For a while now i've wanted the world of SeaCrit to be a bit of a treasure hunt, with sprawling zones and little hidden areas where you can find rare fish that give you interesting permanent bonuses.

When you generally think of "farming" in a game, you think of a monotonous exercise of camping an area for long periods of time, doesn't really matter where, so long as you're leveling up. I'm hoping to create more interesting routes to powering up in SeaCrit, by creating specific areas where certain bonuses are generally found. Maybe there's a small alcove in a toxic zone where it's the only spot that toxic tuna spawns, and these fish give a permanent bonus that makes your charged attacks give a toxic damage component. Or maybe there's a very dangerous area that's the only place where items drop with coveted lifetap mods. I want the progression of SeaCrit to be strategic and meaningful, not the usual slog of just going to a hard area, farming, and moving on mindlessly.

It has to be the right balance though, can't force people to execute advanced farming patterns to be able to advance in the game. I'll be sprinkling middle of the road fish to farm all about, fish that increase max life, fish that improve your damage, etc.

I'm also playing with the idea of enabling exp gain for various actions again, but I think I'm going to tie it to itemization. So if you find a "Undying Tunic" maybe that item allows you to gain exp for regenerating, and every time you level up your regen, you gain a level. If think by tying exp to a singular chest item, and thus only being able to have one equipped at a time, the level up system will be far easier for the player to understand and more fun to have in the game. This will take a bit to implement, need to create new upgrades and code, but I'll take it slow and start with maybe just regen and see how that feels and if it's working i'll generate more items for stun level ups, charge, damage, etc. These will be great items to put in special areas and shops to add interest to exploring the world and power progression.

Combat's really coming together I hope. I had a hell of a blog post yesterday! I was pretty pumped, I wonder if the combo system is all that great now, or if I was just that relieved to sort out the damned nuances of combo input. I think it's somewhere in the middle. It's better now, but plenty of tuning to do to make the system better, the new berserker mechanics are pretty over the top, i gotta tone those down. I think i'll reduce the falloff, but greatly reduce the scaling of it all while adding a cap. Upgrades will increase that cap so if you really enjoy berserk increased attack speed and swim speed from doing your base attack combo, you can look to enhance the longevity of berserk and the upper limit for more haste more often.

Going to need to figure out what upgrades are suited to items, which are suited to permanent upgrades, and which are suited to buying in a shop. Or any combination of the above, the system is pretty robust and dynamic, I can make it so the player can farm tons and tons of max health from fish dropping bonuses or I could give them an item with +50,000 max health on it. Going to take lots of playtesting and iteration to find the most fun combination.

SeaCrit is deceptively simple, the sky's the limit for interesting play progression, farming patters, randomly generated items that throw the player for a loop for what the best area to farm next is.

I have some new toys developed for how to generate fish that drop bonuses. I've only scratched the surface of exploring the various zone spawn setups. I never expected this, but random spawns that randomly appear in the game world are probably my least favorite now. I much prefer while teseting the game to swim to areas where I know fish spawn, and trying to attack them in a fassion that maximizes farm effciency and stat finding. The random elements of random fish spawning that are maybe easy to kill, maybe hard, maybe drop an item really just disrupts the agency of the player and don't help build excitement in the world itself. Much more fun to swim about and hope to find that rare fish spawn that gives lots of pearls, or drops a great item, and it doesnt' feel cheap when you die to these fish, you put yourself in these situations.

I'm thinking of creating a new "roaming" spawn type. Currenly fish are either to swim all about unrestricted, or they will stay at a given spawn point. I want to create a new type of fish where if they get a certain distance from their "home point" they will swim back to a point nearby. I can put a special boss spawn at the center of this area that speeds up the spawn time of the boss any time one of these nearby fish are killed. It'll be a sort of summoning circle for a boss fish that gives great stats or a good item. I'm toying with the idea of making it take longer/ require more kills to summon additional mini bosses, and also boost their stats making them harder to kill and have more health every time they spawn.

Should timers for rare fish count down even if the player is very far away? So the player will develop farm patterns over very large distances to kill certain fish at certain timings? I think this is the best move, but I need to be careful how I load and unload assets in the world, or come up with a new system that uses Time.Time to see how long since the last spawn time instead of subtracting from the timer with Time.Deltatime each frame. Lot's and lots of little things to tweak and adjust in my unoptimized code base. 

Sometimes I think I should refactor my code, but IF IT WORKS IT WORKS! There's something nice about being able to bring the scalpal to scripts and just go nuts on them without worrying about keeping the perfect syntax and logic. If something works and has no bugs it just isn't worth redoing. It's easy enough to just go in there, find where a new mechanic should go, and slip it in. It's really not that much easier or harder if the code is well kept or not. 

I was thinking about this last night, so many teams obsess over best practices of code, and they end up creating absurd and over the top systems and hide certain variables, they obsess over whether to use a singleton, whether to make variables private or public, among a ton of other jargon I don't even comprehend. Naming conventions and all this nonsense, and in the end all these cooks in the same kitchen make things HARDER. IF IT WORKS IT WORKS, give yourself some breathing room to make the game fun FFS! 

If you're not working to make your code more robust so the game can be more fun, then you're probably locking your game into a state where it will be a dull hard to work on mess forever, just so you can pat yourself on the back to enforce some arbitrary guideline on your team for neckbeard brownie points and accolades among a team of people who though they don't understand the secret sauce of making  a game fun, will circle jerk arbitrary coding methodology as tertiary coding methodologies and practices balloons and balloons. Lots of fakers out there trying to justify their positions on various teams by being a hard nose who doesn't understand the secret sauce of their venture, you can say this about a lot of industries. 

Any amatuere coder can jump into seacrit's codebase and jump right in retooling systems without any fuss and to be completely frank, I have no idea how higher level code could possibly make the game easier to develop or more fun, I've more or less been able to implement any mechanic I've dreamt of so far, maybe I just don't know what I'm missing out on. I don't understand larger studios trying to find "genius" coders to write systems that are nearly impossible to understand and if anything goes awry will lock their game into bugs and dev hell forever. Gamedev is such a crazy endeavor with many pitfalls. I still look back and consider having to do all this crap by myself without any funding to be a blessing. Still got the ball in my corner and the project feels easy to retool and expand upon without any of the preconceived notions from "professionals" in an industry that has roundly failed in the task of producing quality content with all the resources in the world.

Ok, enough sh*t talking.

Lots to do! It never ends, don't really have time to just take a break and enjoy the progress that's been made, all systems require a lot of tweaking and tuning, the game isn't realized yet, nothing truly shines just yet, and the game requires that I build everything up in Unison so that the fun can be found, bonuses can be tuned, AI can be set, etc in a way that they all build upon one another.

I think today i'll work on the new AI and spawn setups and build up a bit more world assets to put these new spawners in. I'm thinking I should stop building the world in a way that everything connects to each other out of the gate. Right now you can swim from area 1 right into area 2, and that really locks me in to having zones at a certain size with a certain arrangement of assets without freeing me up to create what is most fun and to experiment with interesting new spawn and level designs. Writing these blogs can really be a boon to coming up with pipelines for future dev, actually taking the time to write out what the plan is gives a moment to consider alternative ways of doing things before jumping right in. It helps that the teleport systems are all in and ready to go so I can either stitch these levels together, or I can go about just teleporting players from one point to another. Maybe i'll do a combination of both.

Alrighty, time to drink some coffee and get to it. I keep thinking I'm getting closer and closer to a state where i can just start creating content each day and dial in values for attacks enemies and items, but this slog is never done, still much to create before the core systems are ready for tuning and the world is ready to be made.

I am very grateful to just be enjoying the ride as of late to some degree, I still dread opening the project and having to wrangle code, but I'm getting positive progress towards a more fun game each and every day. Things aren't perfect, but it could be worse!

Edit: Rough day of dev, took way longer to get these alt spawn systems going and I don't feel as though the game is any better for it. I need to start focusing and work on core things that need doing. No more spinning wheels in mud! Not a total wash, but I don't feel as though i've carried the momentum like I have the rest of the week. I need to refocus.