Just blathering the usual blathers.

I'm trying to ride the high of yesterday and getting lots done. Generally you feel later into the project that you're trying to bleed blood from a stone to get  fun gains out of it. It's all dependent on how familiar you are with the codebase and how ill formed your plans were along the way whether you can shape it to be more fun. If you had lots of half formed ideas and you were trying random things along the way there's obviously a lot to be iterated on and felt out as you go.

I believe that as I'm checking things off the to do list and I'm making items and I'm building up zones that I'm kinda piecing together in my head for the first time what it is that SeaCrit is going to be, and as I type this I'm realizing it's what I always wanted it to be which is really weird to be typing. Some 8 years ago when I was a total novice I was rambling about how in SeaCrit you'd get random fish parts and you would use their random bonuses to dictate your strategy for that "run".

Over the years as various systems came online and they weren't that good, my mind kind of wandered and I started thinking of larger content type ideas, I chased after having a huge world, built things up outward, slowly learned to code and kinda figured out how I could do these things. It's been interesting coming from a design and art background, I had zero care for code standards I kinda just mashed things together, and I hope it's served the project well. Any competent coder could come on and easily understand how things work and probably laugh at this empire of dirt i've built, but I think it's becoming playable and maybe even fun and that's what matters. It's really easy to come across something that's been stitched together several thousand times as an outside observer and point and laugh at it and think, THIS IS SO POORLY DESIGNED! But really the value of that system are the people who created that system and the innate knowledge and iteration that builds on overarching understanding of what works and what doesn't, not just in the underlying code not bugging out, but in actually serving its purpose of delivering fun things that do wacky stuff. It's not just writing elegant lines, it's the constant exercise in understanding multiple overlying systems working in tandom and developing not just pipeline, but the SeaCrit sauce that is funneled through those series of tubes.  

A lot of developers focus on the pipeline too much, on clean code, on over designing it so it can't break, it's so easy to weasel your way into a studio with promises of a perfectly well running codebase with lots of technical jargon and circle jerking of other neckbeards sucking at the corporate teat. Suddenly it becomes shaped to conform with technicality over functional or work of creative fun as projects fail because of worry warts, back scratchers and snake oil salesmen. God damn there are so many grifters out there getting paid good money to make shit games. 

HERE WE GO AGAIN! 

*Deep Breath*

Serenity now

Let's try to be optimistic

I'm going to keep the rest of this brief, I've been checking things off the to do for a long sprint, it's gone well. I think for today i'm going to shift gears a little and play the game from the start and just experience things and make a new todo list as I go. I need to find that inner neckbeard from so many years ago who used to play games, critique them, and think he could make a better one by playing my own game.

It's going to be impossible, but i'm going to try to forget all the things I have in mind and planned, all the thoughts on what I think will make the game better and just take everything in at face value and try to be honest with myself. This is so friggin'  hard to do BTW. There is so much comfort in not staring into the void, in not playing your game earnestly and believing the make believe story that if you just finish you todo lists things will eventually come together.

I hope that taking harsh realities head on and accepting that the game is shit will get this mama jamma across the finish line in some form of acceptable state.

No idea how this is going to go. I think I'm going to feel there isn't enough to do, and that I need to build up the distinction between playable areas and the places you go to buy upgrades and explore. I'm starting to do exactly what I was trying to avoid and build up the perfect game in my head without playing the damned game and letting it tell me what it's supposed to be!

I always hated country music growing up as a San Diegan edge lord, but I lived in Texas for a stint and while I was there it kinda grew on me. Here's a stupid song about getting belligerently drunk on an aircraft during better days...

Edit: Oh quick addition! I spent so much time at the start of this game trying to come up with fancy modifiers for damage and overly designed mechanics that will add damage to certain bleed targets and all this fuss, and now that combat is online i'm finding that being heavy handed with modifiers and making certain weapons deal 5x more damage REALLY ruins the game and the flow, you start having to design for lots of random things. I'm finding as i test that I'm having a much better time figuring out the elements of min maxing the current modifiers and cool unique items to explore intersting builds and play options and strategies.

So a mod like: Deal 50% more damage to stunned targets

is a lot more fun and influences how you play way more than....

30% of all your attacks deal a crit for 150% damage. Modifiers like this are all fluff, they're a means of giving a false sense of depth, a puzzle game that you can toy with before you enter the fight, but it's isolated from your core systems.

I'm really trying to find the right ammount of "oh cool modifiers!" without inundating the player with so many that they have no idea WTF is going on. So as I type this I'm realizing my early unique items will just have 1 or two REALLY neat things on them. Like very powerful regen for the early game, or aoe attacks, or enhanced bleed. Something SUPER fun and powerful for early zones, but doesn't really scale well into later zones. I can get crazy with multiple mods in later areas.

I've set up my UI such that only 2 mods can be displayed per item, that means a total of 6 mods at any given time from items, and a grand total of 10 between melee and ranged with the shared ring. That's a pretty large number so long as I keep them very meaningful! So I'm feeling really good about how items and that entire system is coming along, and if I want I can always inject more with bonuses from potions and such, similar to how diablo added their charm system. But all that said i'm REALLY finding that less is more, and in the best way possible. 

So i forgot my main point that i'm going to be normalizing damage a lot, so i'm no longer on items being defined by this cool sword doing 4x more damage than that one. I'll have a rare item here and there that does maybe 50% more damage than normal, but i don't want to get carried away with it. I already have a levelable ability where as the player deals damage they level their damage output, it can get really muddy if you have too many things all influencing damage in a simple game where you just shoot and smack stuff around.

I cringe when I think of all the time I spent building up systems to support massive #'s of fish, massive #'s of items, massive #'s of prefixes and suffixes. And I'm learning the hard way why the best games do not have a mountain of things. They find that prefect chord, that perfect moment of gameplay and they fucking perfect that singular thing. I'll quote the late great Bruised Lee again, "I do not fear the game that offers me 100,000 moments I want to experience one time, I fear the game that offers me one moment I want to experience 100,000 times". It's not that a multitude of things can't be better than just a few, but we as incompetent people can only iterate and improve and fix so much in our short little timeframes we have. 

When you try to build something grand and massive, you end up with too many cooks, and they spoil the batter and amidst all the hubub everyone points their fingers and in the choas that is the complexity of gamedev you end up with massive armies of coders and designers and artists all shitting one massive bed as pipelines and practice and reason and logic went out the window long ago, supplanted by grift and tribalistic BS. This is why we can't have nice things. I often lament the dreary position from which I make this game, but at least I don't have some dumb fuck neckbeard pointing the finger at me for ruining everything. I'd like to think thus far I've done a pretty damned good job having no prior experience doing this shit, and whenever I see glimpses of what the big guys are doing I still think to myself, "well hot damn, these dumb mother fuckers are giving me a decent shot at this." I truly despise what this industry has become, and the throng of weak willed ass kissers who have made it this way. 

ANYHOW! I'm clearly experiencing this coffee entering my viens, and I'm saying lots of stupid shit that I probably shouldn't, but THERE IS NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN SO BACK INTO THE BREACH IT IS! 

Let's GOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

(This song is about a man who falls in the ocean and gets wet, it is CLEARLY relevant to the development of SeaCrit)