Every project is it's own story. Generally we think of the early days in a project as the fun ones. You're prototyping big systems, getting the groundwork in, finding cool new things, finding the fun. It's exciting. As dev lurches forward systems get locked in, and you spend most your time polishing testing polishing testing and on and on.

Well I bought a little art pack that I touched on yesterday and holy moly has it just absolutely tied the room together. Almost every aspect of the game I was foggy on: the story, the level design, the environment look... ALL these things feel addressable now, I have ideas popping out of my head for building out new areas of levels, and filling them with interesting level assets.

One big revelation I've had is environment assets don't even have to affect gameplay that much, I don't need to totally revamp AI to deal with more complex environments. I'm VERY happy with how the combat is coming along (I do need to make combo attacks feel more responsive, will be working on that soon), so the question wasn't, "How do I add interesting level design assets. It's been, how do I add interesting visual elements that don't disrupt the play that is already working quite well. 

So often we make the problem bigger than it is, which makes our mistakes bigger! We always think more is better, complex is better. IT'S NOT! SIMPLE IS BETTER! KEEP IT SIMPLE! MAKE SIMPLE FUN! The less peices you have, the better you can make them fit together, the more you can polish them. Lots of pieces is a sign that your core game isn't fun, and you're compensating by chasing a white whale. This is the heart of game design.

I dropped some arches in the scene yesterday and BOOM, it was a revelation. I can add compelling assets into the scene so long as angles don't cause fish to get "stuck" on corners within assets. I'll drop a quick mock up of how I will be addressing collisions and the general thought on environment assets.

So these archways will require only one cube of collision at the very top, and they will always be placed in a way that the player can swim through them. They at a great deal of visual interest without destroying the simple area of play. I'm finding I can add all sorts of interesting assets in the foreground and background. I'm not sold on these palm trees, I may use them in the distance on distant islands to give a sense of scale and adventure to the world. "Wow there's so much to explore!"

I've also decided I'll be making sky zone which might be kinda fun. I'll have cubes of floating water and the player can swim around in the sky jumping from cube to cube, it'll be a fun place to hide chests and bonuses and maybe a secret shop or two if the player take a leap of fath into the sky in the right area to find cool seacrits! I also think it'll be cool to see these cubes of water floating in the distance and wonder, WTF are those floating bricks of water, only to continue onward to find that you can jump into the sky. Oddly enough these floating bodies of water are a lot easier to implement than underwater caverns as those require building in both positive and negative space, and addive space alone is far easier, so i'll implement those later.

ON TO INTEGRATION! Gotta weed through which assets to keep and which not to, which is a bit of a pain, lots of textures and materials and models and prefabs to rangle, then I gotta create custom 2d collusion setups and who knows what else, this will take some time, likely the bulk of today. But if I can get this sorted there are some other big things I want to address. Start building up new areas, I want to create "The Surfs" town, a village of poor fish where I can do a bit of world building and get some neat areas to explore that aren't necessarily combat oriented, this will be a first and a great time to develop some level  prefab assets I can use elsewhere.

I want to polish the core combo attacks, they're too slow and not very responsive. We need attacks to be punchy and deliberate gosh darn it! I think I need to make the first 2 of the 3 attacks more immediate so combat feels snappy and in your control .Currently if you mash the button the player executes lots of slow attacks seemingly at random since they queue early in an attacks execution. Just saying this out loud I think I'll add a new check that an attack can only queue when a current attack is .25 seconds away from completion or something. This should cut down on the feeling of attacks just firing off for no reason and make combat feel more deliberate. I also plan on adding a new tuning variable that augments all timings in one variable, so if I get an attack fully set up and the timings work, if I want it to be a bit faster or slower, instead of having to tweak 4 different values of hit delay, hit duration, animation speed, etc, I can adjust this one variable and it will update the attack across the board, will be very nice to have and really cut down on iteration time.

No negative blathers in todays blog! Not even for these sell out sh*ts!

Time to light the tires and start the fires! Gonna be a good day of dev. Coffee time mamma jamma's.

Solid 9 hour day. Feels good. Wish I could clone myself, too damned much stuff still to do!

Good to be slamming out work again daily, but also so ready for this game to start showing promise. Good lord it's been a lot of work. Hopefully the new build comes out soon and it turns at least a few heads...

Conflicted about the future. Part of me wants to do this cool revision to spawners and make them like star gates that asemble themselves, then blow up with spectacle and leave a fish behind. And part of me thinks I need to totally rethink how enemy fish engage the player in combat, and that i need to make sweeping changes to how the charge movement works and revamp all elements of combat. It's  Wonky.

This is the elephant in the room, core gameplay elements, though they have promise, are not sufficiently fun and pick up and play yet. I need to figure out the happy medium. How do I get the proper movement setup where the player can face forward when they want, or turn when they don't want to? How do  i get engagements from melee fish to be interesting? I've been meaning to try blocks for a while, maybe I should make it where the mouth opens the fish actually becomes INVULNERABLE, not weaker. That may make combat a bit more interesting... I may try bringing back the fast movement during the low end of charging for a bit more ebb and flow to combat.

I'm finding myself ping ponging again. I change something, then I change it back, then I change it again. I think i'm trying to find some nugget of fun in the values of my systems, but there is something inherently wrong that needs major revision to the core system. THAT is what I need to figure out. Going to think about it. I think I'm close, but the devil is in the details. I have various systems online and mechanics that can allow for interesting movement, I just need to figure out how to wrangle it all together. I hate revising crappy old code that is over designed and connects to other crap code, but it is what it is. I'm getting close.