When I started SeaCrit, the games that came to mind that I wanted to draw inspiration from were Diablo 2, Dota, League of legends.

We are far more happy, and the game is far better, when we go for the low hanging fruit and chase the emerging fun. We can't decide what our game is, we have to listen to it and support it when it shows us what they are. When your game shows you what it is, listen to it. 

I never chased specific platforms, I never thought, "Oh i want this to be a fantastic phone game". When I was starting I was really bad with UI so I didn't go hard into skills or itemization. It was a personal skill bottleneck, not a monetary or platform decision. So over the years, our unique limits as a developer shaped the game in a myriad of ways. Chose fish because I wasn't a great animator or rigger. Chose  a 2d side scroller because this was my first game. Used free assets off the unity store and kept our art budget super small because of our modest budget.

It's easy to think of what we could have done if we had endless money, if we had endless support. But I'm so happy in this moment that everything has gone as it has. That we were forced to develop our own skills, depend on our own work ethic. It lowered the bottlenecks of failure.

I look at all the multi million dollar ventures out there that are imploding one after the other, these teams with hundreds of people, specialists who work on animal animations, people who ONLY work with animation systems. And I can't help but think... WHAT A STUPID FUCKING WAY TO MAKE GAMES!

How are you ever going to find that diamond in the rough that can finagle all these systems together to make that great work of fun? How does anyone on the team understand the forest for the trees if everyone is working on such a small section of the game? You end up locked into terrible production pipelines where no one knows why or how the system works as it does!

The hubris of empire. The idiot notion that throwing billions of dollars at a throng of people is better than fostering key talent over many years and impowering unique creators.

So anyway, let's talk about SeaCrit really fast. Often times I focus on that end dream of what I thought the game would be, Diablo 2 underwater. And it wrecks me, because we are so far away from that. But when I start to get excited to work on the project is when I think about all the unique awesome stuff that's going WELL and is UNIQUE to SeaCrit. The platforming elements meets fun beat 'em up action paired with upgrades is fuckingn kick ass!

Maybe we're more Gouls N' Ghosts than we are Diablo. Maybe my vision of the game in the short term is not the optimal path. Instead of thinking of complex items and insane bonuses and min maxing setups. I should think about items more like that axe drop in ghouls and ghosts, or the spin slash in Ninja Gaiden.

I've come to realize itemization in SeaCrit will be way more action oriented than it will be about the min maxing of bonuses at least in the short term. I gotta just get in items and figure out what's the most fun way of obtaining them. Should they be purchased? Should they drop from bosses? Should they drop from trash mobs?

I DUNNO! And until I figure out what systems are most fun, and polish the pipeline to make it easy to work with, thinking deep into the future about how I make this more like Diablo 2 is dumb!

We gotta get back to making SeaCrit SeaCrit, fun in its own right and just roll with the changes. And i'm really excited about that, because I think something pretty special here is brewin'!

Some bonus blather as I'm thinking some things over. I love when I sit down to work and I clearly see in my mind what the task for the day will be. Today I want to get everythiing regarding shield item drops tuned up and everything encapsulating that. That means getting the shield enemy in that drops the shield, maybe a hidden chest that drops a shield. Adding a rare tier 2 shield chance for dropping creating the unique stat modifiers for "rare" items. How much stronger should they be? What color text should they have?

I currently have a "regular" shield, and I have a "spiked" shield. The spiked shield causes you to deal damage to enemies who hit you, which is really fun and just makes it altogether better than the other boring shield. Should I make the spiked shield rare? Should I hide the more fun option behind random chance when we're already getting like 1 play a week?

I think we go ahead and make the spiked shield rare. Because there is so much crazy unique shit already going on in SeaCrit that it's a bit overwhelming already!

Ok I'm glad I made this blog, I thought this was going to be harder to figure out, but no, we figured it out. Our base boring weapons are already pretty kick ass and interesting! We'll focus on a very small set of items and prefixes for now and feel out the system and find the fun. 

We can worry about mounds of content in the future!  

EDIT:

Another damned solid day! Not crunching 12+ hours any more. But very happy any time I can get over a few these days. It's quality not quantity when it comes to work, and things have been going great!

I'm excited about the item system I got in, I have a new double rarity system in where items themselves will have rarity, and then they will roll to see if they have a prefix bonus, and how rare that prefix bonus is. So you might find a normal item, but it will have a small chance of having an EPIC rarity prefix bonus making it very desireable. This means some really interesting item combinations and more interesting spikes and random quirky items combinations.

That damned Unity bug that causes slowdowns still bugs the shit out of me and plagues the web build, but I finally decided to do something about it! I've added new buttons to the side of the usual 2 buttons that are optional. If you press those buttons it will automatically rapid tap for you.

This was a blessing in disguise! It's not nearly as satisfying to try to rapidly press a touch device as it is a mouse, keyboard or joypad. Because of this damned bug, I added these buttons that I never would have considered adding otherwise, and now the game is way better on phone!

The game is more playable on ever on phone now. For the first few minutes its VERY good. But after that after "soaking" a bit and as time goes on, something about it starts to lag a bit unfortunately. So still not perfect, but getting there!

Lots of odds and ends done today. Tomorrow i'll be working on getting actual items in, and some rare fish. Should be a good day!