(We're gonna revamp the UI ... Get it?)

One of the most important parts of gamedev is learning when to plan and when to dev by the seat of your pants. I find that if you're feeling it, just go all in on random dev, go crazy with unplanned development as raw gamedev flows through you, I've been enjoying a lot of fantastic gains the past few months doing just this. 

But not every single element can be done on a whim, not everything will find its best form when you have overarching systems and user familiarity to worry about, NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU, JERK. We've aganoized many times implementing failed systems, adding progression setups that just don't work.

The trick to gamedev is finding that sweet spot between innovation and tried and true. Something is interesting when it has a new twist to it, "ya like burgers? WELL BOOM! HERE'S ONE WITH CHEESE AND BACON!" 

But we can go to far. "ya like pizza? HERE'S ONE TOPPED WITH RAW OCTOPUS !" As the developer of your game, you must learn to subtract your years of experience with your project and try to see it from the perspective of someone who has never dealt with your systems before, you have developed a taste for your game, others have not, you can't come at them too hard with new elements. No matter how good something is, if it's alien, it will be rejected by the majority of your potential audience. This is to say nothing of the delusions we get thinking our clever little systems, that our digital babies are more amazing than they actually are. 

I'm trying to take solace in this, I don't have to reinvent the hamster wheel, I can add stats like armor, speed, agility, haste, and damage, and I can display these prominently in a UI and I can consolidate several mechanics into singular stats rather than having massive quantities of upgrades. This also gives me the ability to have MORE STUFF on items while simplifying things, it's the best of all worlds. 

If all armor has an armor value (damage reductions), and a speed value(how fast you move), I am no longer taking up 2 slots that are for upgrades for key stats that should be on ALL armor. Same goes for weapons, they should all have a damage value, and a charge speed value (determines how fast your charge attacks build up, though I'm not sure about this one, since charge attacks are unique to each weapon anyway. 

Should a sniper rifle just inherently cause your dashes to take longer to charge since their attacks take longer to charge? I'm not sure that's fun.) I need to think about what stats to assign to these weapons, I don't want to have stats just for the sake of "more stuff" that's how Diablo 2 ended up with an annoying endurance bar. 

"More stuff" rarely makes a game better, unless it's just a means of padding low itemizations with random junk to empower the player to feel as if they're understanding mechanics better so they can better choose the items that are good. But in the long run it's just noise and gets in the way of fun generally speaking.

The last thing you want to do is add an upgrade like "visual range" and in order to try to make it relevant, you make it so the player can't see very far, so the whole game is annoying to play now. Then on top of this, you want some items to have a high quality visual range and a low shorter bonus, so even with the item, the player feels gimped unless they get the good one. But I digress...

So my plan for tonight is to revamp the UI and stats a bit, and get "Armor", "Speed", "Health", "Damage", etc. onto items, and reduce the bulk of upgrades having to play such a big roll right now. I'll be adding a new core stats section with the fully modified values so the player can see why they have lots of HP, why they move fast, why they reduce incoming damage by a %, etc, and I'll be creating that new window right in the center of the screen where the item description currently goes:

That's the area I have to work with, which is a tad small, so I can't load it up with cool graphics, but it should allow me enough room to put the core stats and MAYBE a brief explanation of what they do in fact I think i'll do a quick mockup for armor to get the juices flowing:

So this is what we're working with for now:

I need to work on it, but I want the Core central stats to look more "inherent" with less of an icon look next to them, and more of an inherent global stat that the player will always know they have. I want bonuses to feel... LIKE A BONUS! something that overlays these core systems.

Armor and weapons seem like they'll be pretty straight forward, rings I'm expecting to get a little more tricky with, they can enhance either damage, haste, speed, or armor, which are the core stats that weapons and and armor enhance, so i'll have to make the UI contextual of which stats display, whereas weapons and armor will always show their 2 core stats even if they're zero. I want ring bonuses to be additive, not multiplicate, so the items feel more like a supplement encouraging interesting builds, rather than just amplifying cookie cutter  builds. So if you have a weapon with lots of damage, you'll feel upgrades to speed or defense more from a ring than more raw damage. Going to have to balance and find what works.

So today I will be trying to get a sizeable chunk of this new UI in, new innate icons, all the above in, and in the coming days I'll be tying these stats into the core systems and items so they actually do stuff and gutting some existing upgrades that are now inherent to items as well as likely creating some item stat setups and toying around with various item loadouts to find what feels good. I'm pretty happy with how this revision seems to have come out, should be very feasible, a nice middle ground of attacking issues without going overboard and creating a whole new slew of functionality to implement in UI, which can be a real headache. 

All these years of hard work is making this all feel relatively simple, just busy work. Though i have a nagging voice in my head saying "START OVER FROM SCRATCH YOUR CODE IS DOG CRAP!". That voice needs to STFU because we have billions of other things that need doing and it's good enoughf or now.

I'm pretty happy with this setup, it doesn't have the nice intricate layouts and nice pixel art quality that a game like diablo 4 has, but we also don't have millions of dollars and hundreds of wage slaves to throw tasks at, and honestly, I like to think that's a good thing. Only one m*ther fucker thrown to the grind machine here, and that's the one coming up with the feature creep.

I think this world would be a better place if the ones deciding on all these big new systems had to do at least a % of the work getting it online, or at least give it an earnest try.

ANYWAY! Enough daydreaming (is it day?), gonna gear up to get to work soonish, not going to be fun, not feeling great, no caffeine to help, just fighting against the blehness  to get this damned thing together before we fall apart. But that's fine, we've got rockin' tunes! Have a new play list called "bangerz!!! from a chiptune channel on youtube called 8 bit universe that i'm looking forward to trying out. I'm really into chiptune covers lately, darned good music to work.