Not wastin' time today, gonna hit some coffee and get to work.

The importance of the web build: maybe it's not important at all, maybe trying to go out of your way to make some creative work in this era of cronyism is stupid AF and this is all a waste of repository space. But I believe getting the web build online is a huge landmark for several reasons. Most importantly we don't go out of our way to find cool games in this day and age, hell simply not having a publisher and having no placement in an "official" list is a massive disqualifier, trying to convince people to download an executable these days is akin to moving mountains. We're all part of this bizarre machine where we're hand held to the point of losing all agency, we're puppets for mass conglomerates of profit margins and monopolizing convenience, our laziness exploited as our taste slowly erodes. All the top viewed games, all the ratings, all the reality of the online market and town square are molded by cold machinery in service to anything but the arts. All risk and excitement have been sacrificed for a reliable decline. I'm waxing poetic to shield my mind from the fact the game is still kinda crap, but we're getting there!

I'm blathering too much, long story short, the game is going to be accessible, and that's HUGE. Soon anyone with the click of a button will be able to play the fish game, in fact I may even make the game auto play in the browser.

It also frees up my brain from stressing this nagging bug. We so often think of the potential fun of a game being held back by hardware, or the # of coders, or having the right people creating the secret sauce, but there's a random ebb and flow that can turn your project into the Hindenburg if the wrong random events hit. I was so pumped to see a web build, devoted a ton of time to developing it, then ran into the lag issue and suddenly development starts taking a nose dive. It's a random assortment of good and bad decisions, and what's a good and bad decision is subjective and evolves over time. You really just gotta roll with the punches and not harp on things. With this out of mind, I will finally be able to clear my todo lists of random crap, free up my brain and go back to just making this game as fun as it can be tuning the core gameplay systems. It's been a long time, all those things across the board just sitting there untouched but constantly on my mind. AI values, weapon damage, UI tweaks, force values, combo timings, movement speeds per attacks, the just build up this giant damn and over time it gets bigger and bigger. Hopefully the floodgates open soon.

Perhaps most importantly the phone build represents the culmination of a lot of things coming together over all these years, you know, an actual game that does STUFF. From the start I did a lot from design to visual optimizations to make sure the game could run on low end systems, I devoted a lot of time to simple but interesting controls, I implemented virtual controllers in the UI and in code, I developed combat systems that are deep but not over punishing so even someone playing on a touch screen could compete. I didn't know it at the time of creating these systems, but all these considerations make SeaCrit uniquely suited to the phone. Do I think playing on a phone is the best experience? Nope. But it's the one that I believe it excels at the most. This wasn't a cash grab, (DON'T YOU GUYS HAVE PHONES!?), but the culmination of a lot of hard work in other areas randomly coming together. I do not believe the experiences on other devices suffer because of phone development. On top of this the guys at Unity continue to make this platform more and more cross platform, which is awesome. While it has its ups and downs, working in Unity has been great, it's like having a team of people in the background working to make graphics better, and cross platform and porting a greater option without having to delegate or do anything at all. Prefabs, portability, physics, UI, the iterative structure of the engine, all made this game possible.

I can put a GIANT WARNING, "HEY THE WEB BUILD HAS A BUG THAT DESTROYS PERFORMANCE, DOWNLOAD THE STANDALONE" but no one is going to. They can try to imagine what the game would be like without that huge performance bug.... but they won't. The easiest way to reach people with seacrit (which is everything) thus far has shown it in a terrible light.  So this will be a big landmark.

It's silly I feel I need to be in perfect form and ready to get hours and hours of work in so that my stupid recording that malfunctions half the time anyway catches an "epic" performance of boring fucking shader duplication. Again, best to let the illusion role, if this task is done tomorrow, great. I don't think at this point that a single recording of me messing with shader graph is going to do anything at all, in fact I'm 100% sure it's going to be boring monotonous BS, but Imma record it anyway and dev for the audience of no one.

There are a lot of shaders to migrate, so I'm going to set my sights on the big ones, terrain, fish shaders, common shaders. These are the ones causing the vast majority of the slowdown, so I don't want to go overboard refactor them all, only to realize this wasn't the core performance issue, though I'm 95% sure it is.

Pipeline for shaders: important to name variables exactly as they were, if your diffuse textures share the same name between 2 different shaders, then if you change the loadout, they retail all the same settings, same for various float and color values and texture settings. So it should be as simple as recreating the exact shader, naming all the same names. Hoping I sort out vertex offset and global parameters without too much problem. Generally speaking if you use one shader system, you've used them all and I'm looking forward to the new shader graph platform that's developed in house, made to play well directly with the new shader graph system.

Honestly, this is going to be a total pain in the ass and I'm not looking forward to it, but i'm looking forward to having this issue quashed, so lets get to work!

Not going to burn too much time finding a music video so let's just keep going on a Willbury's kick:

Enough sittin' around wonderin' what tomorrow brings, let's spend a full day migrating to a new shader system that at first glance will have absolutely no impact on the quality of the game!