Wonderous progression mechanics will destroy your game. Twice if you let them.

First your will create your skill tame and timid. It will be weak and unrewarding to the touch, you will have stunted your game right out of the gate. You make your player slow and boring to justify all those boot upgrades. You make them swing slow and feeble in a futile attempt to suck them into your stunted gameplay loop.

Eventually your game finds that perfect rhythm of difficulty, when they are neither too slow, nor too fast, when enemies are not evaporating i a fraction of a second and in that short window, the combat doesn't suck. Until...

You break everything by allowing your progression bonuses to allow you to swirl and kill all enemies in no time at all! A single right click reigns down screen shattering lightning killing everything in mere moments. The player taps back so much health and mana that all the complex systems you've built up over the years is now nothing at all. All that time and energy to make a nothing of a game.

Why do we add mechanics if we're going to trivialize them? Why are we adding things to the game that we consider to be more enjoyable once they are no longer a factor in gameplay?

What's the point of progression mechanics at all?

A well tuned progression setup avoids the pitfalls of gimping and overpowering abilities beyond reason, and seeks to augment a joyous and fun core. You need to design around ballpark figures, and avoid at all times designing the game around broken mechanics because you perceive them as "fun".

If something is fun because it's "broken" because it heals too much or it damages too much, then perhaps the answer is to add other mechanics that aren't so overpowered that serve the same purpose more reliably.

Let's look at lifetap for example. This single modifier is probably the most "fun" and broken mechanic in all of gaming. A single swing of your sword and when you tap back even 4% of the 5 million damage you just did, you tape back all 2000 of your max hp! Wow!

Your game has no invalidated all mechanics of potions, regen, enemy DOT effects, resting, etc. Combine this with mana taps, maxed out resistances, and all that nuance of builds, all the item mods, all gets reduced down to damage reduction, max HP, and maxing damage.

Where is the nuance? Where are the competing builds that work in interesting new ways to create new styles of play that expand on the total number of experiences the player can engage with, and exponentially increase the longevity and fun?!

This is a very convoluted blog post, and it only scratches the surface. But I was just thinking on the upgrades i'll be making for SeaCrit, and I just got an itch to blather about this stuff!

Post Blather Blather: I've recently decided to change my demeaner, and I gotta say. I'm actually, REALLY enjoying this! At first I felt like I was pretending to be a real, even keeled adult gamedev that isn't going to demean themselves by rolling in the mud as is all to common this day and age. But honestly this kinda feels like a return to form.

I used to do tutorials on gamedev for beer money back in the day and wrote with this sort of professional candor, and I'm starting to wonder... is this the real me? Has that bitter, wild, blatherer that's been around for years now just been some sort of coping mechanism? Let's be real here, it's likely two sides of the same coin? Is there not one among  us not playing to this tune doubt and deception?

Hyde is still in the back scurrying about, but writing without a want to rock the boat feels like such a breath of fresh air. And the game is going well, and my health feels steady, so mostly just feeling pretty good these days! World's going crazy as ever, but as the saying goes, "Chaos is a ladder". We keep makin' these fish, we focus on the game while everyone else runs in circles of madness and who knows what the future will hold.

One of the articles I did was on skill trees... Whew, how the time flies! And yet... after all these years, I still think Diablo 2 may still be the best for progression. Nothing too zany, nothing too crazy, just raw, well timed advancements that defined each class and make for exciting and fun progressions.

I think i'll be sticking to this long dormant ego for a while. I always indulge in levying blame elsewhere in these posts. But I look back, at better times, and what I see is a period of maturity, of stability, and sanity in the creative space. When you look at the people who make great entertainment, you think of creatives who are willing to hide away their crazed ego's and personal vendetta's for the good of the medium and for the good of the audience.

I yammer about purpose often in these parts. My purpose is to make a silly fish game. And that fish game is meant to be enjoyed, not to be a lightning rod of spite and division.

It's funny, I didn't mean for this post to be about self progression when I started, but isn't this just convenient?

The ultimate progression is that which we make ourselves. And that is channeled through everything we do, it purports and contorts all around us in infinite ways, including our games. 

Let's level up ourselves, let's try to be the change we want to see in this world. Let's get back to sanity, let's get back to aspiring to be the adult in the room making sure things don't go south as the fallible humans run amuck in this game of life with really poorly balanced progression mechanics.

Edit: Had to remove a disgusting number of exclamation points, because just feeling kind of ok, but me in an embarrassingly good mood that cannot be abided in these parts.

Not going to give in and rave about this STUPID *)((%&ING MUCKED UP WORLD EVER AGAIN!