Ok, been kind of a crazy week on the internets, got a little sidetracked, wasn't feeling great. Overall, JUST TOO DAMNED DISTRACTED!

Eyes on the prize, we're making a darned game, and we want that game to be good so it can have a snowballs chance in hell. Enough blathering on the internets about trivial nothings. Whew boy, I get distracted way too easily, time to put our obsessive personality to good use again.

THE PLAN!

Been a little scattered, we've been working on all elements of the game all at once, and I want to create some big milstones so we can see our progress towards reaching this demo. So here are the pillars we will be seeking to finish in the coming week or so if things go well.

1: Polish combat. I'm not sure what this means exactly, but our key and #1 endeavor is always the same: MAKE THE COMBAT NOT SUCK! So my plan for today is to just play the game and think of ways it can be better. The absolute most important thing I can do is make beating up fish as the baby shark fish as fun and polished as possible. I've been giving too much love to ranged as of late, I gotta nail that absolute first combat experience for the player. What's the first fish they should fight? How much damage should basic attacks do? How do we make button mashing and the first experience of gameplay as awesome as possible? Beyond this, general polish to absolutely every single elements of play. Sounds, material colors, glows, timings for charges, headings, durations, cooldowns, etc. EVERYTHING can be improved in infitinite ways, so that's what we're going to do. Iterate, tweek, etc.

2: Build up the world. We've got some ok chunks going, we've got some tutorial areas done,  just gotta keep it moving. QUALITY OVER QUANTITY! I'll be working to make just a few core chunks REALLY shine, and then we can reuse them! We're going to develop the pipeline that will be the benchmark of visual quality for the entire game moving forward. No reason to rush this, we can get a LOT of bang for our buck here. We also have to try various enemy setups and spawn things, figure out what difficulty works for certain NPC's etc.

3: Progression stuffs. How many upgrades should players get? How many items? Where? How fast should difficulty ramp up? LOTS of upgrades and items to whip up to make advancing fun! We're feeling out all this stuff for the first time! This is some VERY important stuff, but also relatively easy to set up. So pretty exciting to see this finally coming online. If this goes well, our little demo with just a bit of content, will be very replayable! Random items and enemies in various places. We're really going to get a chance to start creating the random elements of our little seacrit roguelight we're carving up here deep in the cover of the sea.

Really glad I wrote up this list, it's very doable! I'm attacking the combat today and tomorrow because this i feel is the hardest bit, everything will be down hill from there. Really gotta get in there and play the game and tweak and tweak and tweak till every little thing feels right.

Had a great day of work today! I went on a total tangent and added keyboard controls, went really smoothly I think. Game is more playable with keyboard than I anticipated. I even added the ability to swap between directional arrows and WASD with the tab button. Beyond that more tutorial work, and I added a new mechanic FURY, which is kind of the counterpart to Berserker. If you hit enemies with your sword combos you generate fury, if you hit enemies with your bite combos you generate berserker. Fury increases outgoing damage and incoming damage. Berserker increases attack haste. Very solid 4 hour day! I'll take it. We're getting closer.

I'm so glad I added keyboard controls. I think this will have a huge affect on this game being able to reach people. Most people who try the early version of the game are going to try it on their computer. Of those people the vast majority are NOT going to be familiar with gaming in a 2d side scroller with mouse, some may have a gamepad at the ready, but how many are going to try it?

So with just a day's work, I think the game has a substantially better chance of being recognized and played. But who knows maybe I'm being overly optimistic again!

Some further madness! This edit should really go into my other post, but I didn't want to disturb the bit about Chubs so i'm defiling this post instead.

I've been thinking a lot about ranged attacks, and right now i worry that the current movement system is easy enough for new players so I had this idea. I would add a new bonus and put it on the starting gun and call it "retargeting". It would cause your fish to look at the nearest enemy automagically when you fire your guns. It was going to feel so good and look neat and be very fun and just typing it out I'm starting to second guess my decision to not go forward with it.

Bleh. Such is gamedev.

So anyway I had this random thought that totally changes how I plan to approach this problem. I'm just going to really increase the homing range of early ranged attacks, PROBLEM SOLVED. It'll still be fun, just not quite as cool as the auto targeting system, but most importantly, i won't be working on random system that may or may not feel right or have big bugs with other systems!

In the near future plan on just really polishing combat a bit more.

Had another post taken down, I can see how it could be considered sh*tty and attacking good hard working people that I don't know, so i kinda get it. But I was proud of the post so imma just dump it here. I do feel this world needs a bit more tough love. If we coddle each other too much, everything goes to crud, it's a core tenant of my game. We gotta build character people! So we can build a better world for one another, and it's not our faults we were coddeld, but if we coddle others, that's on us.

Going full neckbeard here, all I ask is that you read until the end if you're going to report / mute / whatever.

One of the most fantastical aspects of our industry, is our ability to fall over one another to coddle ourselves and bleed our hearts out in this field of tech.

OH, WE HAVE IT SO HARD! Boo hoo, our team is just SO AMAZING! If only those big meanies were nicer to us. Pout, moan, lock arms, cry.

Always gotta stay in the good graces of that mad tribalistic machine that manifests within the walls of your company. Gotta bleed your heart out, gotta empathize, gotta stay in the good graces of the growing petulance orthodoxy.

Incompetence and greed from the top spilling down to apathy and sycophants at the bottom. The entire lot of the company distracted by putting on a face to blow smoke up one another's behinds. Managers pretending to do manager things, employees pretending to do worker things, each thinking their the ones pulling wool over the eyes of their constituents. It's an entire empire of fakes happily coasting by. See no evil, hear no evil.

Who suffers? The gamers, the developers, the people who rely on this damned engine. In a word: us. But also society at large as the whole world decays.

So frankly, I don't know why we fall over ourselves to excuse laziness, to excuse diminished aspirations, falling standards, insane predatory monetary outburst and fits of greed. Gotta get that hit of moral superiority, gotta show the beast you're on it's side so you can get some of those ill gotten table scraps in this world of political positioning's and smoke and mirror.

What has this team done in the past 5 darned years? If I were on this team I would have quit in embarrassment years ago, or likely been let go for clashing with management trying to enact some f*cking change that would clear the damned disfunction.

Point the finger to the top all you want, get sad and angry at management all you want. It takes two to tango. These guys left their ambitions at the door YEARS ago. They've been sucking at the teat of incompetence for years keeping their heads down and their mouths quiet about all this rot.

I have some sympathy, I'm sure some of them are well meaning talented people. But I've been around the block a few times, for most it's a front. They know the machine, they know the beast, they feed it, they collect that nice little paycheck, socialize with their friends by the water cooler, and spend the rest of their day making excuses and playing the game. Scratch my back I'll scratch yours.

This team left? Good, maybe that means there are rising standards. Maybe it means the rot is on its way out. Maybe it means that there's enough oxygen in the room of this company to allow for positive growth.

There are a lot of sensitive people in this industry, it's not a bad thing. Look at this post, I'm neckbearding out like a spaz getting all worked up over tools in a friggin' game engine. We are drawn to gamedev because we have an emotional attachment to tech, and the people in this space aren't always as "tough" as most others, it's often why we hide away and make games. And this endeavor is a real f*cking pain, and there isn't a lot of glory in this pursuit so we do need to support each other.

But over time, and in poor conditions, this knee jerk reaction to coddle one another can become very toxic. It can encourage further weakness, it can cause us to start going crazy with how we interact with one another no longer promoting positive growth and work ethics.

There's something sorely missing in this digital space of late, and it's caused a lot of degradation to our medium, and the Unity engine, and that something is "tough love".

It's a shame what happened at Unity. It's terrible what well meaning devs went through under sh*t leadership. Now there's a window to enact positive change, to get to doing cool sh*t and getting things on track.

It's time for us to put on our big person pants and get to work. At the end of the day Unity is a game engine, it needs to make friggin' games. It needs tools that are ergonomic and well integrated into the engine. Unity needs tools for the tools so that integrating into the engine is easier across the board.

Look over at Unreal, and what do you see. Empowered, confident devs proud of the cool sh*t they're making. You look over here in the Unity space and what do you see? We see a bunch of people crying about how hard they have it, about how hard everything is, about how nothing is fair.

Well, you guys got your shake up. Suck it up, seize the means of production and get to making cool S***. Show some ambition, rock the boat, show to new management you're a go getter and have developed competencies and ethics that are going to provide value to this engine.

Easy for me to say, I suppose. Working on my own sh*t, excited to push the envelope every day, excited to try new things in this engine, excited to find better pipelines to improve productivity, and on and one.

Frankly I don't know what you guys do at Unity, I don't know what any of your guys's headspaces are, what the massive roadblocks are, why things are as they are. I just don't know if any of you care all that much. Or maybe because of all the internal dysfunction you all fear speaking your minds in the face of all this petulant politcs and bullsh*t that has degraded this engine for so many years.

It is what it is. Forgive me if I'm not falling over myself to cry for the poor souls who left now that standards might be rising a bit at the company, as throngs of well meaning developers wrestle with these tools to provide something of value with this forsaken engine.

The whole situation is sad, people fall apart in these situations. They lose their spark, they lose their fighting spirit, they lose their dignity as workers making cool things and having value, and year after year you become tainted by this insane system that makes you weak and feeble, just an automaton in a dysfunction machine showing up for the sole purpose of not rocking the boat. The only purpose you have left in your life is to pat others on the back and try to maintain your humanity as best you can supporting one another.

Deep down in us, something decays when we are in this sort of terrible culture of backscratching and backstabbing. We lose sight of our purpose. We lose sight of our mission. Unity makes friggin' video games. Unity needs people in it's walls who are excited to make d@mned video games. People who want to make video games over whatever petty politics are ravaging their ranks.

This isn't easy, this isn't always rewarding, rewards are delayed, and it's easy to fake it month after month in these wastelands of development.

For years, and years we users suffered with these render pipelines, who advocates for us? Some among us trying to feed families with a decayed engine as its shepherd's piss and moan about hurt feelings.

The proof is in the pudding. This engine needs to get it's mojo back, it needs prior, passionate competent devs to return, and it needs some fresh blood with a fire under their @ss ready to take on the world.

It's a shame what happened to these devs, it's far too common in this industry. But to be fair, they were part of this machine during all the rot, they accepted it, they stewed in it. Arguably not their fault, but the past several years are the past several years.

Bleeding hearts don't turn ships around, it's time to put up or shut up.