Where to begin?

Dev has never been so damned good. All those years hoping for help and support, and the best thing that could have happened for SeaCrit was to remain secret from the madness.

I just had 2 back to back massive inspirations. Sometimes dev is just mundain bug fixings for months on end, and then out of nowhere you have these revelations that remind you nothing is set in stone and the project can grow by leeps and bounds with singular ideas again. 

It's one of the saving graces of gamedev, you are always one great idea way from fundamentally being able to improve the whole of your game, assuming you have developed your systems in a cohesive way.

GOOD BLATHER DO I BLATHER

So! I was thinking of the new shield mechanics while getting some exercise, and I was thinking to myself, Damn, these shield mechanics are so superior to the base bite attack loadout, why don't I just migrate fully to this as the key weapon mechanics of melee? And i started thinking, instead of gutting bite, or making it secondary... what if we came up with its own cool mechanic akin to blocking which feels so fun?

And I started thinking about how when charging the bite, you open your mouth, and I got to thinking.... what if you were able to gobble enemies when they got low on life, and when they got low on life they got a bit smaller? And by holding the button down it would cause you to be able to swallow them whole? Which sent me further down the rabbit hole of ideas...

What if this was the primary way of getting upgrade powers? To whittle your enemies down, shrink them, then eat them and steal their powes? Kinda like Kirby, but isntead of taking some key attack power, it would be a snowballing effect that's state related.

Currently when you kill a fish, they are assigned a bonus group, and after killing enough of a certain fish type they will drop a bonus. It's really clunky, and it throws damage numbers on top of bonus #'s, and then you have the overhead of these drops...

But what if we simplify it all down to just... you whack enemies till their small and then you eat them?

And now i'm settling on this idea, you will always get the bonus for gobbling fish, but now if you gobble them while charging with your mouth open, you'll get back some bonus health.

Here's the downside. This undoes a full fucking month's worth of work. I spend SO MUCH DAMNED TIME getting this stupid upgrade orb system all up and running, it had randomized elements, soft caps, it integrated with multiple upgrade visuals, and all kinds of shit. If this ends up being superior, all that work just gets flushed into dirt. 

But as a developer you have to take a step back and realize... none of that matters. Our blood sweat and tears don't fucking matter. All that matters is the synergism and fun of the systems we implement.

Which reminds me of a key notion of code that I've come to understand. When you're first starting, you begin to start attributing complexity and tedium with quality. You have to hunker down and create terribly complex and mentally taxing systems that don't make any sense in order to get any of your ideas up and running. And you imagine in the future you will be creating even more complex and arduous systems prone to breaking.

But that's not what growth is.

Wax on, Wax off.

Once you develop long enough, you build up practices and tools that don't allow you to do more and more taxing and complex things, rather the opposite. You begin to see value in simplicity and ergonomic perfections. You start to find new ways of simplifying and streamlining things much like reducing equations to their most simplistic form. 

E = MC^2

We're coming full circle. This is maybe the 3rd time I am reimplementing gobble mechanics, and shrinking mechanics based on fish health. And it's so funny when you're an amature and you're learning for the first time and you'll have notions like "Oh that was a bad idea!".

There are no bad ideas, all ideas can be good. It all comes down to implementation and the holistic mechanisms of play that rise from all the systems working in tandem.

The joy of play feeds off Gameplay which feeds off design competency which feeds off code competency, which all feeds off the lived experiences and work ethics and standards we foster in our day to day life. It's all a circle that must be maintained and cared for all the entire system falls to pieces.

Which leads me to the final revelation I had while frying up some steaks, maybe I had it before but it really hit me.

We've thought so much about the nature of humanity while making this game, about why we ended up face first in this puddle of mud in this world of madness and tribalism. And not through any ambition of wanting to write, or impart wisdom onto others, I became morbidly curious about the world, and our base natures, and year after year stewing in this cave working on the project, i've kinda become like one of those animal researches, but instead of being on safari in Africa exploring rare species of amazing creatures in the jungle, i've been sitting on my ass complaining about Star Wars on Twitter.

But it's really not so different.

As I watch this industry fall in on itself, and become mad with cognitive dissonance, as soft handed elite manhandle the systems to satiate their desires for virtue. And as the tenants of ethic, hard work, and talent fall the the wayside. I feel very compelled to integrate more life lessons into the game. I want to try to bring back an appreciation for principle, hard work, tradition, genuine empathy, genuine open-mindedness, the importance of sacrifice and struggle to achieve goals that hold value to this world.

I know this is trite, and I know these are the things one says when they want the favor of the world at large, like a child trying to be good so they can get that present they want on their birthday. These are the words we put into the world so others will think we are good people and there are so many that play this fucking game, as the petulant rulers of the world buy into their own subversive niceties and bullshits.

But I honestly don't see any higher power around, I don't see any fucking entity out there with any principle that's looking to raise of out of the mud.

I'm going to work to make SeaCrit good enough, that all these petulant shit stains' opinion doesn't matter, it will succeed despite their rot, their petty politics, the professional reach arounds, and their self absorbed gatekeepings.

Then we're going to work to rebuild this world that they have soiled. We're going to write some kick ass stories and smarms and bring good shit back into this shitty fucking existence.

That's the plan anyway. I'm probably just a fucktard with delusions of grandeur, but it beats the ever encroaching despair.