Stumbled on this video yesterday and damn does Carl just hit the nail on the head here, damn do I miss having adults in the room. Sums up so succinctly a good bit of what I've been trying to blather about here from time to time. If there's anything we don't teach ourselves enough as a society (it's the ultimate luxury) it's cognitive dissonance. We don't put our feet to the fire and check each other, "Hey, be careful what you believe in, a lot of that hate and fear you have is projection." 

We're hard wired to hate, slander, and then attack with moral mandates those who we perceive as our enemy, and everything spirals out of control. We used to be better at controlling ourselves, but that's all gone these days, too enjoyable to hate on everything, too profitable. We don't get the same warnings about it from those who lived through the cold war.

People are going to believe what they want to believe, and the sad reality is people want to believe they are surrounded by terrible monsters they can turn into their on personal whipping boys.

Wah, wah, bitch moan, I know.

Anyway, this mad world doesn't change anything. We're gonna get back to work, nothin' ta do but continue to strive to make SeaCrit not hot garbage.

I keep gearing up to start FINALLY working on the visual quality of the game in playable regions and inevitably new thoughts pop into my head of core systems that need revamping. I ALWAYS prioritize core systems over content, it's one of my rules i've learned over the years.

No point trying to polish a turd.

So today we're gonna flesh out the waveswim system, right now it's too easy to just swim about and accidently build up waveswimming. So i'm thinking of adding oscillation checks back in. Which I really don't want to do.

When I was new to gamedev I used to think getting better at design and code meant being able to create more complex systems with more advanced play which would lead to more fun.

That is ABOLUTELY wrong.

Getting better at gamedev is finding elegant solutions that are readable and make sense that you can come back to later and iterate on and is easy to pick back up with clear, concise logic, great naming conventions, well ordered and filed away, and easy to engage with.

That's the trick, keeping it simple, fun, elegant, but robust at the same time. So many areas of my project are terribly made, they're huge messes just waiting to break and drive me crazy, ran into a terrible bug yesterday where i accidently assigned oscillations = -minwaveswimvalue, and that accidental minus sign cost me an hour of work and hours of motivation trying to find the needle in the haystack of my horrid dialogue logic, as now every time i talked to a fish, it was causing me to actually generate waveswim not approach a negative value,  which caused other logic to automatically stop  talking as I have checks to disable dialogue when you're waveswiming.

Once you see the issue the tangle of logic makes sense, but while you're hunting it down you're like, "Why TF is talking to fish causing me to shoot off like a rocket, this makes no sense!"

Good lord I could just blather and blather for hours if I didn't have so much work to do...

I keep having these ideas for cool practices and workflows i've picked up that i'd like to share, but there's really no community for that any more, which is a shame, because I have a lot to learn too.

I've developed these new "test variables"

And at first I didn't like that I couldn't find a way to not make them a rollout because they were a custom class, but in practice it makes tweaking and tuning the project so much better! I fold out the things i'm working on at a given time and i don't have to go around hunting for them in the inspector.

If I click the plus or minus button while playing, I can quickly adjust the value for fine tuning and it updates in realtime. It's so friggin' nice! I know not many devs get their hands dirty with these core movement setups, but the quality of a game ultimately rides on how well the people tweaking and tuning animations, turn rates, animation speeds, and all that are able to polish the systems to a fine shine, and these setups have really helped me. They take a bit of setting up to get working, so i created this throwaway variable "z" in the image above that I can quickly reference for any attribute in code and I instantly have fine tuning access to that property. I find what feels good, it spits those values into the console at runtime, then I just copy that value and paste it right in and set the reference back to its variable.

I do find it a bit frustrating how much overhead this all takes with custom classes, messing with Odin inspector, managing several scripts all working in tandem to bring these variables together, but year after year, it kinda just starts feeling natural. I'm sure I'm doing things "the wrong way" in many instances, but I don't know any better and I don't have any other coders to worry about offending on the project so sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm doing things the "hard way" and that's a bit of a "wax on, wax off" exercise and we're actually becoming better off for it. 

I don't know how to use debug tools, don't know how to do any advanced shit. We just find ways of making simple setups robust and try to make the game fun. It seems to be working.

Ok, to the actual topic at hand! What are we planning on working on!? Need to fix up that waveswim generation issue from above, and I also want to get water surface movement a bit more polished.  I want to add a "skipping rock" type element to bouncing off the water surface, right now it's too easy to just bounce up and down forever and there doesn't feel like any play or skill required to navigate well the ocean surface. It's also too easy to just jump out with huge leaps, and fly all over the place at high speeds, which is kinda fun, but I feel like it's a bit too much for a game that has so many unconventional bits of movement already. So i'll be toning it down and adding upgrades to the future that will enhance them back to how crazy they are now. 

I really enjoy making a game with so much progression, I never feel as though I'm "Nerfing" something, I'm just adding the potential for a cool upgrade to bring it back up to OP in the future!