Been mulling over this blog all morning thinking of a decent gamedev topic, which is in turn preventing me from making the damned game. It doesn't really matter anyway, because I regurgitate the same crap daily anyhow.

The notion I'm settling on is the idea that you can't fake a good game. There's a lot of hubub with various lackluster shows coming out as of late, how you can guilt people into liking the show, how people will enjoy it because of their own prejudices, while painting others as man children for chastising their guilty pleasures.

We live in a very silly world of very comfortable lazy people who are entirely too comfortable pointing fingers at others. (the irony is not lost on me that I am blathering about this)

Anyhow, I take solace that in the realm of gaming, it's much harder to gaslight and coerce people into liking a game. Games are too functional, they are rooted far too much in execution to wrap it up in some sort of moralistic slight of smoke and mirror. I'm not saying SeaCrit isn't shit, but if I am ever able to cross that threshold of into decency, I'll be pretty damned happy and I still hold out hope that something can be made of all these wasted years.

I don't think i've touched on all the changes going on lately. Bleed is now totally revamped, I've ditched poison and now bleed both amps damage (now up to 50% down from 100%) while also giving a constant damage over time effect (DOT), so it's much more immediatlyi gratifying, and has the sort of mechanic you would expect from an evil creature bleeding out. This also distills upgrades and makes the branching of power much more consolidated and fun. I'm finding a big part of making RPG mechanics more intuitive and interesting and enjoyable is to combine them and make them make sense. Damage is a lot more fun that lots of arbitrary mechanics like damage amp or slows. You have to be careful about overcomplicating things. Oh and I totally retooled items and brought back random modifiers (but only prefixes to keep things simple) I'm really happy with items now, I think i've found a sweet spot of complexity that fits seacrit and I'm not throwing away the months of work I spent on the Items UI and systems.

I've learned to not try to inject complexity into SeaCrit with various damage equations and mods and complicated crap like that. Much more fun to have big immediate things like bleeds, spike return damage, increased damage, etc. On a surface level it appears like boring overdone type stuff, but i'm sure i'll be adding more unique mechanics in the near future.

Nothing to crazy, just building out a core that now seems to be revealing itself. And it feels really good to be saying this. Things are becoming more stable and I think the game is actually coming togehter. Though it's deja vu all over again as I note I have said this many times over the years.

Short and sweet blog today! Gonna grab some coffee and get to work, optimistic that if today goes well today i'll be in a damned good spot (Deja vu all over again)

 Gonna grab some coffee and get to work, optimistic that if today goes well today i'll be in a damned good spot (Deja vu all over again). The moment I think about the project and what needs doing, my brain starts freezing up, so less thinking more doing. Gonna just open the damned project and get to it.

Edit: Quick summatoin of work today! Went pretty well, I did lots of random things. I'm finding that I'm able to make huge game decisions mid dev out of nowhere and it seems to work out alright. I used to think the best time to plan was in the dead of night alone in the woods alone with my thoughts. But lately I've just been doing seat of the pants type things while i'm knee deep in code pounding stuff out. So today the big decision was that chests that drop items can recharge after you kill enough enemies in the zone. So a bit of a spin on the old boss dynamics, sans the boss, which works better for now since my boss mechanics are ass!

Got bite visuals in, got new text zone overlays as opposed to images, got a new endurance mechanic in so you can't just go everywhere at high speeds by spamming attacks, got some item polish across several items, and lots of other little things. SOLID DAY!

It can sometimes feel like you'll never finish when day after day you do tons of work on random things that aren't on your todo list, but it really feels like things are coming together. I think tomorrow i'll finally be able to start really feeling out the zone setups and core enemy spawn lists and start setting up progression and shops and such from there. Just smashin' my head against the wall day after day inching forward.