Happy St. Patrick's Day!

It's a strange time to be alive. We're racing towards the singularity, we're affirming one another moral sweet nothings. Literally anything but trying to do cool stuff that makes us happy to be humans and will improve the future.

Oh god, here we go again! Let's get back to talking about gamedev damn it!

Despite not feeling great of late, been getting some decent work done! I hate this nagging feeling you get when you're developing responsibly. Your brain has these core goals in mind, it wants to make a fun game: Improve AI, attacks, polish combat and movement, Make the world pretty.

But if you're responsible, if you want to go the distance, you often find yourself having to fix things elsewhere, you gotta do stuff that isn't exciting. UI, loading systems, TELEPORT SYSTEMS. Good god am I SICK TO DEATH of working on the GOSH DARNED TELEPORT SYSTEM GOD FOOKING DAMN IT.

Anyway... some really cool sh*t going down in SeaCrit. I REALLY feel that in the past few months its REALLY starting to feel like a game. I do have these nagging thoughts... At some point we gotta tune difficulty, fix up enemies, attacks, and all that from the ground up. And because it's so high priority it's easy to feel helpless thinking. "Gosh if we spent MONTHS working on this god darned teleport system, then when we finally get to making enemies fun to fight, it's going to take YEARS longer".

But that's not true. Truth is most of gamedev is tweaking and tuning boring sh*t. And once you realize that, and you accept it. You can start prioritiizing it higher and better gauge how to move forward in a smart way and you can start making ACTUAL progress on your game.

Here's the exciting bit: I feel as though I am ALMOST done tweaking and tuning all the BORING SHIT.

I'm burned out as FOOK right now, but we've been getting tons done, and I had this great moment yesterday while working where the game just started feeling fun. Like LEGIT fun, in some innovative and new ways. And i'm really excited for the future again :)

Hopeing health gets back to better, it's not terrible, it's been better than it's been months ago, so i try to look on the bright side.

Who knows what the future holds, this entire space is full of the most judgmental underhanded assholes I've ever seen in my life, and we have not shied away from stirring the pot here. To get this far into a project solo, you gotta be a little stubborn!

Going to be continuing to push upgrades and start getting New NPC variants into the game to drop an expanding set up upgrades.

LOTS of distractions. LOTS of things to worry about in this cruel, mad world full of soft handed judgements from the peanut gallery.

All we've got to do is work on this silly little clusterfook of happy accidents. Might as well get to it!

Been a DAMNED solid week of work thus far, and we didn't have the crutch of caffeine! And we felt like crap while doing it! Hoping to get at least a few more hours of work per day and if I can keep it up, who knows, maybe we put out that new demo that finally isn't garbage :D

Quick milestone list for the near future:

For this week: Get relatively OK level structure locked in, some ok enemies and enough upgrades and adventure for the demo to show the game's promise.

Next Milestone (should only take a week or two): Get rising difficulty over time in. Get more and more content in. Expand on what works, curtail what isn't. Create an actual experience with a win state that feels fulfilling to achieve and has some modicum of balance, fun randomizations and feels relatively well tuned start to finish. Actually feels like a game of sorts.

Beyond: Bosses, more area types, more NPC's better and better tunings, better easy enemies, higher end challenging enemies, a larger world, more viable build paths and upgrades. 

Didn't want to complicate things with a new post so making a stealth edit here: Kind of a crap day, slept like crap, and tried to get some cool new tool called blackbox in Unity, but while testing it my repository went all janky and now I can't connect and make auto backups of the fish game.

There are few things in life as joyful as repository issues, I tell you what. That nagging feeling in your stomach that at any moment you might lose years of all the hard work that your entire life is riding on, NO BIGGIE!

Oh well, at least the web build test I just did seemed to go ok. As I type this I'm uploading a web build. It's kinda crap, so it doesn't count as the big new demo. Going to be trying to polish it up in the next few days and then get feedback on it then do lots of polish THEN we will consider that the demo that should hopefully be fun and turn some heads. WE WILL SEE.

Ups and downs, strikes and gutters. Oh, made some good chili yesterday, got that going for us I guess!