The usual course of dev is that I have to constantly fight to get back a headspace where I can work on the project, but I think i've found a bit of a groove as of late, and that's nice. It's been really stressful trying to tackle bugs and port to the new render pipeline as of late so tonight I think i'm just going to clear my head and take a breather.

Got some really good feedback on phone build of the game, people are really liking the playability and graphics, I really think I'm on to something here.

Crazy times in this world, lots to wonder about, lots to be regretful of, lots to be angry and frustrated about. But none of these things do any good for powerless plebs, so all I can do is continue to work to make the game better and better.

Generally I like to have 1 big task that's goign to take up the whole day like graphical revisions or gameplay, but tomorrow I think I'm going to break it up by sorting some graphical issues, now that I think about it this MIGHT be connected to a performance issue, there's a discrepency with the overly complex fish shader that causes some functions to render on the phone build, but not webGL, I dunno i'm done stressing over it. If Unity fixes the input lag that only exists on webGL great, if not, it's still kinda playable and the stand alone build is fine. 

So tommorow it'll be shader cleanup followed by items tweaking.

Long term I have a new goal, after watching my 2 core testers play the game, I realize that I need a nice big sprawling world. People naturally want to swim and swim and explore and i've put WAY too much a focus on developing the gameplay, so screw it, way easier to inject some spawn systems on some big, cool grandious world to explore than to try to make some boring cookie cutter world exciting. So the plan is to just make a huge metroidvania style place.

Ugh, this leads me down roads of thinking of quest systems and progression mechanics and building up story and environment art and all that jazz, and I'm not in a position where I can worry about that stuff. It's frustrating.

I know the game is getting better, I know it has potential, I also know this world is increasingly more batshit, gatekept, and stupid and this entire endeavor was reckless and selfish.

Nothing to  do about it now but push forward and make more shit. Oh and I need to scale down UI a bit because it's a bit overbearing. I can hide some elements until you have an item (or greatly reduce opacity) as well as remove other elements (like item damage and armor) now that they are out of the game. And I may greatly scale down core stats for stun, damage, health, regen levels because the exp bar is shown when you execute tehse actions and siimply show the bonus in a scaled down manner. Lots to be done to simply the UI screen.

Thank you for the Kool Aide, reverend Jim

Edit: Going to sneak a new blog in here since I'm going to be changing the format a bit moving forward.

SeaCrit is getting better, the play is getting better, I hope it's becoming fun, and none of my blog posts *SHOW* this. People don't want to read a wall of texts, they want a gameplay clip that says "Hey, I'm fun, Play me". So moving forward, I'll be adding little gameplay clips of the features I work on in a given day. For a long time I took comfort that even though the game wasn't successful, "well I'm not really trying". It's long past time that I do start trying at least a little. I need to provide a chance for this game to reach people, even if I'm going to blather a bunch of nonsense afterwards.

Back to the blathers...

I'm not entirely happy with how i've set up my level structures, right now each level prefab chunk is an entire large area to be repeated, similar to metroid. I'm missing a middle ground prefab asset, where I have bite sized chunks within bite sized chunks. So today I think i'm going to be developing those, and once I do, I'll be able to build out areas a lot faster, unique areas.

Whew, head is spinning with everything that still needs doing, i'm transitioning beyond core gameplay and starting to think about content again.

My new plan is to build up a world, a large expansive world with rivers and cool caverns and adventure, I want to remove from my mind the notion of spawn lists and zones, I just want to create something large and expansive that becons the player "EXPLORE!"

So that's my plan today. In fact I'm going to deep dive this, I was going to clean up shaders and stress what builds work and which ones don't... but today none of that secondary stress, it's 100% focus on building a fun world. Once I do this, I can pepper in the play and I will have the best of both worlds, gameplay and expansive world.

Might get tricky and get some neat little water volumes in and play with waterfalls, so there are areas you flow down rivers or who knows what, we'll see. It's hard to just think "hey lets try cool stuff" when I'm under the gun trying to build this into something worthwhile. Trying not to go down over scoped rabbit holes, also don't want to squander the potential by not trying cool new things. If there's anything I haven't experimented with enough, it's level design.

I've been haunted by this notion from the very start that SeaCrit is going to be like Dota, a very small, tight polished map where you just farm in certain sections. For so many years the design of the game has suffered because of this preconcieved notion. SeaCrit is dying for some more exploration, for some fast paced platformer elements where you swim through rivers and caverns and combat takes a back seat. A little bit of awe inspiring scale, some vista's, some waterfalls. Maybe a nice quite zone where you hunt for rare  stat fish.

It's time to finally hunker down and do something other than core gameplay systems, while not spinning wheels in mud. It may be a wash, I may find that the expansive world doesnt' work, but it's worth a shot. I think today may be transformative in the best kind of way.

Gonna cook myself up some ramen (with friend meat and veggies) pour myself some coffee I just brewed up, and get to fuckin' work. Glad I've been more focused on work then self destructive chicanery as of late, wish i could chalk it up to resolve or discipline, just haven't had the urge to be a lush lately. In relatively good health, have passion for the project if a bit stressed, and got almost an ok amount of sleep, so it's just about go time.

Really fuckin' pumped for how this is all coming together. As always, fuck this ass backward world of cowards and back scratchers.