I'm so glad I took a little detour and got some particles in the project, the whole thing feels a bit more "legit". It was also a reminder of a key concept that I needed to be reminded of: Most great games are not about punishing the player, they focus on empowering the player, of making every decision, every mechanic, every item a fun little toy to be PLAYED with, not FOUGHT with.

Last night reminded me that SeaCrit is a big toy meant to be fun with fun gadgets and responsive elements that bleed visual cues and bubble over with sounds and lights.

So often we dial in and we're tuning some enemy to be SMARTER, to be CUNNING, to overengineer some god aweful system creating AI states and making endless edge cases. You can devise the absolute most amazing code and systems for a waypoint system with weighted decisions on which abilities and attacks to use on the player... you can spend months on the ULTIMATE boss fight. And it will make a few minutes of your game a little bit better. In fact, it will likely make most people quit in frustration. All that time and energy and creative juice utilized to make your game less fun! For all the time I spend ruminating on these things, I still find myself pulled to the allure of these convoluted and over engineered systems. It's like Sauron beckoning to all your carnal desires, you can make the most impressive AI, you can really show those players who's boss! You can have a legion of enemies at your command that are smarter and stronger to best anyone who dare try to beat your game!

Take a deep breath, games are meant to be enjoyed, they are meant to be fun. Too often we lose ourselves in the moment and we wonder how can we make any number of the hundreds of things in our projects better. But there's only 1 that truly matters. And that is the core control, move set, and abilities of the player. Their items, the polish of their move sets, how fun it is to smack enemies around. Players should look forward to encountering things in your game, not fear them.

So my entire outlook has changed in the short term.  I'm not fixated on the level design and the enemy AI so much. I think I'm going to spend maybe another day or two really making it fun to smack enemies and developing the core combat flow. I'm not thinking "how do I make the enemy fight back" so much as Im thinking, "How can I make smacking a dumb enemy that's just standing there more interesting.?"

Think I'm going to add a "fear per hit" value on enemies. Every time they take damage, multiplied by the damage cooldown of the hit (so rapid attacks aren't OP in this respect). And some enemies after taking a few hits aren't going to attempt to swim away from the player. I think this alone may be just enough of an interesting mechanic that it's not TOO boring to smack big tanky fish at the beginning. Currently if I make it too easy to stun lock them, they just sit there like an idiot and you just hit them and hit them and hit them, and it doesn't feel right. But if they start swimming away, that will make it more interesting.

Problem to solve that I've been putting off for WAY too long: The AI systems are a bit of a mess and scattered. I should probably condense them into 1 big script, rather than having a script for the aggressive state, a neutral state, and a core AI script that manages both of these. Some of the things fish can do like try to find a way around a floating object is really poorly done and needs to be remade from scratch. In fact, The entire thing should probably be redone!

I hate to admit it, but I'll probably spend the entire day just refactoring this crap, but this will pave the way for far easier improvements in the future that will make fighting fish a much better experience. It's way too complex and poorly made with crappy logic. Time to gut it all! Too often I go out of my way to try to salvage some really crappy code. Much better to just nuke it from the very start and get to work making something clean, efficient, and elegant that does what's needed in a clear manner with as little code as possible.

Keep it simple, stupid