For weeks now I've been very measured in forward progress. Don't want to jump the gun spinning wheels in mud because of reckless forward development. I've been trying to better finess spawn systems, AI, abilities, stuns, hesitation hit timers, and ensure that when I do start to add fish to the game, and start tweaking their values for forces, attacks ranged, damage, etc, that it is meaningful and won't be irrelevant after some sweeping system revamp.

It's time to bite the damned bullet and start adding enemies and composing playable areas.

It won't be perfect, there will be MANY things to tweak and tune, but you have to start somewhere.

There's a nagging voice in my head that says, don't start yet! You might find that all this work isn't going to coalesce into something fun, you're going to come to the realization that all this work was for nothing, or that you have this massive gulf of revisions to make before this game starts to come together.

Perfection is the enemy of progress. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a starting point.

I am going to add fish, some will hopefully be fun, and others wont be. I need to let go of notions of what features I spent months developing, and just find out what is most fun to engage with. Maybe I find the best enemies just swim up to the player and execute the most absolute basic of attacks, rendering all the bells and whistles pointless. Or maybe I find that it's a combination of simple and more complex. Maybe ranged enemies are more fun. I DUNNO! Gotta start throwing shit in and get feedback. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Rather than thinking today, "How can I improve all this stuff?" I will be focusing on. "How can I set my project up so I can iterate on all of this faster? How can I make abilities and enemies easy to select and their values easily adjusted? How and where do I spawn these enemies to make testing faster and more efficient?

I'm going to intentionally keep todays schedule fast and loose. Here's today's task list:

1. Get a little area in zone 2 going where I can test 2 roaming enemy types and a harder node spawn .

2. Populate this area with some interesting ground and floating assets and play with these setups to see what's most fun? Lots of cover? Cavernous areas to swim through? Or mostly open? Experiment with both ranged and melee in these settings. I'll create one side that is more open, and another side that is increasingly more cluttered with assets.

3. Set up 3 core fish today. A super dumb melee, a slightly more advanced pudge shark, and a ranged bubblefish. Set up the scene so their abilities and AI can VERY EASILY be iterated upon. Ideally these ability properties can be edited in an inspector somewhere with a single click.

One last tedious day of setting things up so that dev can go smoothly into the future.