It's tiring to work on a game day in and day out. You become so burned out it's hard to even think about problems again and again.

I have been fighting issues with gobbling up fish and hitting them and shrinking them, and figuring out the best way for the player to farm stats and powers for over 8 years now on this project.

But we gotta push forward. Haven't been feeling great, but I've also been indulging caffiene the past week, so it's time to ween off it and maybe take it easy for a bit. We have BEEN ON FIRE with work lately getting all kinds of good shit done. Work has never been better, never been more optimistic SeaCrit will be fun one day.

I thought about it, and the new gobble mechanics that I planned on EVERY fish having are too obtrusive to the flow of combat. If every single fish you beat down shrinks, then runs away, and you have to hunt them down and gobble them. The flow of gameplay gets all muddied up. I want combat to be about crushing those foes on the screen and worrying about how you're going to crush them, and avoid their attacks, not a constant annoyance of swimming down fish.

SO! I think I have a solution. The new gobble mechanics are pretty great I think, in moderation. So what I think i'm going to do is have specific areas with specific fish that will give you these bonuses, and you can farm them there. Like if you want to up your ability to shoot homing projectiles, you'll go to this certain section of the ocean where you know you can find fish that you can beat down and gobble up, but the rest of the ocean won't be full of these powerup fish. I'll probably sprinkle them in here and there, but they will be the exception rather than the rule.

I always think about how I should make videos showing all the cool systems and content I'm making, try to build a following and get eyes on the project. But that goes counter to the guiding principle I have for SeaCrit. We put 110% into making the game good, everything else is noise, everything else is bullshit in this crazy world. 

Everyone else may be fucking off making stupid twitter posts for clout, playing the publisher game and trying to get the right schmoozers to team up with to sell their game like snake oil to the legions of gamers shackled in their little cages of predefined engagement. Doesn't mean we're going to do it. If the game flounders, so be it. We don't feed the beast around here. 

EDIT: Just had some cool ideas! It just struck me, i've got this chungus system that causes the player to get fat if they bite back too much health as a bit of a balancing mechanic, the player becomes tough, but slow and cumbersome. What if gobbling fish for their powers made you grow fat too? And what if getting rid of that extra weight took a bit of time? Could be interesting!

This opens up a whole new line of potential upgrades in the future too for increasing metabolism. And if you're big slow and fat it would be all the more important to be able to suck enemies up kirby style from long distance so I could give improvements to suck range.

So many ideas! Gonna take a bit to get implemented by I'm so stoked that all these various systems could all end up tying together and being awesome!

Edit x2: Not feeling good, health kinda took a nose dive, might be due to pushing too hard on the game and drinking caffiene,  anyway, gotta take a little break weather I want to or not, unfortunately. Hopefully back to it tomorrow for a light day of dev. Short days of work for the foreseeable future.