 99% pure, it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a gulf of difference. Like when you play a platformer and the jump is just a LITTLE too floaty. Or when you try to turn left to right and it takes just a TAD too long to turn, or when you go to throw a punch and the animation has a BIT too much backswing on it. I'm hardly polishing off the gold master of the game, but I do feel as though I am sanding off the unpleasant edges that are preventing all of the elements of seacrit from coming together to be the sum of their parts. I'll say it again, these gains are not linear, they are exponential, as the small tweaks to gameplay are made, as the small tweaks to items and balance and simplifying overly complex elements to fit their overarching tone of Seacrit that is emerging, that 3% improvement here, the 2% improvement there, you compound these and suddenly you're looking at an experience that is many factors more enjoyable than its previous iteration. 

If you've ever poured over a piece of art, a painting of a face or a horrific attempt at a horse, sometimes it can be a small element that's "off". Maybe the left eye is a tad too far to the left, or the nose is slightly out of place, or you've drawn the horse legs like a blind ignoramus would fashion a gnat's malformed testicle. These small irregularity ruins the entire piece, and no matter how good the rest of the work is, all that is fixated on is those over testicularized, fucked-up horse utensils. 

I'm hoping that as I clean up the itemization, the overly complex spawn systems, and feel out the world with more interesting areas and well placed secrets that all the nasty bits fall into their respective places, not just so that it's some sort of Frankenstein monster, a miracle it's able to hobble about but a terrible sight, but rather something to behold, something that glides through the water with grace like dolphin gymnast, many days sober.

There are so many years of cool little nick knacks that haven't found their place quite yet, rockets, lasers, sharks with FRIGGIN" LASERS ATTATCHED TO THEIR HEADS, but I'm hoping as the core systems come online and the pacing follows suite with the form of level design and deeper moments of play, that all the game design goodies explode out of the corpse of this SeaCrit pinata like so many bits and bytes of fish gut.

But I've learned a lot trial after trial. You don't make a good game zealously pushing ahead to add that next cool thing. You make a good game by painstakingly crawling forward ensuring everything you add is worth having in the first place. A game with a handful of artful interconnected elements that build upon themselves is a far larger work than something with a trove of elements bound together by duct tape, half-baked in a kitchen by too many cooks fingering each other (for blame you perv).

After weeks of drought... i did a keg stand of gamedev today. When it touches your lips, it's so good. It's so, so good.

Ok, pretty fucking spaced out blog post today, but feeling a little loopy after the floodgates of work OPEN AGAIN!