To feature creep, or not to feature creep?

That is the question.

When we're beginning our gamedev journey everyone will tell you, "Don't feature creep!" that's what amateurs do. FINISH YOUR GAME!

But after all these years, I've come to the answer.

FEATURE CREEP, M*THER FUCKER!

You can either go to work on your project thinking, "Ok, let's be delicate, let's not try to do anything TOO awesome. Let's be a weak developer just trying to make something okish"

We don't come to gamedev to make something "Okish". We come to make games to kick ass and take names.

Let's not get it twisted. You have to understand what feature creep is GOOD, and what feature creep is BAD.

Is a new feature or elements of the game you want to add totally isolated from the rest of play? Does it essentially make your game more than just a hybrid of 2 genres? Are you adding RTS elements to your point and click adventure game? You're going too far.

The sorts of pie in the sky crazy ideas we want to attack are ones that make all the gameplay we we have created up until now better. We want to work endlessly on polish and features that enhance all the other elements of the project so that as we work on it year after year after year those little bits of polish aren't making the game a little bit better day after day, but EXPONENITALLY BETTER.

A good game sets the right CHORD of great features, elements that coalesce to be greater than the sum of their parts.

I could not be more happy with how well the project has been going as of late. We might be crazy, but it feels like everything is coming together!

I added what I felt may be an overly complex prefix system to items yesterday. It essentially makes it so that prefixes have their own tiers now just like items do, think of them as common, rare, and epic, but only for the prefix. These prefixes also get their own unique color identifier. So when an item drops you will see the color of its item name coded to denote its rarity, but you will also see a uniquely color coded prefix like "sharp shield". What makes this more interesting is rare and epic items have greater chances of both having prefixes and of those prefixes being rare and epic.

What this means is all items can be very good, but the more rare items will have a better chance of being really good. Within the common, rare, and epic prefix bonuses, some will be better than others, and some will be better suited to certain builds than others. Some will be better suited to farming power over a long period of time, and others will simply give raw survivability, offense, and speed.

Here's a couple random upgrade idea I had:

Scavenger: Gives a permanent HP and damage bonus any time you equip a new item. I think this would be super fun, the player would have to decide if they're just going to equip everything that drops for the long term permanent bonuses, and decide which items are worth holding onto for that play session.

Enchanter: For every ring you equip, charge speed are enhanced by 1%

Screw it, i'm going to do a quick screen record just this once to demo the new feature, even though no one reads this damned blog, it'll just take a min!

I just went down such a damned rabbit hole doing odds and ends for the past hour. Holy crap.

So I stumbled across this random goof. Turns out some time months ago while refactoring the movement system, I had moved a function that limits horizontal and vertical momentum while outside of the water to prevent the player from sailing through the air at 90000 miles per hour. And guess what? Turns out I had somehow removed the check to make sure they were out of water so for the past who the fook knows how long the player has had all high movement speeds being limited arbitrarily so now all my tunings for waveswim are going to need work.

Oh well! It's a mixed feeling when you find crap like this. It's like, DAMN IT! How long have I been working in a broken game setting poor settings because the core system was FUBAR!? But it's also like, SO THAT'S WHY EVERYTHING HAS BEEN BEHAVING SO JANKY!

That reminds me, just the other day while testing something I realize huge sections of the game weren't unloading and somehow I had inadvertently removed unload systems. So I added those back and got like a 20% boost in framerate.

I always think back to Aladdin and the Genie... "TOTAL ABSOLUTE POWER TO DO ANYTHING!" But instead of itty bitty living space, it's soul crushing, debilitating bugs that will arise when you invariably make the tiniest of mistakes.

Got side tracked with so much other shit too, can't even remember what we worked on. That's what this is, just endlessly getting better and as you get better all your past work just becomes offensive and stupid to you and all those tiny mistakes you made because of poor implementation will haunt you forever. But if you ever hunker down and try to make everything perfect, by the time you finish everything you will have already grown and gotten better and then you'd be in this perpetual state of fixing everything.

At some point you just gotta take a deep breathe and say "good enough".

Pretty burned out, and I noticed on my metrics some poor bastard just downloaded a stand alone version of the game. So I figure today is a good day to update all the downloadable builds! We can be productive and lazy at the same time since it can take hours to switch platforms. Fingers crossed we don't run into any new bugs!

Goal for the end of today will be new downloadable builds that aren't a year old or more that will accurately show the quality of the game as it stands today.

Edit: 

Great success! The builds went off largely without a hitch. I did come to realize an issue while making these builds. There is input lag for touch controls for the joystick, I've kinda known this for a while, but I've only REALLY noticed it and tried to fix it recently. Made a post in the new Unity discussion forums hoping maybe someone can shed light on what's going on:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/using-ondrag-im-experiencing-input-lag-on-touch-...

Beyond that, The PC build is SUPER FRIGGIN' PERFORMANT. Getting like 300+ FPS on it, I'm curious how the game runs on really crappy machines now, but I don't have any to test on. Both web and PC build I'm curious about, I suspect they should run really well.