I was building up this massive rant and rave about how I'm not sure how i'm going to make the game better... Should I take my own advice and come up with some big bold new feature that I KNOW will make the game better, but will take lots of work, energy and time? I've been thinking of a new facial bone/ animation system that I could add to a few fish to get different emotions and fish would feel more alive. Then I got distracted working on a few tiny things here and there, got a lot more done today than I planned, and I got to thinking, maybe there is no giant piece of the puzzle missing, maybe there are just 10000 tiny little things I need to fix up and make better.

I think the best attitude to have is to do a little bit of both. Try some big grand idea you're excited for once in a while if you're feeling fresh, and just clean up the garbage you already have rotting in the bowels of your game.

I've been thinking about how the shark just doesn't feel quite as cool as the ranged fish in that the bleed effect associated with the shark doesn't feel quite right, how wounded is the enemy? There's no raw numeric value, just a wonky particle trail that looks way over the top and a little out of place. Part of me thinks the blood trail is pretty cool, part of me thinks it's way overblown and doesn't communicate wounds well enough.

Things like stun duration, regen, lifetap, bleed damage, bleed duration, and bleed recovery all need tweaking and tuning ad neusiam, sometimes it's just external values, sometimes code needs adjusting.

I keep thinking "I should totally revamp the spawn system and start from scratch". The current system is kind of clunky in its scene footprint, and it's painful to get the fish spawning in the right place. But then I convince myself that it's mostly good enough and i don't have a good enough excuse to revamp it.

I think about side scrolling shooter games, and how neat it is when those strands of enemies come flowing from the screen, and if you aim just right you can take out a big wave of those enemies by spamming your attacks in one direction. I could do more with AI to get enemies to put themselves into more interesting positions with a sort of hive mind where they take into account nearby fish and sort of group up, but that might just end up being awkward. I think my current AI setups allow from enough variety in combat, just kinda thinking random ideas on the blog to illustrate how scattered your mind can get when you're thinking of improving a game with so many possiblities and parts.

I was just tweaking what eye color fish's eyes turn when they go into rage mode because of stuns, I had set them to red as they get angry and when they go full berserk they turned yellow, but that didn't work well because the yellow was really hard to see, so now it's just red. I also have textures that show wounding on fish, and those have distinct colors based on how wounded the fish get. These are micro details, they barely affect the game at all, but you always forget just how much damned shit there is in a game when you're sitting down expecting to get a decent chunk of work done.

Ok back to the shark attack loadout... even though it has more RPG "junk" in it, one charge attack inflicts wounding, the other heals your life back. It just feels kind of "bleh". With stuns the combat just feels uneventful. You stun an enemy, you him them, then you stun them again, and repeat. I'm really frustrated thinking of games like double dragon where it's fun to just walk up to an enemy, spam the punch button and you see them get hit, they get frame locked, then you punch them till you knock them over. For some reason I can't put my finger on, SeaCrit is lacking this bare bones melee goodness. Maybe it has to do with the fact you're floating in water, and the enemies don't get knocked down... Hmm, maybe I should think about putting in a sort of "beat the crap out of" state, akin to being knocked down, where fish become immune to damage, no that's a terrible idea, wouldn't make sense like an enemy lying on the ground does. I need to stew on this more.

Lately things have been going well so i've allowed myself to do seat of the pants decisions and just play the game and make changes in real time, but one thing i've learned that you REALLY need to take your time with is adding new large feature type things, because it's not just the energy you put into adding them, but the enthusiasm it sucks out if they fail and you have to go in and surgically remove them.

My idea to make the shark interesting was to revamp how wounds works. Currently wounds do damage amp and damage over time, which sounds really cool in my head, but in practice enemies dying randomly far away off screen without you hitting them just doesn't feel quite right. I have an idea! I'll taper off the DOT damage so it does more damage the more health the enemy has, and maybe taper it off when low health such that at 5% health it stops doing damage so you have to finish them off with an attack. I know it sounds small, but these sorts of things make a big difference. Further, I was thinking the wounds bite and the lifetap bite could be a sort of finishing move, where if you hit the enemy with them, they would remove the existing wounds modifier off the fish in exchange for either BIG damage, or a healthy chunk of life healed. The greater the wounds value, the more the bonus damage. But how do I properly communicate to the player how wounded a fish is without information overload? How do I tune the damage of all of this between damage mods and the damage over time component? This system also sounds counter intuitive, it simply doesn't make sense that by biting a fish you would remove the wounding from it, essentially healing it. 

I dunno, maybe the game would be better, but i'm not going to move forward on an idea i'm not 100% on, so instead i'm going to sit here and come up with a better idea... It has to revitalize the combo and alt combo system, it has to provide the player 2 great options to choose from when charging with meaningful and twitch style options mid combat, so the player can in one moment think, "Ok I can execute this cool bite" or I can execute.... "something else". What is that something else? Does it have to be something else? Street fighter had 6 actoin buttons and they were all essentially the same damned thing, short ranged melee attack. It's kind of crazy when you think about it. I wish i had more attack animations... I could make some... that would take time... and there's no guarantee they'd be worth it. Ok, random idea, there's a few tail whip animations in the game that I am not using currently, what about an attack that when it hits a fish it causes them to swim away for a brief time?

I think where I'm going wrong with the shark, is that i'm trying to make it interesting with mechanics like stun and bleed, and what I'm missing is button smashing goodness. I'm having a really stupid idea right now, I could revamp the combo system to allow for various combo chains with different effects. Button A would be tail while abilities and button B would be Bites, and maybe there's a 3 button combo chain total and each button has a different attack depending on when it's pressed with the thirst one being a "finisher" move.

God fucking damn it. The whole point of this blog was I was going to go over large new systems I was going to resist because they were too big and hard to implement but I think I'm going to run with this one, I honestly don't think this'll be too hard to add, just need to create 2 sets of 3 combo attack slots and choose the preceding attack based on which button is pressed, then I'll just have to tune the attacks. The question then becomes, how core to the game are the combo attacks? How much damage should the charge attacks do? How do i make these attacks relevant without overshadowing the others? It might be a waste of time but I think this is worth the risk, in this moment after playing for a brief moment my thoughts are the biggest problem with the game is it lacks core "beat 'em up" goodness from button mashing.

There's a rule I try to adhere to. Don't push forward with content if the core game is lacking. So i'm sticking with my rule. The core combat isn't good enough yet, I need to push it further. I new to spend more time trying to make the core aspect of this game decent. Rule2: Don't attribute non funness to the challenge when it's probably just not enough cool shit to do as the player.

This all would have been so much easier if I was just making a beat 'em up game, or JUST making a shooter. I JUST HAD TO BE FUCKIGN FANCY...

But we shall see! I'm kinda looking forward to trying this actually. Should be relatively easy to implement, there's a solid chance this is awesome from the get go. It may redefine how the player doles out stuns and wound effects, as right now they feel a little TOO easy, but if they were a reward for executing a full combo chain with big flashy size growths and kick ass particle effects, that could be the balancing point that brings this whole damned thing together.

Ok, today's blog was a total scattered mess. That was the point, this is the mad house I am in right now. Pulled in a thousand directions, surrounded by a throng of ill formed components screaming in pain for assistance.

Tomorrow we suture melee combat.

Edit: I am haunted by thinking of how inherently fun this game was with it's absolute rudimentary  graphics and mechanics and I can't figure out in my head what to change in SeaCrit to match it:

I'm legit considering grafting arms onto the fish so they can fuck shit up in a more satisfying manner