PLANS ARE FOR FOOLS!

I really need to plan... I've been deving by the seat of my pants and sometimes your game can really benefit if you just take the time to clear your head and not try to drive through your todo list at 90 MPH. A thought just occured to me, I had this general rule that all upgrades and bonuses would require active play to be beneficial. No global +50% haste, no global +100% damage on an item or mod. Maybe sometihng that enhances the haste bonus from your haste attacks, but I didn't want the game to simply devolve into the usual cookie cutter /damage/haste/crit build that damn near every existing rpg does. Thus far I belive this rule is serving the game well, but it's impossible to tell because the game has never gotten up and running! 

My current thoughts are this could push the game too far in the other direction. Bonuses are fun and all, but if you have 10 of them, and they all consider your mental faculties to stratagize how to use them best, the game starts to become too muddy with random things going off all over the place that you may have forgotten of. What if I give you an item that every 10 kills generates a heal cloud? Is the player going to see that cloud among the other 50 effects going off randomly and wonder... "Why the heck is this greed cloud appearing all the time and WTF does it do?

I think i'm going to trap myself in a sensory deprivation tank and just think about upgrades for an hour or so. It's been so long since I took some time to think. THEN we plow through our TODO at 90 MPH! Will update this blog in just a bit after some deep ponderings...

Shit, I accidently deleted my blog and it had a bunch of upgrades that needed doing. Ok quick attempt to remember, wanted to do a few upgrades for ranged fish:

Blowback: Stun and knockback on ranged hit

Homing: Longer homing distance, longer lifespan, slower projectile speed

Artillery: Enhances damage based on range of enemy

Eh, good enough for now. Let's just get to work.

Post Work Edit: Holy Moly I went down rabbit holes fixing random things. Still got about 50% of what I wanted done, so i'll take it.

Hit a really nasty bug towards the end where for some reason enemies just weren't moving when I was hitting them, like they just got stuck. Was it a bizzare issue with forces, was it some stun function somewhere or hit function causing NPC's to not want to move? And if so how? Was it a raw force removal? Was it altering the AI? Was it reducing current velocity on the rigidbody? There were SO MANY DARNED THINGS that could have been causing this, luckily I stumbled on the issue before too much time invested into the multitude of things that it could have been. Turns out one day maybe 5 months back I was annoyed at how fast fish could slip away while swimming away and my answer to that issue was ALL FISH THAT EVER GET HIT EVER JUST DECIDE TO BYPASS THEIR MOVEMENT LOGIC. Search terms were never going to get me to this because it was such a bizzare way to go about slowing the fish.

if (!fish.isPlayerFish && fish.noHitTimer < .25f) return; //Prevents NPC's from just swimming away when being hit

Ugh, I was due for a nasty bug, things have been going so well lately. I'd like to think i'm getting better at this stuff, and I wouldn't just put insane logic such as this without commenting it out or not putting it in an explicitly named function.

Oh well. Progress made. But the thing about gamedev is, is it's so vast and hard to comprehend in your brain, you never know how much there is left to do. Only thing you CAN do is work and work and work and hope to make it better.

I can only imagine the pain of working on a larger team where code isn't properly managed and these bugs popped up more frequently and were harder to solve.