Every feature in every game ever has the same lifecycle.

You add something, it's TERRIBLE, then you polish it and make it better. You devote hours to adding new sounds, new bubbly effects, you tune how strong it is, how fast, you find what you think feels good for this asset. The more time you spend, the better this feature becomes in every single solitary aspect. Your game is directly correlated how much pain you can endure asset to asset, system to system as you build up the bedrock of your world one needy, accident prone, overcomplicated mess at a time.

There are 100% solid ways to make a game better without taking crazy design chances or wild ideas in new directions, this is a fantastic video on making a game "juicy":

I went back and played the old build last night. And in almost every single concievable way it was better. The color choices, the lighting, the ground materials, the rocks, the dash values, the combo chains, the enemy behaviors.

We become so starved for any sort of change to the same game we play over and over again as we build it, that we become prone to the craziness of thinking ANY change is better. We want a full game so bad that we start adding lots of things into the game and things start to get muddy, we don't get as much time to devote to every little thing to make it "juicy".

What is driving me mad right now, is how much worse I have made the game in the past month. It's time for me to take a deep breath, focus on the fun I had before and get that back and then build on top of it. I don't think it's going to take too long, it's just a few combo chains and 1 enemy to tune up.

I used to always wonder how patches or games could come out that were WORSE than the prior iteration. Now I know. You get stuck in dev, you push hard and you don't want to lose work,  or recapturing old work becomes an impossible chore. So you just soldier on. SURELY all the new work you just did outweighs the lost fun... right? I guess we will see!

I've said it before I need to find the goomba. I need to design the perfect stupid enemy. The smart, difficult ones aren't 1/10th as important. 1 good enemy, and a slew of fun items and upgrades for the player. I'm putting at the top of my to do list to recapture the tunings of the old demo, and to hide away all the junk that doesn't need doing for a long time. I will create just 3 enemies, hefty sharks, baby sharks, and ranged fish. And I will be tuning the player's core attacks and setting up the second area.

I heard this trick that professionals do. They create some mid section of their product, chapter 2 of a movie, level 2 of a video game, they will make it as good as they can. Once they have gotten better at the process, they go back and they craft up the opening chapter with all the best practices they have developed and thinking over what's most enjoyable over time. 

Looking back the anatomy of what the combo system should be seems so obvious, and I'm almost tempted to refactor it now that I know WTF I'm doing. I have a throng of functions called "Use", "GetAbility", "GetCombo", "GetComboAbility", each component is built with player and AI settings lumped together into one messy disaster. It's scattered and built up in many directions from the start of the project and it's an absolute nightmare to code in and I wake up today and think, "Why the heck is this so damned messy?". Sometimes we just take for granted something is messy and overdesigned and complicated. We go into the code and we think, "BETTER NOT TOUCH ANYTHING OR IT WILL BREAK!". I wish I could go back in time 2 weeks and tell myself to just gut that garbage, start from scratch, make it simple and just work, expose the very simple points of design so it can be debugged in realtime and easily expanded upon.

Trash code begets trash code.

I'm done spinning wheels in mud, it's clear I can't trust my own opinion. I need to stop fixating on the project being perfect and just make it iterable and well set up. Get a new build, share it out there, get feedback and make it better!

I'm probably being too negative in this post. A LOT of good things have been going on as of late, lots of systems are being refactored and polished up and made usable for long term development and a game with a breadth of play and play styles.

The old demo was much more "juicy" because I only focused on a small set of attacks and 1 enemy. Over months of revamping varous systems tuning has gone down the tubes. This happens when building up features and expanding things, it will just mean I must go back and fix this stuff up again, for the 5000th time.

I don't have a lot of gas in the tank today, but I do want to at least try to recapture the visuals of the first demo for area one. If I can get that done today I'll be feeling  a bit better about the projects trajectory.

Who was your favorite Beatle? Was it John? Was it Paul?

IT WAS RINGO YOU PRETENTIOUS F*CK

Edit:

I love when this happens.... Last I recall this happening was maybe a year ago when I was tuning some projectiles, and as I was fighting some fish I thought, "Holy shit, this is kinda fun!" And for a moment through all the gunk and grime, there was some quality gameplay in that moment against 1 fish shooting bubbles at me.

Today I opened the project with the sole expectation of tuning some boring color values, and while tuning these I had forgotten to turn invisible so the annoying fish around me wouldn't bug me as I tweaked the art a tad. Well, some unrully pudgy bastards decided to start trying to eat me, and before I knew it a throng of these pudgy fooks had spawned around me, and I was like, "STOP BUGGING ME I'M TRYING TO GET WORK DONE U SH*TS". So i started firing off some of the new combo moves which inflate your fish up, and then you can send off a slam finisher and smack all the fish around you. Well i'd forgotten I'd given them ungodly health recently for testing purposes and the smacks were all for naught, but I was having a lot more fun than I was expecting considering all the frustrating dev this week.

I was actually enjoying the added features quite a bit, they weren't just some tiny addition that were a waste of time, they're genuinly adding depth to the game and making it more fun.

(I was going to show off the pudge system, but it's broken, it's supposed to transition back to a normal fish when you have 15 health, not literally one hit after turning hefty. Oh well i'll fix it later, easy fix. And i'm also seeing the healthbar blows way the fook out, also an easy fix.)

This is a good moment to say so I don't forget in the future, that I want all attacks to be powerful and interesting and unique and change your build path. So maybe you get an item that enhances these AOE attacks somehow, that will encourage you to go to a certain zone where LOTS of fish spawn and AOE is a real strength there. Maybe a certain stat or item is found there that then gives you other unique paths to progress. I'm wanting to build the world out and these powers up in a way that they build off of each other and encourage you to explore and enjoy a variety of play rather than most RPG's where you just build up the one thing that lets you kill everything on screen with a single button press.

I know I repeat myself, but it's still funny to me how I feel like I'm two weeks out. For years and years now, I'm just about to get to work on the key things and this game will be fun and the demo will be out in two weeks time as the years fly by. I do finally feel as though I am getting close to doing the small handful of things I thought i'd be kinda ok at, making some interesting item bonuses and skills... HOLY SH*T it's been a lot of work getting to this point.

Anyhow, feeling very optimistic for the future after making a bit of a downer post. I gripe about paying the piper... but if you do it enough, just maybe the investment will start to surprise you.