I'm rather manic when developing the game. There are moments where I feel everything is coming together and this won't be a wash, and then I'll play the game at times and it's haunted by the same issues I've seen years ago and I feel this game will forever be stuck in this state of mediocrity.

Planning work today and it's going to be a bit of everything. Part of me wants to push forward and finish up zones and create more items and get the ball moving forward, and part of me wants to go back and fix up some core things that continue to not feel quite right yet.

I've had this crappy scene loading asset that I've been dealing with for way too long that interrupts the workflow of environment design and I'm gladly going to be removing that from the game altogether and revamping it. It hit me yesterday "I did this in such a stupid damned way". It's intrusive takes a lot of setup and makes building out the world a pain, and it dawned on me I should totally revamp it and I think I have a good idea how. First I'm going to revamp how it finds assets, currently it just does all child objects which makes it prone to disabling things you don't want disabled, I'm going to set it up so it searches for objects with specific tags, which should be easy, pretty sure there's a way to get all objects in a scene with certain tags. Then I'll just have 2 lists of assets it cycles through, Distant assets will slowly be checked through and if it gets sorta close to the player, I will add it to the list of nearby assets. Nearby assets will cycle much faster and this is the list that can enable/ disable objects. 

It's kind of amazing how you grow as a coder, and things that seemed so foreign and complex eventual just seem liked "well duh just do it like this" at some point. It's such a bizarre thing, absolute total control to do anything infinitely anywhere, but prone to breaking and exploding at an atomic level everywhere all at once as well.

It's exhausting when every day feels like the entire project is in limbo and you have to sort everything to validate everything leading up to this point.

FUCK IT

If I take a step back, shit's getting progressively better. Things ARE lurching forward. I just need to deal with one headache on setting up the load/ unload situation and once it's done I NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THAT SHIT AGAIN and can move forward with environment work much easier. 

Enemies just need a bit of tweaking and tuning, last night i was worrying they aren't good enough. I'm thinking about things all wrong. and this is something I think most of us do as developers. ENEMIES AREN"T SUPPOSED TO HARD, ENEMIES AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE SMART. They're supposed to be big meat backs for us to shoot at and explode in a piñata of particle frazzles, experience points, fat loots, and candy.

I have some decent enough enemies right now that can use a little polish but are perfectly capable of running down the player and FUCKING THEIR DAY UP when I need them to, so I'm just going to ride with them for now.

For too long i've been trying to create these areas of pain and suffering and that's the wrong perspective, I want to make enemies that are fun to shoot at and bite! I also keep saying I keep spinning wheels in mud, not sure that's been the case lately, haven't been adjusting enemies too much and when I do it's been fairly fruitful. It's hard to keep perspective when development has been a crazy rollercoaster for years.

Whew, glad I wrote this blog, woke up in a little bit of a rut but feeling better about moving forward. Going to be a bit of pain in the ass maintenance today, but should also unlock some big nuggets of gameplay goodness. That's gamedev. I'm a little overeager to push forward and finish this, need to take a deep breath. It's taken many years to get this far, a few more days ain't no thang.

Oh and I have one last idea that I think is going to totally revamp how the ranged fish operates. I added a new alternate attack that doesn't have the keep heading mechanic, and while I really like it, a lightbulb went off and I THINK that i can revamp the system to be the best of both worlds, i'll have just 1 attack that's the same for both buttons akin to the shark having 2 buttons for sharkbite, and if you spam the buttons very fast, in the combo loop i'll have it add to the keep heading value, so if you want to lock your heading you'll just spam buttons, and if you don't you'll tap a bit slower. I'm really optimistic that this is going to really bring the entire system together into a nice tight intuitive package.

I wanted to link this song today but wasn't sure how I was going to get around to being optimistic in the blog entry to make it relevant, but it just sorts happened

I’m not usually one for lyrics, but hot damn do I love this song

Edit: Work went pretty darned well today. I always have these expectations that I need to make the game amazing in one day. That didn't happen, but the game is a bit better and that + stubbornness may one day yield a decent game. Kinda bummed video recording went out right as I was redoing the unload system and I was pretty happy with how that revision went in terms of time and execution, oh well.

Excited to see Dunkey launching a new publishing thing. Gonna give it a shot soon, really enjoyed the video he put out about going HAM on gamedev and being passionate about this stuff. It's fun to think about but been burned by these sorts of things in the past.

Oh last thing, as a test I may have uploaded a new web build on the downlow. I'm really happy with how the web build is running, WAY less performance and sound issues. Not ready to start sharing the build though, just doing a quick test.