No more angry music! We’re in our Moody Blues phase now. Happy, uplifting thoughts channeled from much happier music as we write these blog entries. I thought of linking TLC’s “creep” since it fits the topic a bit better, but that’s just not the right moody we’re trying to set.

So anyway! Most gamedevs will always tell you, DON’T FEATURE CREEP! That’s the death of your project! 

That’s only kinda true though. If you’re working on some large piece of synthesized corporate sludge designed for mass content and mass consumption, that is absolutely true. There is nothing that will kill a project faster than to demand the many cooks in the kitchen to change up the recipe. But we’re the only one back here orchestrating things like a lone madman! We rarely bump into ourselves, and since we’re the one using all the ingredients and putting them away and setting things in the oven, though it’s frantic, we’re able to manage the chaos in our lonesome.

So despite promising myself NO MORE FEATURE CREEPIN’, that’s exactly what  I feel like doing today. Gobble is SO CLOSE to being great. But the problem is it’s easy to damage fish into this grey area why you THINK they’re almost small enough from the damage they’ve taken to gobble, but they’re not quite small enough. And the way I’ve set up the combo system, the game auto fires combos rapidly so it can be a little hard to stop exactly when you want to and it’s easy to throw in an extra bite or two or volley of projectiles and kill the enemy you wanted to eat!

So I’m thinking I’m going to add a new passive attack called “Munch”, and I THINK it should be relatively easy to implement. I’m just going to do a check to see if fish are touching the player, and if they’re in a forward direction and the player hasn’t initiated an attack in the past .5 seconds, they player will play a bite animation in a loop and all fish nearby will take very rapid and small bits of damage. This attack I’ll set not to trigger the time since attacking timer, so the player will still be able to gobble fish whole after delivering damage from munch.

I’m really tickled by the idea of being able to play SeaCrit viably without pressing any action buttons, ONLY using the input direction, and this opens that door! We already have wave swimming which allows you to deliver big damage to enemies by swimming in a wavelike motion and accumulating momentum. This will give players a more consistent means of killing enemies without pressing buttons.

Speaking of… I also want to add menu elements to the starting area that allow the player to set music, sound volume and enable/disable shadows using in game physics items like a slider bar that exists in the world and they push with their fish. I thought that would be kinda cool. I only have to create one and repurpose it for each of the different sound/ graphic options, or whatever else we come up with in the future.

I really just can’t be bothered to deal with additional UI elements at this point and I figured this was kind of a cool solution and makes the game unique and more “organic”.

Whew, we are feature creeping harder than I thought we were when we started this blog, but if things go well I think we can get this done in a day. Might have to find a means of expanding the starting area to include all these options. And i’ll likely use “PlayerPreferences” to save these settings so they remain even after you close the game. I ALMOST want to use object oriented programming to allow menu items to inherent from a key bit of code, but I think i’ll take my own advice and just make one master script that handles all these settings. 

Here’s how I see it working: I’ll have a list of physics objects that can only collide with the player. If when cycling one is touched, i’ll just check to see if the player is on the left or right side of the object, and then increment it in the other direction while updating the setting that said object is assigned to. Should be pretty doable, but it’s always more of a pain in the ass than you think it’s going to be!

I think housing advanced options higher above in floating volumes of water would be a fun way of doing this too! So that’s the plan!

I’m a bit frustrated I keep allowing myself to get sidetracked with all this work, but it’s worth it. That’s what gamedev is all about. Deciding if ideas are worth adding or not, and if they’re awesome enough, YOU HAVE TO DO IT! And if you’ve decided no ideas no matter what… well I think that’s kinda sad, and kinda antithetical to the spirit of gamedev.

I mean, if we’re not here to make kick arse stuff, and pushing for that extra inch of fun, what on Earth are we even doing as gamedevs?

So today, like yesterday, ever deeper into that creepy abyss!