How have I never heard this song before!?

Feelin' good. I'm growing stronnnnnnnnngggggggger. Was in a pretty dark place just a few months ago. Got a solid 7 hours sleep yesterday... night? I keep strange hours these days. 

POINT IS! I just noticed I'm not waking up every day and wondering if we'll be able to get work done, or if we're gonna feel like death. This industry is collapsing, people seem to be waking up from this nightmare and realizing shit's fucked up.

The winds of changing are blowing!

And that's friggin' great for indie devs just trying to make a good game like me!

Hot damn, it feels good to just feel good. It's the little things. I've got some chili cookin' up, we're gonna make some pretzels today. The game is comin' together! We've been kickin' ass! And i've decided NO CODE TODAY! TODAY WE FINGER PAINT! Gonna make some new chunks to fight fish in, and create those spawn areas. Ok, maybe a LITTLE coding if light mechanics need adjustment, but nothing major.

We got wave swim revamped. It wasn't on my todo list, but the other day i saw the logic and I just had this thought. This SUCK! So i redid it, it was based on oscillations, the change in rotation direction, because i didn't want the fish to just swim in a circle to generate speed as that isn't what happens in nature. But after months of tweaking and tuning the system I came to subconsciously realize, that adhering to the natural order of things blows. So anyway, it ended up being the best of both worlds, because when i removed the oscillation logic, oscillating is still the best means of generating wave swim because it detects CHANGE in bending, not the bending itself, so bobbing up and down with movement is the way to go!

This adjustment opened up all sorts of new changes to the system, and it feels WAY better before. The best way to wave swim before was to just look pulse up and down like an idiot barely swimming like a dolphin at all, more like having a seizure. I also figured out kinda sorta how to get smooth movement in the code and with keyboard inputs. 

I mean i could blather forever about this sh*t and I barely remember how it works, I just know it does, so let's leave it at that. Long story short is i'm much happier with some of the core mechanics of the game and I think just swimming about is way more fun, which is one of the core tenants of game design too many games don't understand. 

Want a great game? Make it fun, DUH!

Like fun to just move around, fun to move around slow, fun to jump out of water, fun to dive back in, fun to explore, fun to fight. Hot damn, I'm actually pretty proud of how much fun we've been packing into this game. If there's one thing I'm proud of, it's that we never lost sight of the core goal. Just pack as much gameplay goodness and nuance into every single bit of this game.

I really feel like this project is a celebration of solo development. Everything interconnects, the way the movement mechanics sync with the charging, and the charging syncs with attacks and the combat syncs with progression and on and on. It's all very cohesive, it's all spawned of a singular vision that wasn't muddied by teams of people who are burned out with each others bullshit. Well technically, i've grown tired of my own bullcrap but I digress!

Goes without saying, but things are going so damned well on the project right now. It's been a long dark road, and we second guessed ourselves many times as the world went crazy. Maybe we are crazy, we're all crazy in our own ways. 

But feeling vindicated right now. All the struggle, all the hardship, all the things that I thought were weaknesses and giving bigger teams with bigger budgets having a better time and an easier go of things... they've rung hallow and fallen before us like so much chaff.

Excited as ever for the project, grateful to just be alive, and i'm as pumped as ever that this game is about to whoop some ass. Will it make waves, will it be a huge success? Who knows. I do know that we're devin' as well as we've ever dev'd, the game is shapin' up, and i'm excited to see where we take it! And that's a gah damned miracle in this day and age, in this late phase of development.

Gonna finish up this chili! Gonna do some finger paintin'! Gonna make some pretzles! Should be a good day!

FUTURE'S BRIGHT!

APRIL FOOLS M*THER FUCKERS WE'RE ACTUALLY MISERABLE! BAHAHAHhahahahahaahhaah... JK. Great times on the project.