It's very rare that I open the project play it and think, "oh snap, is this not dog shyte? What do I do now?"

"Guess I'd better write up a ton of things to do so I'm busy! "

WRONG ANSWER! 

I'm not eager to throw myself into development hell and create more random things to work on because I've become accustomed to never-ending grind. Perhaps I really am getting close to putting out a new demo. I always get feedback I wasn't expecting so I'm sure I'll have plenty to work on once I get that feedback. One thing I'm trying to get better at is not developing in so much isolation, but things have been going really well lately so i didn't wanna F it up and I really don't like bugging people these days. I think one of the hallmarks of actually becoming decent at making games, is learning to not put out crap for validation you're not going to get on unfinished crap, when you should just focus on what you know needs doing.

I wanted to expand on one thing that drives me crazy about game design that I kinda touched on yesterday, is that we are paralyzed by possibility. We can do almost anything in a video game. It's INSANE to think about the sorts of things we simply haven't tried, we're wrestling with these tried and true gameplay elements, but how many things have we simply not tried? I jokingly thought I could add a bear that shits rainbows and have him pace around at the bottom of the ocean firing rainbows at the player. This might be a really good idea, it might be the thing that in a YouTube video catches people's eyes and gets them to actually play the darned game, I dunno. But we can do literally anything! And that is paralyzing because  in the creative process a big part of what allows seasoned vets to produce superior product is to know their limits about what's possible, and when you're making a game, that becomes next to nothing. At any given time doing literally any task, we are at the precipice of making a terrible decision to open Pandora's box and add some brand new unnecessary dog shit to our game that will cause us to lose unrecoverable focus going down some forsaken rabbit hole.

Years back I had this new system that I was CERTAIN was going to be awesome. It was going to be a play on old side scrollers, sometimes you could get a powerup that would enhance your speed, sometimes you'd get a powerup that gave you more max life, and if you waited long enough these powerups would cycle and you could sorta pick and choose what you wanted. It was great fun. I had this idea, I was going to add this powerup bar, and every time you killed an enemy it would fill up, then once you filled it, it would pulse and make a sound, POWERUP TIME! Now the next actoin you performed would determine what bonus popped out of an enemy. If you bit it, it would drop some sort of melee bonus like enhanced lifetap, or maybe bonus bite damage, if you shot the enemy you'd get enhanced ranged attack powerups like bonus projectile speed, or enhanced homing, or better spread. And if you got hit with the bonus bar full, you'd get a defensive bonus like regen or more life. Just reading it here it sounds like it'd be kinda fun. But it was a nightmare. As a developer testing it for weeks on end I knew inherently how it worked, but many months later I played a build and it was just absolute dog shit. The bar made no sense, powerups just felt random, and in the middle of combat as you dove through bullets you didn't want to think in your head about what bonus you were trying to get and pace your play around that. On top of the shit system all the combat mechanics were less polished and felt out. 

It took months to build that system, took substantial time to take it out. And it took many months to take it out, and enthusiasm for development really hurt after that. That was teh first time in the dev cycle of SeaCrit it really hit me "oh damn, this gamedev thing is hard" and when it really dawned on me things can often times not be as good as you think they'll be in your head. So I have a new found appreciation for finding that sweet spot of tried and true married by just the right amount of innovation. When I look at the recycled slop coming out of AAA studios I feel like iv'e really gone above and beyond with all the new things in SeaCrit, slick new charge mechanics, a new underwater roguelite world played in 2.5 D where positioning, melee and ranged combat blend in a really neat new manner. The lock heading mechanics that have bolstered not just player controls but adds some pretty neat bells and whistles to NPC AI patters. The new take on item mods... I feel like i'm tooting my horn a bit too much here for a game that's been an abject failure up till now, but hey, presently i'm likin' me odds!

There are a billion little things that make your game better. One thing that caught my eye as I played today that I'm happy I changed is most all attacks share the same attack values now. The shark combo bite starts at 4 damage, the lifetap bite starts at 4 damage and the alt bite does the same. This way any time you press the right button you will see a nice round 4 in your damage and see it scale higher as you hold a charge. I don't know why but this just feels so much more cohesive and simple and easily understood, rather than having to learn 3 different attack numbers and having to figure out which one does the most damage, you just start and realize all your attacks deal 4 damage and whichever one attacks fastest does the most (aside from charge). There's also the changes to knockback where only on very low charged attacks will you bounce off your target otherwise you charge through them. There are a billion little things all adding up I hope. I was really enjoying just playing the game and remembering the new mechanics i've been adding in, all the minutia, it's really feeling smooth and a nice balance of pick up and play and deep and impossible to master. I really like the sense of popsitoining and weight and moment to moment play there is in SeaCrit. In a game like diablo you spend a lot more time just mindlessly exploding things on screen without much care, but in seacrit diving in to attack enemies between attacks, or charging in barely missing incoming projectiles while barely grazing the enemy and setting yourself up to stun another enemy... the things in seacrit just have more of a presence than most RPG's, and i've been very happy to discover that when it comes to combat less is more. A single ranged fish and a single melee fish really just feel like a great engagement, I don't need to fill the screen with 50 enemies all attacking at once to give some sort of artificial difficulty spike, and that utterly decimates the nuance to the rhythm of combat in the game. It also means i'm able to create exciting scenarios with just a few enemies so the game can keep very low system requirements. This ALSO means that in the future i can create new zones with very simplistic enemies that have tons of #'s and it'll feel really cool. Oh damn i need to add this to the ToDo list, a swarm zone!

Games are a very bizarre endeavor. From an artistic perspective you can work forever to arrange things until the composition is perfect, you can spend forever on the colors, you can try to fix that weird nose you painted, even out the eyes. Games have these same aethstics and then infinitely more compositional elements that exist in the dimensions of time, do gameplay elements exist early in the game or late in the game? In this sense we also have to take into account pacing like a movie. Blah blah blah, I blather about this all the time, there are just so many damned things going on in a game you don't feel unless you're holding the controller, executing attacks yourself.

Still pinching myself. Is SeaCrit actually getting good? Does it even matter in this curtailed, castrated world where it's all about who you know and being the "right" person for success? Let's not blather about that too much right now, what's the fucking point? If ya know ya know, otherwise i'll just look like a crazy person. Dumb as fuck to even bring up, I know, but you don't get this far making a dumb fuck game about fish by not being a dumb fuck.

Ok today's blog ended up being a massive scattered mess, but that's fine, because I wasn't sure how I was going to link it to the song of the day I had in mind, but now it fits perfectly! GREAT SUCCESS