I've rarely drank coffee, but lately I've been indulging because it gives me 10 hour work days, the downside is my sleep hours go nuts and I get a little loops, not tired, not awake, just kinda in a fog. So my mind was wondering and I started thinking about the move "The Prestige" with Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. And the premise was basically that this dumb fuck became too infatuated with magic that he subjected himself to limitless torture and death because he couldn't see that the world he so wanted to be part of was simply make believe. He sacrificed everything for it and the moral of the movie was, don't go chasing waterfalls, you dip shits, live your lives it's all an illusion, literally. Nothing is real everything is a game, everything is smoke and mirrors and if you allow yourself to get too carried away you will destroy yourself.

And sometimes I think I'm sorta like that dude.

But then I remember I didn't start this project hell bent on creating some grand epic game, I just wanted to get out of the meat grinder and try my hand at a tiny little side project, gamedev is hard, the world went absolutely batshit crazy and now here I am, inadvertently chasing this white whale. 

It's sorta weird, because now it feels like things have inverted, rather than the choas and secrets and mystery being in art and entertainment, it's been let loose from pandora's box. Now you wake up every day and you wonder, Why the fuck has the world gone absolutely batshit crazy?

Mother fuckers I didn't go crazy, I'm still just trying to make a living earning an honest living making something I hope some day has value, and I feel as though a lot of us get ground to pulp for not buying into the reckless maddness that used to be rare, that used to be realm of the secluded and non mainstream.

It still feels like some kind of bizzare twilight zone episode.

Anyway, work is kicking ass, but it demands polish, I'm going to spend some time in the near future to clean up abilities to make adjusting them easier. New combo system feels pretty ok, it's not the huge boon I thought it would be, but I think it's worth pushing further, the big difference was a super tiny tweak I made to how stuns work, they now reset the attack index of enemies so even micro stuns will "stun lock" the enemy if you attack them enough, which makes it feel like a good old fassoined beat 'em up with combo's locking enemies. Just going to add a % chance for stuns to hit per attack, and this will make it so it's not quite 100% and the game is going to feel really good I hope. I've also taken most all stuns off of other attacks and now the game feels WAY more alive and volatile. There is an actual ebb and flow to combat now.

I want things to be perfect overnight so I can finish this up and maybe end this long slog and move on to some level of sustainability, but these things take time, especially for my dumb ass. I dont' know where all the time goes. But I'm happy for the rapid gains I've been getting as of late.

You know, we obsess over making progress, over checking things off the list. But all the spinning wheels in mud, all the mistakes, all the hard earned lessons... those are the real progress. Knowing what I do now, I think I could make this game in about a third of the time, and it would be way better. I get why games get delayed for years now, why sequals are often WAY better than the original, why so many games don't go the distance.

I'm ramblin' again

Hoping for a good day tomorrow, I got some new sounds, really looking forward to getting them in, for a very long time i've used just a few noises I got from a very good, but in some ways limited sound pack I bought many years ago. Got some new combat noises and UI noises and jingles. 

Was going to hold onto this blog till tomorrow before work so I could blather more blathers into it, but this feels pretty sufficient. Let's plan on just rockin' out some dev tomorrow. Really feelin the 80's so imma make some new playlests to mix things up because I'm about to overdose on coffee and Manowar at this rate.

Good, varied noises are underrated.

Quick Edit: I don't think I really touched on how big yesterday was. Mashing buttons, and smashing up enemy fish is actually fun now. You can now unload with the shark and if you do it properly it's satisfying. This is absolutely massive, as it feels like I'm finally making strides towards making the core experience actually fun, like I finally figured it out after just not even thinking about it for years as I ground away with visions of items and zones and fish powerups and lots of random garbage. Finally feel like I'm at least attempting to find the fun. Long way to go though, experimenting with different combo chain mechanics, should different combinations allow for different attacks with different mods? Not sure it's worth the effort so far, but going to polish and try a few things and see what happens.  What's a day or two to try to make the absolute core of your game more fun? It's been a weird ride, learning to code as you go and not really having the luxury of prototyping with a half finished product coded by others. I WOULD NOT recommend this path to others, but hey, COULD BE WORSE! Or could it? LOLWTFBBQ oh well, just gonna get to work tomorrow and hope this shitshow sorts itself out.

Edit: Quick new build with some of the janky new combo system, just wanted to test if the new Unity release solved the input lag bug, IT DID NOT, oh well. It's driving me crazy.

Edit: I lied, I'm going to blather more. Just some thoughts on combat now that I had time to step away. I think it's easy to go down rabbit holes and think of what you "want" to wor. I want different combos to inflict bleed, some to do lifetap, some to be AOE... I also want that street fighter goodness...

But this game isn't street fighter, for one i'm working with fish, and I conciously chose fish because I knew they would be easy. The downside is it's hard to get a tiny little fish in the middle of the screen to do epic face smashing punches.

So I've made a decision, I'm going to just keep it fucking simple. You spam bites, maybe the final attack does some bonus wounding. You spam the spin attacks you do some AOE attacks. I'm not making a fighting game, SeaCrit is closer to Diablo than it is street fighter. It's about loot, it's about spamming buttons and getting immediate funs. No need to overthink overly complex como chains and complex animation systems. If I had more resources I could entertain these fancy things, but I don't! The play of secret is about timing, its about positioning, it's about rhythm. If I'm honoest, if I indulged in complex combos and flashy animation blendings, this would suffer. Though I am worrying about animation blending. The combat would feel a lot better if I spent a bit of time to polish the animations a bit.

Sounds, animations, ability setups, code cleanup, level creation, item tuning, upgrade tuning and implementation, more cosmetics, more fish types.

GOOD GOD THERE'S SO MUCH TO DO! Going watch a little Dota TI as I wake up then get to it, hoping for a good night. I'd like to think if I have one more good night the game will be ready to get more feedback on, but realistically it's going to be a couple days or more, there is a SHITTON to do. It's exciting, been getting big gains, I'm honestly flabbergasted how well things are going as of late, happy with the phone build working through WEB GL, the combat is coming together, the visual elements are becoming polished, the world is becoming interesting to explore, the underlying pipelines are coming online, really good shit going on despite the squalor. And with that thought, good things aren't hammered out made from a position of comfort anyway, think that's why this world's gone so fucking crazy, so a little hardship might be a good thing for SeaCrit.

I kinda dread playing the game after I think I kicked ass teh night before, add some new thing, I load it up and often I think, eh it's not as great as I thought it was in the moment of finishing it off. But after just trying the game to see what I need to work on, I'm really fucking happy with how it's coming along. The new combat system is here and it just needs a bit of tweaking and tuning. Bites will be nice and spammy when you want to deliver damage to the enemies in front of you, and spins are there for when you want to just twirl and everything near you to die.

I can't understate this, things are really going well as of late, to the point that for the first time in a long time I feel grateful and happy to be toiling away on SeaCrit. My personal life is mostly dead, my life is in shambles, i've squandered nearly everything, but the promise of redemption seems to be there. It's not even entirely about the end goal right now, the ride is genuinely satisfying in these recent moments. It's demanding as fuck, it makes me want to pull my hair every single fucking day, it's a slog, but it's rewarding. The hard work is culminating, the systems are coalescing, all the shame and sacrifice stewing in this cave, it may not all be for naught, and for a good fucking bit there, I was questioning it all.

I don't care that the game is nothing, it's not on any radars, that's been the point for a while, I kinda relish in the failure. It's SEACRIT, it's safe! My goal is to make the game good enough it makes a mockery of the bullshit system that snubs it, and to do it away from their infectious madness. 

Fuck the world. Further up the mountain we go...