A couple of pleasant surprises have demanded a lot of secondary type work.

1. I have found that i can very easily play the webGL build of the game on phones, and not only does it run, it runs pretty damned well, aside from a major performance issue that after some trial and error I've been able to at least lower the performance hit until it's manageable. I made a post in the Unity forums and got a reply from the guys at Unity so here's hoping they look into the issue. This is the only glaring issue remaining for phones that prevents this game from being VERY playable, aside from a few things I'm going to try to tackle tonight.

2. I'm finding that I have inadvertently made a game that is actually pretty damned fun to play on phones, from the beginning it was important to me to distill gameplay, and to reduce controls to two buttons, and to in that simplicity try to create something that is actually BETTER and more deep than games with a ton of buttons to manage. All the tertiary elements of play that come from the secondary button combinations, the keep heading mechanics, the various speed alterations and positioning from this simple control scheme really make this game something special to play on touch devices, and even being someone who rarely plays on these devices, i was able to play quite well with the touch controls. All that said, it's probably delusions of grandeur and rose colored glasses.

It's weird, a few days ago phone builds weren't really on my mind, they weren't performant, and no one wants to download a random file that isn't on the app store, but now that I know people are a click away from playing a game that has no right to be as fun as it is on a mobile device, i've totally shifted my focus and Phone playability through webGL is absolutely my #1 priority, just trying to hedge my bets and play off the unique strength of the project. I'll hardly be abandoning PC builds of course as it's built in and has been how I experience the game. I'm really happy at the parity of web and PC in one singular web build that now runs really well. I've got things structured in the game that regardless of whether you're on your pc or using a mouse or a keyboard or a phone it all sets itself up automatically so builds in the future should be a piece of cake.

Issues I will be tackling tonight are poor button arrangement (easy) and revamping how buttons detect if they're clicked. This task may be anything between super easy, barely an inconvenience, to SUPER ANNOYING. But anything is possible in code, just gotta dive in to this phone touch input crap i haven't touched in years and see if I can come up with a solution. If things go well i can go back to creating more content before i'm tapped out.

So currently when you are using a touch screen if you want to press a button, you must newly touch the screen, you cannot simply roll over from one button you clicked, to over the other one in order for that button to register as being clicked. this means that holding the phone becomes very awkward as you must use 2 fingers from your right hand to independently click the buttons rather than using just your thumb to roll over them both. This fundamentally changes how the buttons recieve their input as currently the system uses a raycast on touch, and sees which buttons are activated. I suppose I could mess with the code and do a raycast every frame, and that may actually work without too much of a performance hit, constantly trying to press buttons wherever your touch is currently situated. I'm kinda glad I had this talk with myself, as I think I may have figured this out and maybe this won't actually take 2 hours as anticipated.

I've become kind of addicted to making development videos, and I take pride in doing dev without a hitch and "showing off" as I dev, it's kinda silly since gamedev is about as non show off as you can get, it's boring and tedious and the last thing anyone would want to watch, but all the same I'm finding i'm not wanting to work because I know that in trying to sort these button issues i'm going to look like I don't know what i'm doing and feeble (which is largely true to a degree as a self taught coder of just a few years).

Point is, I have all these stupid things floating in my head that are preventing me from getting to work and it's really silly so once I finish this paragraph I'm going to load up the project, do some tedious stuff, not sweat doing anything awesome and cool beyond that, and get back to work tomorrow making actual progress after hopefully having a nice fancy and super playable web build that is mega playable and maybe even revolutionary to some degree in terms of the experience it is able to deliver on touch controls. I'm probably delirious, but we'll see, going to be really easy to get feedback from old friends and family now that I can literally just bug people with a link that they can play from anywhere. Although iPhones are tending to be an issue, often crashing.

Just one of those days where I'm not going to be working on anything flashy or exciting. I've sunk thousands of days into this damned thing so far, another day working on tedious shit ain't no thing. Hard to get out of the mindset that every single day I need to finish absolutely everything to make this all worth it... Way to easy to think about how much of a pain in the butt this is going to be, ok enough thinking, lets make this mamma jamma worth playing on a phone...

Edit: Long night of work, got a few things sorted i've been wanting to for a long time. Fish no longer point at the player when stunned. Fish are better at pointing in the direction they want to swim, i'm sure there's something big i'm forgetting, and I got the new revamped button pressing scheme in and working, feels much better I think.

Probably the least watchable nigth of work i've done, usually happy with the pace of work and getting things done, but this was just a shit show. Not entirely sure why i'm posting this, I guess just to show some days are boring UI work and you gotta trudge through them.