We are PUMPED!

I think I know how I want upgrades to work! And items, and enemy arrangements, and how to bring this all together! Like the gameplay loop exists almost fully formed in my head right now short of bosses.

Here's the plan!

I will create a core upgrade item, very generic, a glowing ball, this will have prefab variants that specific fish will drop. All baby sharks will drop the same 3 orbs, common, rare, and epic, they will all be themed towards health, and the same color (Green). The common drop will be a basic + health bonus, the rare drop will be bonus to regen, and the rare might be something like combat medic, which increases the speed you can move at while still regenerating. I believe I have  all the mechanics to make this work already, I have item drop %'s, just gotta hook these items in and trigger it on spawn rather than death. If an enemy is going to drop a rare item, their eyes will change color, common = yellow,  rare = red, epic = blue.

I'm debating if I should add a soft cap to drop rates, so that specific upgrades don't get out of control with too many level drops.

This opens up the potential for interesting spawn mechanics, where the player can "banish" a certain fish type somehow, maybe by killing a certain fish type with a certain type of gun thus promoting other bonus types. Or I can make certain weapons have a special ability to give a % chance to drop a rare or epic orb if the player kills the creature with a specific charged ability. Lots of neat potential here!

Items will have a totally different feel. You'll look at some pistols or a long rifle, or a sword and an axe, and you'll just think to yourself. "Do I like the "FEEL" of this item? If so you can equip it, and some items will be rare and powerful, but I want to change how items affect the play, I don't want the game to be slow and about looking over stats. I want the nonstop action to flow. The door is there if we want deeper itemization in the future.

So instead of a drab night of setting up upgrades, I think I'm gonna just dive into what I'm excited for, building up the upgrade drop system, creating a visually interesting upgrade orb, creating several variations of it for sharks, and being excited about creating spawn areas in the future.

Instead of just throwing fish together randomly, now we'll be going in with the core gameplay loop in mind, and we can start thinking about what an interesting world might look like.

So think of SeaCrit like poker, you spawn random level chunks, and those level chunks have random fish spawns in them, which will allow you to get random upgrades of those types. If you learn where secret shops are, you can maybe compensate a bit for bonuses you're not finding in the game with some upgrades you purchase at various shops.

We can also spice things up by adding rare rainbow fish and other rare fish types that spawn all over that might give really rare and really powerful bonuses to really make the experience fun and exciting game after game.

So for now the goal is going to be to get upgrades and spawns and world building online, from here we start tuning up the rising difficulty a bit.

Funny thing is, I had a system similar to this YEARS ago and it was terrible. The way it worked was depending on what you killed a fish as you leveled up an exp bar, you could spawn a unique upgrade. So if you killed a fish with a ranged attack, it would spawn a ranged upgrade for example. The system was super complex and not really fun, because when you're in the midst of combat you don't generally want to deal with this sort of crap. So it's a little weird to be creating a system so similar. We're going to dial down the upgrades (at least for now) on items, and we're going to focus on adding them to fish as drops, which is going to make this feel a lot more strategic and more of an investment, rather than making the player make itemization choices mid combat which I believe is going to be WAY better.

I'm still happy to have the upgrade system fully working with items, but we have other upgrade systems that I believe will fit the general casual game flow of SeaCrit. They're going to compliment each other!

In a great headspace as of late, the newest builds have really been getting better in all aspects and we're finally closing in on making this a fun game that's feature complete with an actual level layout, fun enemies, fun exploration, fun progression that can run on phones and PC. The recent performance boost really made this game so much more playable on phone. I used to try it on the phone and it was kind of a novelty, it was cool to see it running, but the performance made the twitch and complex input controls very clunky and if i'm honest it wasn't that enjoyable. Now you can play the game, and aside from some performance bugs on Unity's end, it genuinely fun, and things will only get more performant in the future as I track down more performance issues and setups.

Shout out to the kind souls who have provided feedback on the project, now more than ever it's good to have a little feedback moving forward as I tool up to build up the beginning experiences of the game. I'll be creating unique level chunks that will have easy fish interspersed with some fun platforming type sections that just allow the player to enjoy the movement mechanics and wave swimming. So less emphasis on combat at the start, and a more gradual introduction to combat is the plan.

Anyhow, enough blathers, gotta get to work in this crazy arse world!