I am eternaly in a state of thinking I am 2 days from this next big demo coming together. As such I work in this mad dash, forgoing best practices because salvation is right around the corner if I can get this together, this endless decline may be turning around at long last.

I had an epiphany yesterday while rearranging fish art setups for the 5000th time. I need to stop doing stuff the stupid way. At some point you become accustomed to doing things the stupid way. You have a LOT of content that all does things the stupid way. You don't want to invalidate that shitty content do you? YES YOU DO!

Because years ago I assumed that any time you reimported scale you would break any mesh no matter what, I just started accepting scales for fish as they were, and I would hand place all the item locations for weapons, hats, rings, etc for every single fish. If I wanted another fish that had similar behaviors, similar abilities, etc. I would have to generate them independently because every fish type was locked into the art of that fish. Long story short, the look of fish and the gameplay mechanics were all locked together.

As I type this I'm having more realizations of how I can set up fish settings. Instead of tuning them per fish. I could create these assets as a unique object. So instead of having a script on the fish for fish sense and having to tune them independently for every single fish. I could create a seperate object called "Long sight fish" then drag this component onto the fish and any adjustments to this asset will propogate automatically. All I should have to do to get this working is change "get component" to "get component in children". I'm actually dumbfounded I never thought of this before. This is going to RADICALLY change my workflow for fish in all aspects, it's actually kind of a revelation.

Going to take many hours of work to implement all this, but once I'm done I should be able to generate new fish MUCH easier, and any revisions will not destroy fish.

Guess it's another 2 steps back, two steps forward day. Going to be lots of arduous work with no exciting gains, but come tomorrow, I will be excited to work and generate new fish and the back end will be leaps and bounds better.

I'm excited to be able to create archtypes for fish independent of their looks. So instead of creating a pudge shark, then creating different types of pudge sharks. I can create core archtypes like "scared fish", "Aggressive fish", >> "Aggressive fish melee Bites" And fill these fish with appropriate behavior templates from prefab inheritances. THIS IS GOING TO BE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE OLD SYSTEM.

This means that I will be destroying most all content that I have made to this point. But the good news is it's only maybe 10 fish, and it's not total destruction, more like taxidermy. I'll be gutting every single thing in the game, throwing away the entrails, and stuffing them with hopefully something slightly less revolting.

Whew, this day is not unfolding how I thought it was, but it's time to pay the piper again:

This song is f*cking weird, but it's catchy as hell and I can't resist posting it any more than I can resist throwing away all the work I've done again for the sake of a competent system to work with into the future.

IF YOU CODE WITH ME ON A FRIIIHIDAY ALL THE CODE GOESSSSSSSSssssssssssss. Wouldn't you know it it's Friday, how serendipitous.  NO MORE BLATHERS, TO DEV!

Post Work Edit: Critical hit from my code. Sometimes everything aligns and you get the perfect storm of a bug you can't track down. I want to ramble about how this happened but my brain is too fried, I gave up trying to find the bug, but a secondary issue led me to it. Holy moly what a day. I got the revamp done, but this was one of the most nerve wracking days I've ever had in gamedev. Absolute doozy, still kinda shell shocked, but everything got done, nothing was broken beyond repair, and the project can move forward again. Whew.