Stumbled upon an old design doc yesterday and figured i'd take a peek at it. "Let's look at all the terrible ideas I had back in the day!"

Now i've got feature creep because I liked a couple of them. I kinda want to bring back gobbleable fish, and give them the ability to increase your max life and enhance your damage if you eat enough of them, I think that would be really fun and add a bit of variety to the game so you're not just constantly button mashing all the time, could be an alternative play style where you just sneak around fast and eat all the fish all over the ocean that are bite sized till you're strong. I've gutted these systems in the past (multiple times), but I don't think it would take more than a couple hours to get them back in, just a collision check, a few animations, pull the fish transform to the head bone, and set the bonus properties/ health they give. 

Having an easy form of healing (eating tiny fish) would also be a great way for the player to overheal and enter chungus mode, which currently the player doesn't really know exists unless they use bite taps excessively when at full life. It also means I can make the combat a bit more hectic early on without killing the player while they're building up their items and upgrades and becoming self sufficient where they can heal and survive without healing fish about. It would also just add a lot of life to the ocean to see many passive, viberant fish swimming about wither various neutral swim patterns. 

I think i'll add lots of tiny fish that add very minor stat bonuses so if you eat like 10 of them you'll get 1 health, or .5 bonus damage, something like that. Should probably display a "+1" in the color of green health, red damage, blue speed when enough fish are eaten to trigger a stat gain. Years back I would have had these ideas and spent days trying to figure out how to implement them, but I think I could get this all in in a few hours now, crazy how much more efficient i've become over the years handling so many systems every day for hours on end year after year.

Another idea was tying dash damage to actual in game speed at a given moment, and with the recent wave movement speed in the game, I think it could be a lot of fun to time your dashes when you're at high speed to charge just enough to deliver a big whallop of a hit to an enemy's backside. I may play with this mechanic today, it's relatively easy to implement, just need to add a "enhance damage based on speed" flag to attacks, and turn the wavespeed canceling off on charging, and make it a lerp with a falloff instead.

I was so jazzed to implement the dash damage amp mechanics and now I kinda just want to add the ambient gobble fish and cruise around eating tiny fish (will pair really well with wave swimming). If I tune the fish to run just slower than the player's max speed I think it'll be really neat chasing these suckers down.

I am SWIMMING in possibilities right now, some might say I'm CHASING WATERFALLS with all the bells and whistles and big ideas I'm chasing right now... 

…Holy s(&T, that effect work.... I actually I think this is all pretty doable, and I'm always happy to be distracted building up core gameplay systems. But It's amazing how much I keep getting distracted by new things and I'm not able to get to building zones 1 and 2. So it goes, I'm happy to be distracted so long as the game is getting better! Slept like shit but I have coffee so going to power through it and get to work. But you know me, I CAN'T COMPLAIN.

Post work edit: Trying day of dev. Started off alright, but my brain started melting towards the end and ran into massive edge cases as I implemented the new gobble system. It should have been expected, but i'm optimistic enough to attempt this stupid sh*t. Kinda got it in. On the plus side i've come to realize there is likely a better way to do  fish setups that doesn't require so much constant hand placement of assets.