Work is interesting, it's a rollercoaster implementing new things, will I run into new bugs? Will the changes stick? Will the game get better? Will I play the build after work and feel as though I've contributed to the game? Making games is an iterative process and you have good days and bad days. And some days you feel good about things and some days the sky is falling.

Today I feel good about things.

And I get the sense I know what i'm doing moving forward, and I feel like I know what items need to be, and I think I know what needs polish. So today i'm declaring "ITEMS DAY". The day I will be going in, getting items into the game. 

For too long I've been looking at this game from the wrong angle, How do I make this hard? How do i create a challenge for the player to rise against. Not a good plan. I think building up items, making the player powerful FIRST, making gameplay fun FIRST, then adding challenges to meet this power level is a much more workable plan.

Here's the biggest revelation: Lets say I make the game fun to play, it's super awesome to get all these powerups and a blast to find all these amazing items... Does it eve matter if there's a worthy challenge for the player to face? This is the big thought I had.

It's easy to get caught in the weeds when you're working on the game, your brain fills up 100% with thoughts of spawns systems and AI and raising difficulties and building up a world to populate this stuff. So much so that you can often lose sight of the "fun". What is the meat and potatoes of your game? What part of your game will the player actually enjoy? Make THAT 90% of your game.

Who played diablo because of its complex control schemes? Because of the bullet hell elements? Because of the advanced combos and crap like that? NO ONE! It was fun to drive through hordes of demons, see them driven before you, take their fat loots and hear the lamentations of their goblinkin. 

I now know what items are. They are new movesets, new accentuations on play with about 25% unique item mods splashed in. Unique items will all have 1, maybe 2 mods on them that will define them. Plate armor for example will always give spikes and health, as well as a potential unique item mod. The forumula i'm going for for random item mods is 75% hand crafted with 25% RNG mixed in. I'm excited for it to start coming together.

I also know that my current item drop system is clunky and looks bad and I should feel bad about that. So I want to do a quick pass on item loot, make picking up items require a single button press, but put a delay on how long you need to interact with an item so people don't accidently pick them up. I also want to work on the particles a bit so drop look more "legit". Making the item drop 3d assets presentable and not look shyt is an ongoing process. The 3d asset I made for teeth for example I spent like 10 minutes on and i'm extremely rusty as a 3d artist at this point.

So as I was drifting off in bed I was thinking about what to do tomorrow, and just as I was slipping into dreams I had this notion for the armor fish, that it would play differently, it'd be burly and slow during combat, but I could make it so out of combat speed was tolerable so you could actually get to fights. And I thought, it's a shame it'll be hard to get the armor and you'll have to go deep into the game to see all the work and gameplay possibilities that go into it. And it dawned on me, "I am an idiot for rationing the cool s tuff too much. SO NEW PLAN! We inject tons of neat fun stuff early. I'll put in some heavy armor that's relatively common, it just won't be the full on head covered armor.

So the to do list for today!

Create 2 spawn lists for items an early game, and a late game drop list, not one super gimpy one with boring items, and one exciting one, but 2 kick arse ones with the later one being a bit more kick arse.

Make zones drop these generic early/ late game lists, with their own unique items per zone, maybe 1 unique weapon, armor and ring. These will drop 50% of the time and the generic stuff will drop 50% of the time. This will give me a nice sense of being able to create items for all of the game, but also pepper in unique items per zone that will make every area very exciting.

Work to get the base setups for items working, core unique mods for item types, and pepper in secondary ones here and there.

Polish the heavy armor variant and add some new dials for innate max combat speed per fish archetype.

Maybe even get in some rare catfish ranged fish, and pudge shark rare drops. We're bringing back the archtype swaps! I'm thinking these rare items will have unique and compelling alternate left click abilities to replace dashing. Even if it doesn't feel all that great I think the fun of having unique alternate visuals for items will be really cool.

Too much to busy with, get these instruments of death into the water

Edit: Stressful day of work, massive Repo/ Prefab issue. There's nothing like losing hours of work and stressing you're going to lose the project. I made a bit of progress, mostly relieved that i was able to get thigns back on track.

Rewatched the video to figure out WTF went wrong, my prefab structure blows up at 2:22.  Every once in a while I'm relieved as hell that I make these videos and it helps me track down a big issue.

It was a string of unfortunate events. I'd say my fault but it's just such a bizzare situation that is a massive edge case. The BIG issue is I didn't see that my 2 core prefab assets were sitting in a folder titled "Items" It JUST SO HAPPENS that I had moved a new folder named "Items" which is exactly the same name. So now Unity mixed up some reference ID's and the repo was no longer able to find these assets in the items folder, so every prefab that inherited from these assets lost their references and my project became fubar.

It's comforting to know the reason this happened, mostly my fault, but there's always this looming threat any time you're working on a game that you might stumble on some bizzare edge case and everything is going to fookin' explode. Gamedev is weird.