SO ANYWAY!

I was flirting with the idea of taking today off, everything feels overwhelming, and what's the point? But I figure, eh, let's do some friggin' work. So I've decided we're going to work on getting the armored fish to drop cool armor. That's the goal for today.

And WHEW BOY can I go down a rabbit whole with that. I haven't tuned their attacks, they do too much damage and the timings are all off. The art is kinda rough for armor, could probably tweak the materials, to say nothing about how all the assets are kitbashed to begin with. I'm not sure how to go about setting up the fish that drop armor. Should ALL armored fish drop armor, or just some, and if only rare versions of armored fish drop armor, I'm going to have to go about creating unique glowy mateirals to denote these fish drop armor.

WHY THE HELL ISN'T MY SPELLCHECK WORKING!?

Oh well, this blog post is going to be even worse than usual XD. JUST ANOTHER DAY IN SEACRIT DEV WHERE EVERYTHING GOES TO SHIT AND WE PRESS ON!

I need to make rare versions of heavy armor, I need to sort out what sort of cool bonuses are suited to heavy armor, I need to start tuning armor values on dropped armor items. How do these balance against armor with with lower values? I gotta implement slower swimming when wearing heavy armor, or maybe slower acceleration for waveswim I like that better. Maybe a bit of both?

This is just one small facet my brain is going down that needs attention, there are 3 other armor types, there are rifles, pistols, axes, shields, all with unique loadouts and prefixes and bonuses. I need to get all the fish dropping all these items, I need to develop the world for these fish to inhabit.

ALL THAT HARD WORK WE'VE DONE SO FAR IS JUST DRIVING US MORE CRAZY! BECAUSE WE HAVE TO GET IT IN THE DAMNED GAME TO VALIDATE ITS EXISTANCE!

I coulda finished this damned game 2 years ago if I'd been able to manage scope a bit better.

WAHhhhhh wahhhhhhhhh. Bitch moan, I know. This is a lot more frustrating when you don't have a paycheck week to week. Indie dev is weird, the more you work, the more ambitious you are, the more you scope creep and the bigger and more potential your game has. The less likely you are to ever make any return on all that investment because you never finish. Gamedev is weird.

What I'm trying to do is focus.

If we can get the armor dropping, and maybe just a couple weapons, and a small version of the world, then we can take a deep breath and do one thing at a time.

The crazy thing, is once everything is set up and ready to rock and roll. The content will be so much easier to create. I've spent so much time trying to make a game that has a strong enough base that all the systems I've created really sing and their creation all works together. But until we get the game out and we show that vision up and running, we're just this crazed lunatic speaking in our usual rubber room to ourselves complaining how stupid the world is as we work on our worthless bullshit.

So, anyway. I think the best course of action is if we can stop stressing, stop worrying about that huge demo we want. Just tackle one thing a day in a vacuum and try to focus on how neat that thing will be and all the cool content that will bring online. So even though it won't be much we'll get these armored fish spawning, and we'll get them dropping cool pieces of armor.

Awe shit. I just had a cool idea, and I hate when I do this. What if armor was super OP but had durability?

NO FUCK THAT DURABILITY SUCKS!

It's always so incredible how me 25 years ago played diablo, and i HATED durability. But here I am now wondering if it COULD work. And i'm POSITIVE I would have the exact same experience those devs did. I would implement it, find it sucks, but all that work went into making it, so i wouldn't want to just scrap it, so I'd remake it so that broken items could be repaired using gold.

It's funny how you can have the exact same notion as to why a specific game idea might be a good thing, without acknowledging that you've already seen it done before and that it breaks everything.

Same thing happens with speed upgrades. Low level speed upgrades are SO FUN! The make the game fell exciting and it feels so good to go from slow, to nimble, to blazing fast. But you can only do that upgrade a few times, and then everything in your game starts to break. So it's this pandora's box sorta thing. Same thing with lifetap, you allow too much lifetap and suddenly all the defensive mechanics in your game goes out the window!

Probably spending entirely too much energy here instead of working on the game.

Ok, enough procrastinatin' suppose we should go get back to work on this foresaken project.

Some days you're rarin' to go, and others not so much. Todays just going to be a short blech sorta day. So it goes.