Status update really fast: I had these high hopes of adding this new complex charge system, and I was going to kick ass yesterday, but I decided to take a mulligan and just enjoy a nice quiet day without any guilt while I prep to dive into this hard for the foreseeable future.

I’m glad I slowed down because I've decided the charge system was going to be clunky and hard to understand and not make the game better. Combat feels fun and button mashy, but also complex and nuanced if you want to maximize your damage output and survivability.

Gamedev is not about recklessly moving forward. It’s about very calculated and purposeful development towards a goal you are positive will work stemming from years of tried and true practice.

What we DON’T want to do, is to smash our hammer against cold steel as we desperately try to make our game better by adding random shit. This will spell doom for our projects.

So I thought about things and combat I feel is actually becoming quite decent. I have some tweaking to do, I need to tone down movement, add more itemization and start putting well balanced upgrades for purchase throughout the game.

What DOES need work and this has been lingering for a while now, is I need to build the world up. And this is particularly frustrating because the environment art in the game is severely lacking. Environment art assets are the lego block from which we build our worlds.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of unique aspects of secret that make it so environment assets are things that need to be relatively unique. It’s a 2.5d game that takes place underwater, and you swim around with no jump mechanic, meaning it can’t get by on a generic sci fi space back, I can’t download various 3d assets meant for FPS games, it needs to be generic underwater type stuff, and the vast majority of assets are art minded and not developed to build out actual playable areas.

So right now before I push forward too hard is the period where I can hunker down and try to come up with ideas for creating the world. I’m really not too happy with using the terrain system, it looks great, it creates decent enough floor plane for gameplay, but it’s disjointed from all the other systems and clunky to make new areas, the system is really not very well implemented.

It’s just me and a generic, free to use rock pack I bought off the Unity store for now. A few generic rocks that don’t have very great collision that i’ve kinda slapped together in a haphazard attempt to create this underwater environment. If I want caves, or if I want long stretches of collision to quickly build otu the world like you might do with rectangular collision it just doesn’t fit together very quickly.

Building out levels with cubes for a jump platformer is straightforward enough, building out a large sprawling metroidvania world usin spheres is proving a real pain in the ass. I want cool new unique environments, i’d like to have neat vistas and various scenery that provides a compelling sense of exploratoin and wonder. And I don’t have those things, I could take a couple months off and maybe build some up myself, they wouldn’t be very good, I haven’t done art in forever and i’m rusty as hell…

I feel as though I’m pushing forward too fast, and sometimes I feel as though I’m not pushing forward fast enough. I should be feeling out what’s fun, I should be feeling out what works, the world should be bigger, it should be more polished.

Being just one person spread so thin across the various design elements is so incredibly daunting. Now that the various combat and progression elements are feeling decent, I need a great looking sandbox for them to be in, and it needs to be fun, and it needs to be reasonable to implement. There is so much more to building up your levels than simply “make it look good”, iteration, feasibility, implementation, speed of creation, all of these things are major factors. 

I really thought I’d have more in mind than just “throw spheres together” at this point, but that’s what the world is right now. Just a bunch of clunky rocks at odd scalings all creating a rudimentary level. It is 100% the weakest link of the game at this point, and pushing forward using the same haphazard assets feels like such a waste of time but I simply don't have the resources to do things the "right way" presently.

That said look at “getting over it”. That game has very basic out of place visuals. But it’s fun.

I wish I could just rotate the terrain 90 degrees and start paining out some cavernous geo for the game. Or if the terrain editor was easier to just pain in terrain anywhere in the scene without having to manage large chunks. The anatomy of my game REALLY isn’t what the unity terrain system was made for, it’s for large sprawling FPS games, not a 2.5D underwater platformer. Can’t get into fancy light makes to make the environment look really nice, gotta keep the memory footprint small so the download is small as possible for web builds.

Feelin’ like a fish out of water. Don’t have as much time as I’d like to invest into level design. Don’t have the perfect pipeline, don’t have anything close to the perfect art assets, don’t have the resources to attain help creating this stuff.

Not the end of the world. I’m going to focus on quality over quantity, and create just a few small areas, if I have to reuse them that’s fine.

Going to let this breakfast settle as i watch the last match of the international, then going to take a little time to collect my thoughts, think about how I’m going to set up prefabs on a small and large scale, how can i make it easier to link teleports together, how can I make this level design system something tolerable to work with and implement, look good, and be fun to play and allow for all the secrets and shops, and expanding world. Maybe it’s already there and i’m just being melodramatic. Might poke around the unity asset store and see if I can find anything that gets the creative juices, maybe an underwater pack or a new rock pack.

Ok, so today did not go as planned. I put myself in a sensory deprivation tank, let my mind go blank, listened to some celtic music, then some mind bending techno and waited for inspiration to strike. I was romanticizing the idea that all of these new age methods would somehow cause a bolt of inspiration to hit me that would allow for me to push forward and totally revitalize the way I do environments. A EURIKA! moment is what I wanted.

NEW PLAN! BORN OF FRUSTRATOIN AND PAIN! 

I had an epiphany while knee deep in technical issues, "gosh I wish i could just build these areas up without the headaches of teleports and level bounds and all that crap.

And I can! We get so caught up in our current pipelines and trying to make a full game that sometimes we forget how simple we can make our pipelines.

So I will be letting go of the notoin that these areas need to hook together, that they need to have "bounds" like walls and floors and I will be creating several tiny areas unbound and trying some unique envrionment assets and design setups to see what's most fun.

Thus far I have juggeled too many things in my persuit of putting togther the most fun areas, terrain, sky, walls, entry points, exit points, teleports, all this nonesense ended up being 90% of the stuff I was worrying about and not arranging things in a way that it made gameplay fun and exploration interesting.

I've sorted some technical issues, I've devised a clear plan moving forward, and I'm going to spend the rest of the day sorting out one last environmental texture I was putting off so i can at least say I had a semi fruitful day today.

I used to be more artist than coder and designer, and that was such a different angle to approach things, creating fun stuff, shoving it all together, throwing technical things and spawn points and checkpoints and NPCs and secret areas on top after the fact. I need to allow myself a little more time than a single dev session to attack this artistic and design issue from a different perspective/ angle.

It's an entire endeavor in itself staying optimistic, keeping a solid task list, and managing unforeseen technical hurdles all the while

So this week I've spent most my time fixing a bug that was out of my hands and then implemented a fix to said bug that seems unnecessay. Bleh.