I'll start with some optimism. Last week things were kicking ass, the project was going well and I was super excited for where I was taking it. A few bumps in the road with real life as well as trying to hunt down a bug have really taken the wind out of my sails momentarily.

The bug I thought I had found the other day and fixed was not fixed, it was a false sense of security. As I built up the new shaders after 8 hours of work, I loaded up the game fully expecting it to look great and play well, but all the same performance issues were back, seems this is more of a general shader complexity issue, so who knows what's going on, I just know when I upload my game with all the bells and whistles on my shaders the performance tanks on touch. I have spent over a full week, and massive ammounts of attention and motivation attempting to solve this. At least I finally have the piece of mind of knowing it's a shader issue, and 95% sure it's out of my hands after trying to isolate the cause of the slowdown and finding that just any shader setups at all was diminishing performance.

Finally got around to sending a bug report to Unity, will it get lost in a sea of bugs? Will they already have the issue solved as this seems like a global problem many will be experiencing? Is there some niche thing in my problem causing this ONLY to happen to me and I'm wasting everyone's time? Who knows, but it was worth making a report after all my setups and investigations into the issue so I don't feel as though I've wasted all of this time.

This was a really dumb path to go down. I should have focused on making the game better and fixing this better, EVERY OTHER BUILD is fine, even the stand alone phone build. So the game runs on phones flawlessly, it's only when played on web that it faulters a bit, and even then it's still playable.

Ugh, what a week. But everything is mostly over now. I'm going to have to spend some time getting my project out of debug mode and be back fully online and I'm going to have to change my headspace back to forward progress and not rebuiling shaders and spinning wheels in mud trying to track down elusive bugs.

I'm looking forward to putting all this crap behind me and just getting back to work on the game again. Deep breath, things were going well, gotta just get back to it, and push forward with positive progress. Who knows what the future holds just gotta try to make the game as best as I can without getting sidetracked every step of the way.

The past month was amazing, just some hiccups recently, I feel as though the piper has been paid and it will be full steam ahead soon.

Caught myself from posting an upbeat song, this one is far more fitting:

Late night edit: Just thinking about dev tomorrow. Do I dive in like usual and fix issues as they come? Tune the overblown dash mechanics? Tone down the movement overall for zone one and phase in more agile fish and player loadouts elsewhere in the map? These all need to be done, and I know exactly how to do them.

I feel mentally rested from heavy gamedev right now, and it would be dumb to waste that. Now is a good time to come up with a core change to the game to make the core experience better.

I think the biggest hurdle to making a fun game is going down the developer rabbit hole too far, you see the game from an angle the player never will. You start having these notions of quantity over quality, of automated systems that can produce endless content, of loot systems that can make infinite items, of systems and tools that will end your misery so the game will make itself.  You have these idiot notions that "oh if only I had more art this game would be so cool". 

Loads of external niceties like fancy environments and animatoins and character art are all fools gold. How do you make the UNIQUE elements of your game better? How do you add to the collective fun of gaming as a whole with your game? Not with other people's art, not with other peoples nostalgia... Stop looking for a gimmicky escape route and make a fucking game.

But when you play the game genuine notions of what will make your game will bring you pain, you will shut them out from your mind. You do not want to live the nightmare of revamping systems AGAIN, of opening old festering wounds.

I think of the resentment that must form deep in the coder cages of most game studios, the untold stories of beaten developers down to their last gasps of enthusiasm being blamed for the game not coming together, of the revolving door of poor souls who engage with this fool's errand of attempting to make a game worth a damn. Gamedev is mired by delusion and mistakes, as manchildren wrestle over the toys and play hot potato with any form of accountability with self destructive payloads.

Anyhow, back to the tired subject i've rambeled about several times before... I'm going to go to bed a bit before I'm ready to sleep I think (despite the international going on tonight I think). I rarely give myself any time to think these days, like really think. My mind just goes a mile a  minute. What I never do is allow my mind to settle and deep dive untapped thoughts of what radical direction I can take my game.

This was always my dream when I would play games, thinking of cool and neat mods, thinking of better systems, thinking of neat stuff. And now it's all a nightmare. 

"I should probably add cool stuff because that's the point of making a game, but I'm so tired"

That be the rub. Picking your poison, you can command a legion of people with a wealth of corporate money and watch as everything falls to pieces because no one has the dedication to the project, a cohesive vision, and the project falls apart from a thousand cuts from a throng of cooks. Or you try to handle shit yourself, and find out just how much fucking investment these things take, and that you will resent your project long past the honeymoon phase. I envy those who cruise by on the outskirts of a steady studio.

BUT!

For the first time I'm semi excited for where this SOB is going.

Fuck it, I think tomorrow I'm going to add energy back into the game, go big or go home. The game's getting pretty ok, let's try to make it even better.

Right now combat is in this weird position where charged attacks are good, combo's are good, and if I don't balance things properly, then you just use one or the other, but if I perfectly balance them, then it kinda feels like, "ok I can just do anyting and nothing is better than other stuff so i might as well just smash my buttons and nothing matters." I want secret's combat to have at least a little more meaning than this shit show of post reality we live in.

So here were my thoughts, I'm going to add an energy bar, but instead of energy just not allowing you to execute attacks which felt really bad in the past, it's just going to cause you to charge your attacks much slower, so i'm hoping this doesn't end up being detrimental to being able to just smash buttons and have fun.

I was also thinking this will add a nice mechanic to bites on the shark, allowing you to tap back your energy, think of it as a mana tap from diablo. This also opens up a whole new world of potential fun item modifiers in the future.

Fully charged attacks I can now tune to genuinly be big, heavy hitting special attacks with neat paritcles, though I'd have to revamp the system such that particles scaled based on how charged the attack is, eh, maybe not, maybe I can just jazz up the charge effects a touch and visually communicate thier stronger power that way.

Anyway, going to deep think about this, can't be adding major systems just willy nilly, creative energy is a rare commodity these days and I need to push forward, I feel i'm getting close. A couple more additions to combat to bring everything online in a cohesive manner is absolutely something worth persuing, even if it risks being a waste of time. Which reminds me of a blog post I wanted to write, but I'll just say it here since it fits in the moment. Getting better at making games isn't learning to not make mistakes, or finding the right people to work with, brown nosing on your resume with all the right keywords. It's about making all of the fucking mistakes faster than everyone else. Learning from them, and then moving forward anyway, then running into a debilitating bug, and then pushing forward again, because fuck the world. I'm pushing forward with my muderfish game, you fucks. If you can do this for 5 years, perhaps you too can find yourself penniless in a cave mumbling to yourself about how great it is to fail.

ANYHOW! SeaCrit is hot garbage, gonna pound my head into the keyboard tomorrow to make it less garbage.