I really wish I had screen captured today's dev session. Usually I record myself coding, something i'm self taught and have only been doing for a few years . This would be akin to Alec Baldwin having a second camera on set to record how exceptional he is at wielding prop guns.

I've done a lot of tech art and environment art in my day, so migrating to a new render pipeline and setting up shaders and sorting errors is something I've actually been paid to do in the past, and the one day I'm really kickin' ass doing what I do, I don't record the session because I thought it would be boring and I was burned out and didn't think I'd get much done.

I'm happy to be mistaken.

Dev has gone off on some real tangents with this visual revamp. I believe the game looks a lot better now, the lighting, the shadows, the shaders, the particles, the rendering, the post process effects, everything is a tad better, and when you add them all up the game really looks pretty nice now. Unity's done a great job of pushing things forward bit by bit.

The crazy thing is even though i keep my ear to the ground with gamedev, and I use unity all the time, I didn't know migrating to the universal render pipeline would provide such a graphical boost, I just figured it was a blank template akin to the base pipeline. It's kinda crazy with the sheer volume of information there is in gamedev and the specialties associated with it that big glaring things just slip by. Kinda like not knowing where to go to get publishing, or crowdfunding or just playtestrs for that matter... ok I'm starting to border on griping and I've decided NO MORE of that weakness.

So yeah, very random course of actions lately, random paths have opened up and Im just riding the tide migrating all these things to this new platform that I stumbled upon trying to solve a darned bug...

Oh speaking of which the bug popped back up, I thought I had solved it, but I didn't, I think I had deleted the event system that allows touch screens to work at all, and in doing so thought I had fixed it. I'm so glad I remembered deleting that thing because I thought it was redundant and I could have spent hours or days trying to figure out why touch controls were not working. Every day working fast and solo and tackling massive issues is walking a tightrope, perilously on the verge of breaking everything and not being able to recover.

But things are going well! I kinda go crazy thinking about how I never actually make progress on the few things I want to, items, new areas, shops, progression, that sorta stuff. But the game is getting better in other areas I felt incapable of addressing just days ago. Big graphical upgrades without having to pay money I don't have for art, big usability boosts from the web build, these are pretty huge things. They don't just give this project a better chance at success, but they're also a healthy moral boost that'll help me keep pushing forward knowing wheels aren't spinning in mud.

There are some downsides... Unity is a bit less stable now, i'm getting random shader errors and reference exceptions randomly as there are now more moving parts in Unity, a more feature rich render platform, more shaders, lots of fresh revisions to break against random things.

The android build doesn't have the button lag on screen touch, but it does have a unique shader error no other build gets where the player fish doesn't glow the proper color, that shader is a nightmare or I would have just fixed it, also that build isn't that important considering the web build is by far the easiest to access on any platform now, even if it has a bit of button press lag.

Often times as designers and coders we'll think to ourselves that graphics aren't important, that it's the play that matters, and fancy graphics are a crutch used by poor creators. But there's something about fancy graphics that just feels good, like the difference between driving a clunker and sports car. It's just inherently "fun" when things look nice, when things move the right way and flash the right colors at the right time with well times beeps and boops. At the end of the day these animation controllers, heroes and enemies they're all little toys, and toys are fun, and that's what games are supposed to be. So for all blathering about people fixating on graphics, to say they aren't important would be a lie, good graphics are fun, and they're kinda at the heart of pushing this medium forward, the functionality of visuals are the very core of what a video game is, and It's been pretty rewarding to set everything up and see all the material and shader and animation setups i've been working on for years get a nice little shot in the... fin.

How has the fish game survived so long?

YOU CAN'T KILL WHAT'S ALREADY DEAD MOTH-R FUCKER