There's been a radical change in the fish game as of late, I kind of take its story seriously now, and with that I have to rewrite a good deal of the NPCs in the game. Some bits I can keep, the cooky pirates are meant to be fun and inviting, but my entire outlook on the game has changed.

SeaCrit is no longer a hyper casual game full of dad jokes. The Shimmering Shallows no longer sets the tone of the game of fun, shallow blathers and fourth wall breaking fun.

I'm taking the story and the characters and the overall game much more seriously now and I feel so much more invested in the project because of it and I really can't understate how much more I'm looking forward to the future of the game now that I see value in the story.

I often speak to how elements of a game are multipliers and when you fight and claw to make this system 5% better, and this one 3% better... you do not add those up, they are exponential. When you multiply all those little bits of polish and hard fought design up, you get an experience that is many magnitudes better than the hastily thrown together garbage is was years prior.

Story is no different.

So i'll be taking a bit of extra time to comb over dialogue and ensure the writing isn't too ham fisted and goofy at the start. I need to sprinkle in some depth here and there to ensure the story isn't uneven, or that people come to think the dialogue lacks depth out of the gate and get in the habit of ignoring the writing.

I'm thinking of adding a setting for "simple mode" where the dialogue is replaced with a far simpler version for users who can't be bothered to read pages and junk. But for now, I want to go all in on whipping up quality blathers and try to create something unique and well put together.

It's an interesting contradiction, on the surface, SeaCrit is a cartoony game with inviting cute fish and colorful coral formations, but the gameplay and now the story will be deceptively deep. And i'm totally cool with that. We need more meaning  in our entertainment, we need enrichment in our dreary and contentious lives.

I'm hoping i'm creating something that a wide range of people can engage with and relate to, something that bridges the gap and doesn't drive everyone to being the lowest common denominator. So much of our world is hell bent on treating the audience like they're dumb, and kicking them down into the dirt to try to appeal to the worst aspects of us as the consumer.

I want SeaCrit to be the "nutritious" game that feeds your brain essential vitamins and minerals that will make healthy in your brain. Lets dive deep into some mystique and mystery and question the lay of the land, because things have been getting very dark lately. It's not good for anyone. These are questions and stories that I feel need to be asked and maybe even answered if I may be so bold.

Anyhow! sometimes I wonder if im wasting writing juices blathering these blathers, but maybe some day down the road I can mine these old blog posts for inspirations for dialogue topics of future NPC's in the game!

We ran into a bit of technical hurdles yesterday, but they're all sorted now! I need to tune some abilities so the ex-caliber isn't broken, and I need to create the mass o' moon, but these things shouldn't take too long. And I need to finish up the design of the SeaCrit Lake and the legion regions (hey that's not a bad name for the zone...) So I don't forsee design taking TOO much time, but everything always takes longer than you expect it to, that's gamedev.

TODO:

1. MORE WRITING!

2. Revmap writing of several NPC's to ensure we have some better quality writing that isn't just goofiness at the start and in "The Legion Region".

3. Create the Mass O' Moon, and tune the abilities of Ex-Caliber

I just want to say that i'm so pleased that after all this time, i'm still enjoying this process. Like thinking of "The Legion Region" and still taking pride in the project and being excited to make it better, that truly makes all the difference in the world. Happy everything is kind of coming online, and excited to see where the project is a couple weeks from now. Holding out hope the demo will be complete soon!

Edit: Ugh, I feel as though I'm putting too much thought and pressure into the story writing. It's hard enough trying to just make the combat not suck. Bleh. If i can just do the job of a full studio, and execute at every level perfectly MAYBE this game can be successful. I need  a nap.

Ok, enough whining, let's plan, like logic our way out of this. It's a bite sized chunk of story, no reason to get melodramatic. We'll finish this up, and write up a couple more fish, no biggie. Rather than just going through and reworking all the dialogue line by line, I think i'm giong to read it all over first and see if I can make it a bit more concise. I don't want to scare off the player with a massive ammount of story, let's aim for quality over quanitity. So the Legion spirit is half done, and the dark spirit I think should be a bit shorter, sort of foreboding and mysterious.

Once I have the dialogue done, i'll know how many instances of these fish i'll need to generate in order to tell the full dialogue, then it makes sense for me to design the cave design around that. Form following function and all that jazz.

Geez, if I were half as able to just blather through the NPC fish as I were this blog i'd have story pouring out of this darned project!

Let's say it again, louder this time: PERFECTION IS THE ENEMY OF PROGRESS

Post Work Edit:

First of all, this is really draining, because I want this to be really well written, and it isn't just a blather like in the rant section of the game, it has to be "next level" writing, so it's taking a lot out of me to try to make it as good as I can possibly write it.

Only a few hours of work, but I'm trying to take it easy and not burn out. This is a marathon not a sprint and health hasn't been the best as of late and if I work too hard or two long, I start feeling breathless and my brain turns to mush and it sticks with me for days. I can hear myself and I know i'd call bullsh*t on myself as just BSing, but it is what it is. No gaping wound to show, no heart palpitations to measure, just a terrible feeling in my brain when I work too hard or stress too much these days.

Some thoughts after today:

The darkness needs more work. It's got some contrived thoughts about "YOU CAN'T HAVE THE DARK WITHOUT THE LIGHT!" But how many times has THAT story been told? It's so surface level and lacks any real meaning. I want to portray the dark as a bit more edgy and angsty, where they sound profound crap and then they get on a roll and they kind show how petty and spiteful they can be, but also with a touch off innocence so you can tell they aren't the big bad they're always meant to be.

I haven't really captured this in the writing at all. Currently the light and dark just kind of talk about the nature of light and dark and there's no real story here. I need to think on this and not just keep throwing myself at the writing. What is the PLOT!? What is the history between these two factions, what is the history between these two characters?

It doesn't have to be super deep, but it needs to leave breadcrumbs, it needs to present new questions that lead the player to want to know more, to explore more, to be intrigued by this world, to want to get to the bottom of these ravines and it's not smart to try to just polish some mundane talk of light and dark.

Anyhow! Some solid polish today to the writing, it's getting there, but a good bit to go. I'm hoping if I get some solid brainstorming in today and tomorrow I can inject these elements that I want above, and with maybe one more day after that have the dialogue done for a first true draft.

Oh and i've also kinda chunked the writing apart so i have sections per fish that i can cut and paste and reorder or take out if I so choose just for organizational sake. It's kinda nice to go back to something a bit more simple like writing where I'm not plagued by bugs and things that can really punch you in the gut and make you not ever want to work again, but at the same time, writing is so easy to do anything you want to do that you get lost in possibilities! And there's so much darned good writing out there it can be a bit daunting to put up your own scribbles and hope they're up to par.

Post Edit Edit: So I did a TOUCH more writing, I came up with the idea to make the shadow the soul of an NPC that's been killed by players over and over and over again, and that's what caused them to turn dark. Now I need to figure out why they don't hate the player so much as "the light". The X factor here is that outside of this light vs dark talk is that we're all united in this craziness and shades of grey, and the story is meant to be deeper than Light vs. Dark, so this is actually a good problem to have! I need to think of the next big beat, what's the big story reveal? Or at the very least, what's the breadcrumb of story that leads to it during this initial story area.

I do think this is going well though! Not fantastic, but good enough for now. I'm revising the writing right here in this blog post:

https://illtemperedtuna.itch.io/the-seacrit-fish-game/devlog/638989/some-scribbl...

Post post edit: Writing is so crazy to me. It's both exciting and maddening that you can come up with the grandest of plans, but as you're writing, maybe you just write this ONE LINE that hits really hard, and it can be about the most mundane and stupid crap. Like that little nothing that you didn't plan on can outshine everything else you had planned an in mind.

This is actually a pretty nice thought. As the saying goes, life is what happens while we're making plans, or in this case, writing is what happens when we're whipping up outlines.

It's going well! There is no perfect story! Much more important is how well it reads, how fun it is to read, how it resonates with the player that can relate to the notion of digital NPC's thinking they're the bad guy after being killed by them over and over through their endless pain. Anyway, I think I may have done more writing in this blog today than in the actual game! Oh well.