No new features! I told myself. Just get the AI systems and movement online!

So I wanted movement to  feel a bit more eventful and real so I added a new crash into obstacle mechanic, where if you hit something too fast you take damage and slow down. I got it in, and it was too much, taking damage from just moving around immediately felt terrible, but the slowdown and sound felt pretty good. Movement feels much more natural now. You really feel like a fish in the ocean and not just some machine that can zip around with no consequence.

Well I had the immediate thought, What if you could crash into fish? AND MURDER THEM! So without thinking I started feature creeping, this is how it always happens. And before I knew it, I had an entirely new core mechanic where you waveswin and if you swim into a fish you deal damage based on the impact force. I THINK it feels pretty good for an early implementation. Now I'm at a crossroads, do I keep it as some sort of secondary neat feature? Or do I double down, polish it more, add particles, tweak the knockback forces, create more sound damage logic, incorporate upgrades that enhance it in various ways? Just yesterday I was beating myself up for getting sidetracked and adding too much tertiary stupid shit... and here I am, adding brand new alternative methods of combat on top of the core systems.

WE DOUBLE DOWN

The more I think about it, the more this system is great. It doesn't add any new buttons, it gives purpose to moving fast, and it's also just kinda fun. It's going to take a lot of tweaking and tuning and additional setups to be worth having, but if it's worth having it's worth having. And that's what makes a good game. A series of systems that are worth having. So as much as I'm tired of bringing things online, cleaning things up and setting values, that's what I plan to do today for the crash dash system. It also occurred to me that "Crash Dash" isn't a terrible name for a game, but it's probably already taken.

Let's also talk about how stupid I've been in other areas of dev. I did a massive scale revamp taking the scale of the entire project down to 1/10th size, a massive decision that I feel the ramifications of daily. Every single session I am spending hours rescaling particles and systems that have broken in ways i can't even fathom. I had an annoying bug where fish would break and just freeze and it took me a bit to figure out that there was an obscure "Stop Distance" at which point fish swim at 5% speed in order to stop them  from just smashing into the player. Well turns out I didn't rescale this in the value or in the code, so fish were just deciding to stop for no reason at a very long distance. This is one tiny example of the multitude of things that are breaking and will continue to break until fixed for the foreseeable future. On top of the scale revamp I totally refactored the AI systems at the same time. So I have no idea why things are breaking nowadays. Was it a broken float value? Or was it broken code? I figured, if i'm going to be fixing stuff up, it might as well be a system worth fixing. Payin' the piper and rippin' off the Band-Aid.

It's been a very trying couple weeks  trying to just get things to where it was 2 weeks ago. It's getting there though, so much more invested week after week, so much coming online.

Getting lots done as of late. Hoping it's coming together. 

I'm pushing so damned hard to get to a state worth showing off. I could complain about circumstances per usual, but work is commencing, progress is happening. 4 years ago I would have given an arm and a leg for some big publisher to help support the project. And it would have been dead and gone now. I'm grateful things haven't been easy, it's made the project stronger.

God I love this song.

Post work edit: I wish I had the time to focus and do things properly, to develop best practices so that any time I coded, all those best practices would follow me.

I'm pushing forward too fast with too many systems all at once.

In code, you are always surrounded by potential failure, when you're working responsibly, have a focused changeset, the potential for catastrophic failure is narrow. The more you change at once, the more things will break, and the more things that cuold be causing those things to break. It's an exponential expansion of both ammount and severity of issues. And yet I can't help myself from building multiple systems at one, because systems feed off one another, and from another perspective, you can get exponentially more work done if you're working on several things at a time, as you can tweak and tune everything at once, without having to wait in the future to add new features that connect and refactor things over and over with small incrimental change.

During the first few hours of work my mind is sharp and I can tackle more complex systems without as much user error. But as time goes on things start getting sloppy and I can't concentrate as well and everything starts falling apart. I think I need to start being better about cleaning up code as I go so logic is very well laid out and variables and logic that are locked in, get hidden away. It's so important  to hide away the things that are "done" properly balanced, won't be changing soon. We need to put front and center the things being iterated on, and structure it in a way that we can improve the logic so that at a glance we can tweak, tune, and expand upon these systems step by step as we implement features and expand on them. I'll probably read this blog post over again tomorrow and think to myself, "that's not necessary, just do the code right! and fly through it!". I feel like jeckle and mr. hyde, because early in the dev session I can flyl through and not sweat being organizing things or framing logic perfectly, because i've got enough brainpower to power through it. But as the hours go on and my mind gets bleh, I really just start getting stuck and not able to think of solutions. Just writing these paragraphs is pretty straining. Too many weeks straight drinking coffee and pushing long days I think. Can't expect to be 100% 8+ hours a day 7 days a week, eager to push this out the door though.