Do I spend more time thinking of which music to link than writing these blogs?

PROBABLY!

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm gearing up to get back to work in a big way. I love this feeling. Took a long break, came back, and all the sensible paths moving forward are revealing themselves. Lots to talk about!

World Building: This is a big one, because for a long time I wasn't sure how to attack this. What art do I use?  How do I build levels? How am I going to build the world in my lonesome?

The biggest change is going to be in my approach to making content. I used to build out huge sections at a time and think i'd go back and build them up later. They were all connected and I had all these massive monstrosities of design that didn't lend itself well to iteration.

It all seems so obvious now, but the sensible path moving forward is to just make small sections that are independent of each other and not sweat integrating them together too much. So I'll make ONE really nice shop, and I'll just use that everywhere. I'll make ONE really nice secret cave, and I'll use that everywhere.

Bye Bye to terrain. It's buggy, and I just had hours of work disappear on me. Never again. I can get by one terrain chunks, they're almost as good. Terrain takes up lots of time and often breaks, not a good solution. Basic B|%{# geo is good enough!

I have built SO MUCH content that has been thrown away for one reason or another. Never again. I will build each independently, and i will make each one great. If teleports are clunky, i will fix them up and make them easily integrated and level design will be easily iterated on, and expanded and made in a way that it can only get better, not scrapped!

More than ever, QUALITY OVER QUANTITY!

UI revisions: There's a lot of garbage on the screen pertaining to enemy difficulty and random EXP taking up lots of real estate. So I'm going to do a pass on UI to try to minimize the less important stuff, hide it away, and show the more important stuff. Pearl UI i'm going to greatly scale down, and remove perfection and combo bonuses from the start of the game, and have them only appear after the player gets some kind of upgrade.

NPC's and Story: The most common feedback I got was that the story is lacking and I 100% agree. I used to believe it was important I tell the player, "This is a demo! Don't mind the unfinished stuff!" That was kinda pointless. I need to start writing up story stuff! Not sure I have much time to do this justice with other game stuff going on. But I will at least get some generic stuff into the game so players can pick it up and feel some sense of purpose and start feeling out what it would be like to try to inject story and purpose. Gotta start somewhere, perfection is the enemy of progress

NPC's are often situated in poor areas in lots of combat or bunched up together which gets annoying. I will be working to hide tertiary fluff dialogue away from core combat areas.

Fish Art: I can't believe how much time has gone by. But I opened up Skype and found the old conversation thread I had with my best former fish artist and sent him a message, hoping he's still willing to do more art for the game! I tracked down this old monstrosity for old times sake:

THE HORROR

I've decided I want a new, full on character fish for the player to play as. Could be a more refined baby shark, could be an entirely new type of fish, not entirely sure! I just know I really liked working with Maham and wanted to give him first crack at it even if he had a penchant for wanting to make every single art asset a big tittied horror. What I do know is the new fish will have to fit with bite attacks, because that's what I have setup now and i don't want to lose work. Although it's possible I could ditch the bites and just rely on weapon attacks and make the player fish something less aggressive. So many possibilities it's easy to get stuck thinking. I THINK i'm just going to ask for a very iconic looking shark, maybe with a swordfish like mohawk or something very unique to help brand the game. The player fish will be the defining piece of art for the game, so if it's fantastic, every moment of the game will be better for it!

The ranged fish is also a very basic pointer fish. Do I want a unique ranged version of the player fish?

Future Videos: The other day I wanted to do a super long video where I show off huge sections of the game and do voice over to sell the game. I got stage fright and ended up just doing a blog instead. I still want to get a little more personal with my future videos, so in the near future I will be making shorter videos where I kinda talk about the design process as it pertains to smaller chunks of the game, I think that might be kinda neat.

Remove Exp Systems: In this moment I think I have decided that I am going to remove exp systems from my game. I was just theorizing that I should transfer common item drops to enemies and it dawned on me that to make it interesting certain fish should drop different powerup types of items. Like big tanky fish should give you a permanent item that gives extra health. Fast tiny fish should give you powerups that improve your speed and agility. And I got to thinking, well a lot of the power is tied to the EXP system, which is kinda clunky and doesn't really feel right... AND BOOM. WHY NOT JUST REMOVE THIS ENTIRE SYSTEM and tie all these progression mechanisms to the drop system? This reduces a lot of UI and streamlines the progression of the game. It also gives much more strategy to where you fight and which fish you kill. It also means you don't have to resort to weird gameplay to try level up your stats like sitting around and taking damage and healing to level up your max health and regen. Just play the game, kill fish, get stronger base don what you kill.

It's friggin' great when you have some epiphany that a huge chunk of your game is redundant, and will likely be better if you just remove the darned thing. There were a lot of clunky stuff related to this system, from screen overlays to confusing UI. I'm looking forward to taking this out. So much time putting these systems in... but such is gamedev. Maybe I'll add rare items that on give a % chances to drop these items when you regen, or when you stun an enemy, or when you deal damage. It would be the best of both worlds without the UI clutter.

Remove scaling difficulty from initial zones: I keep putting this system in and then taking it out. I'm going to make it a toggle on whether a zone gets harder or not, and disable it from starting zones, and I will remove it from the core UI, migrate it to secondary stationary UI, and make it only display info if difficulty has gotten harder.

In my last blog post I posted that I needed a team to make progress, but honestly, I think I can take this sucker pretty far on my own in the near future. Would the game benefit from talented people on deck? Sure, but it's not showing much promise yet, I need to sail alone a bit further methinks.

LOT'S TO DO!

Feeling like my old self who's ready to kick ass and chew bubble gum, and I'm now on a non sugary diet the precludes bubble gum. 

I recently got some feedback that my blog posts were too negative and crazy, and might drive people from the project, and for a moment I was thinking of removing them, but I've decided to keep them up. This is what the project is, this is what it's been through. A dark cloud of secrecy surrounds other projects, SeaCrit will be made in the open, at least for now since I have sole ownership and can do as such, warts and all.  Once I get back to work, blog posts will be made cataloguing dev goodness, and the darker days will slide to oblivion. Ups and downs.

I'm excited for more upbeat and kick ass blog posts in the near future. Feelin' like my old self again. Feels good to be on the precipice of whoopin' ass.

There are a billion and a half other tiny things I need to do. I'm not sure if I listed things here, or on my other to do lists. Sometimes I worry that if I don't jot those things down, those great ideas will be lost forever. But I've got a lot jotted down and I'm sure I'll have PLENTY of other ideas here and there. Gonna open my ToDo list right now so i can catch all these random ideas that are popping back into my brain. It's been too long. Maybe too long. I just gotta concentrate, can't get distracted...

This blog and dev are a scattered mess. GOOD! Sometimes dev is going to be a bit scattered. Means lots of good shit is gonna go down!

SeaCrit is going to be a real game soon. Pumped.

Edit: I may make items unlock the ability to acquire EXP. Need to think about it.