In short, the hard work is finally paying off! And as much as we want to think graphics don't matter. They certainly do.

Maybe some day we get more investments and we can dump more art and bodies at this project and it can really sail forward at a rapid pace with super high end assets. But at the same time, I'm happy we had to stew in this cave, I'm happy we were forced to learn things the hard way.

We didn't have the option to share the load, we didn't have an opportunity to divvy up complex systems and try to get multiple systems with different design sensibilities up and running. We built things up as best we could with our limited coding knowledge and it's all working now, and it's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and it's all pretty simple, which is great!

I look at the project with new eyes now. As all this small amount of content becomes more and more polished, I'm not longer itching to make more fish, more upgrades, more and more areas to explore. I really want to hunker down and just make these few things currently online better. And as we work to make everything even more fun and more polished, all that investment is going to spill over into future content making it better and easier to create.

Just taking a few assets out and adding other higher quality environment art made a HUGE difference. And because of the modular and inherited nature of it all, I'm able to upload those changes to a few core chunks and it propagates to every level bit in the game! 

Didn't sleep great and had a big day yesterday so i'm going to take it easy to day, just a few things on the docket. Now that everything else is looking better the flora assets aren't looking up to par, so I may remove them, but I'm going to try to salvage them first. Beyond that just a bit of organization and MSC other things. Who knows, maybe once we get going we find more energy and have another big day of dev, but yesterday was so great and not feeling well today so not gonna push it.

I can't believe it, but the # of things that need doing just gets smaller and smaller, and soon all that will be left will be to make a few new fish variants and expand the game, make more difficult areas, more places to explore, etc.

We found our goombas. We have FUN fish to fight that will only get better! And we have all these mechanics that are finally all feeling better than the sum of their parts and they will only get better! We've got some interesting upgrades and have a TON more to add once difficulty starts coming online.

We're finally entering the phase where everything (HOPEFULLY) becomes greater than the sum of their parts! Whew, it's been a long, long crazy road, and this crazy world was going to do what it was going to do out of our control, but after all this uncertainty, after the waning health and the years of fruitless toil. MAYBE, just maybe, we're on the verge of this becoming something!