Firstly, I have no idea what i'm doing with this blog, if its to get the game out there, if it's only for me, if it's supposed to hold insights on gamedev. I kind of blather too much, sometimes I feel like I have some solid gamedev wisdom to impart, and sometimes I just go on wild tangents on BS no one wants to listen to, so like the game, i wonder if this blog is for anyone. And then I think about how I'm thinking too much, which is an all too common theme here. I guess it' smore a journal than anything else, and if it helps somehow at some point get the game out there great, in the meantime I'll just keep rambling to myself. Part of me thinks, I need to dumb everything about this project down, slap an icon on it that looks like those phone games, and start looking for a publisher after we agree on how to monetize the fuck out of it. While I would like this project to find meaningful success, a big part of all of this is to not enable the insanity that has led us to where we are, so in a weird way I'm glad seacrit is not successful in the current climate of madness, in the meantime i'm just going to attempt to make it not dog sh*t..

ANYWAYS...

Some days are just great days of dev, you have a thought of how to make the game better, you add it in, the game becomes better. There are so many things that can go right or wrong, it can be a bad idea, it can be implemented poorly, it can vastly increase your scope, yadda, yadda. The best implementations streamline content, get rid of fat, and make the game more fun without too much fuss. That was yesterday. But I know there needs to be more adjustments, I was just too tired to think of them and implement them at the time, the game needs to be refined to a well tuned core.

Well some days you just wake up and the mojo follows you along, and even though i kinda resisted, I opened the project right after waking up and had some great epiphanies to make the game better.

IT REALLY HELPS TO SLEEP ON IT sometimes.

It's easy to get lost in a small section of trees and lose sight of the forest. I needed the perfect moveset, I needed depth and intersting dynamics of movement and strategy just with the starting shark and the success of the game was going to revolve around this! And i wasn't sure how to do it and the future was in limbo. It's easy to enter this sort of manic state when you're tired and subjected to pressure time and again. You don't want to be making big decisions in this state. The sky is falling and you'll panic and add lots of unnessary feature creep.

Again with the notion of "I can't remove that, that defines the game! I spent so much time creating those systsems!" in regards to alternative charge mechanics. But I just know completely that if I consolidate the dash to one skill it's going to feel so much better. The alternative attacks on the damage side of things will give the game a nice feel, and really clean up the feel of the controls in general. It's been a lot of sweeping consolidations lately and tons of work to help communicate how things are working in the UI to the player, I hope they're all paying off.

So today I had a few revelations, mostly that "hey goober, you have an entire item system that's designed to expand on the depth of play of the game! Games like this are SUPPOSED TO BE SIMPLE at the start, new items later on spice things up! HOLY COW! I don't know how I just forget about entire swathes of my game. I had a few other nitpicks, i think i'm going to just up and remove the alternate means of dashing, and just make it an emergency button that does exactly what you hope it does when you're in a pinch, dash through many enemies and stun them a bit. There are plenty of items already that have stun mechanics on attack: sniper rifles, swords, etc.

Easy to harp on things, easy to wonder if only if, easy to bitch and moan about this stuff blog post after blog post, but for all the trial and tribulation I genuinly believe SeaCrit is better for it all. It's SeaCrit and Safe from the madness.

TLDR: As designers we get in this bad habit of thinking "How do I add more to make the game better" and we don't take enough time to think "How do I fix and mix and match the stuff we already have going to make everything better?". STOP THE INSANITY! Stop the feature creep. The best games have just a very few mechanics and things that are VERY well polished that interact with each other very well.

So just a few new things to add to the to do list today, and they all appear very doable:

1. Remove alternative dashes and refine existing core dash to be an escape ability at low charge, and a hard stun at full charge

2. Adjust the new bite attack and clean up excessive particles

3. Tone down movement speeds a bit

4. MORE LEVEL DESIGN! ADD ENEMIES, FIX BROKEN UPGRADES, MAKE MORE ITEMS, MAKE MORE ZONES, MAKE MORE ITEMS, FEED THE CONTENT GODS! The job is never done...