(Is that Ron Jeremy in the audience?)

Glorious sunset of my heart was fading,

Soon, the super karate monkey death car would park in my space,

But IllTemperedTuna has fancy plans! And pants to match…

The monkey clown horrible, karate, round and yummy, like a cute small baby chick would, beat the donkey

I believed it was going to be hard to change the nature of this blog, to try to be more optimistic, and not so negative and aggressive, but dev on the game has been AWESOME this week! I’m so pumped by the direction of the game, and I was already excited, I honestly just kinda want to gush about how well dev has been going. I took a breather today, long day yesterday, needed a break.

These new gobble mechanics change EVERYTHING. So many neat ideas for progression are coming to mind. And I had one of those moments where you can just FEEL everything coming online. There is nothing better than to be testing your game and just find yourself thinking “Wow… this isn’t half bad!”.

I was checking some new features and I was holding the charge button which also causes you to inhale fish and coins in front of you. And then it happened. I was chungus (Fat as sh*t), which meant my fish was larger, which means more fish would be at a threshold where I could gobble them. And I just so happened to have pointer fish set to debug spawns.

And as I sat there on my fat fish @$$, I spawned a fish and he just immediately just got vacuumed into my mouth and my fish jiggled and I burped, and I got my little life bonus, and damn it felt good, it felt so much like FISHY! Then I spawned more, moar, MOAR. Very satisfying.

I feel like we’ve made 3 games over these long hard years. We have a platformer, we have a beat ‘em up, and we have a goofy fun gobble game all rolled into one with fun adventure and dialogue that has only begun to break through the ceiling. I’m so darned excited to see how far I can push all of this, this truly is just the beginning of something I believe will be quite good. Feel as though we’re kinda starting to break away at this point. And no one even knows it exists. Strange days.

Well a few people out there do, half of them want it to fail. What can you do?

I wish I could say I was looking forward to success after all this endless toil and sacrifice. 10 years ago we could have looked forward to that, but the world is so crazy now. To be fair, we have run our mouth. But since when is that a crime? This is America darn it! 

The way I see it we have 2 futures to look forward to:

Either we’re totally delusional, a washed up loser working on a stupid fish game that will never be worth anything, and we’ll fade to obscurity as wasting what few decent years of life we have left making an edgelord murder fish simulator (there are worse ways to bite it).

Or, after being an abject f*cktard on the internet, after saying things that would offend absolutely every single person in this industry, we get to become some kind of icon of sin for all the world to rally behind hating and wanting to destroy.

OH BOY! Oh well, no point harpin’ on it.

I know what I know, I’ve said what I’ve said, we come and we go, that’s a thing that I keep in the back of my head.

My plan was to put out a little video showing off the new mechanics, but truth be told, I’m just so worn out right now. I’ll link yesterday’s dev session though. 

Banger of a 12 hour day, got so much done! In game settings bars in realtime! Volume sliders! I added depth of field on a whim!

That was actually the inspiration for this blog. I knew that the only way to make Depth of field worthwhile was to make heavy revisions to rendering setups. I had to create a second camera, and start syncing everything together so that if the Depth of field setting were turned on, all particles would magically rearrange themselves to the transparentFX layer, so that they would properly render without depth of field. The way transparency works in Unity is particles inherently have depth buffer z sorting data, so they will inherent all depth from the geometry behind them, sorta like a decal. Combined with Blurryness from depth of field, you get TERRIBLE results.

Long story short it’s a real pain in the ass, and I can’t even believe we got the entire system up and running and DAMN DOES IT LOOK GOOD. I just love the feel the game gives off now. It’s VERY heavy on the system and reduces FPS by a solid 15ish%, but my computer is NOT very good and i’m still consistently over 100 FPS and that’s in editor which is far less performant, so the game really is well optimized enough that for most all desktops to run DOF. I also went ahead and… Eh screw it i’ll toss a video together really fast showing this stuff! It’s all a really rough implementation we got together in a day, so not the most polished stuff ever:

I’ve decided moving forward it makes sense for us to focus on slices of progression at a time. And in the short term I want  to focus on building up the play of bites and gobbles. So for this initial demo that’s what we’re going to focus on. Neat progression mechanics revolving around improving bites and lifetabs and becoming BIG and STRONG, and eating EVERYTHING! I think that’s something unique to SeaCrit.

How weird would it be to swim around in diablo and inhale zombies and demons? But it’s really fitting for us!

The game feels so dense right now, and I LOVE that. I used to stress because I believe we’d have to make this massive ocean to cram all the bonuses and features that I wanted for the game. But more and more I’m finding I can load up just a very small handful of fish with so much stuff! You and beat ‘em to death for money and items, or you can inhale them for unique bonuses. On top of that, different items reward level ups based on dealing damage or dealing stuns, or regenerating.

There are SO MANY ways to grow in power, and it all stems from just goffing around and causing mad mayhem to the ocean around you. I’m really proud how much fun I think we’ve been able to inject into every inch of the game. Ever bush you can push around, every bit of sea surface you can spring off of like a trampoline. Every area is a bit of race track for you to race through as you wave swim about hunting for pinatas to smash into to eat the goodies that explode from within their entrails.

I can have a shark with a sniper rifle… or a Nosey fish with a sniper rifle. Or a CATFISH with a sniper rifle! The possibilities are endless! I’m only halfway joking.

I’ve touched on it in prior blogs. But life is what happens while we’re busy making plans. All these years I stewed and lamented that we didn’t find a great team to work with. That we’d never have our shot as everyone else was speeding on by enjoying life as it was meant to be lived.

But in this moment, I feel very much at peace, and fulfilled. Though we didn’t get to live a comfortable life, we have been living a purposeful one. No support, no glory, no nights on the town, no pats on the back, no bonuses or high fives meeting big milestones.. The winds have pelted us, the onslaught of grit and grime has lacerated our numb cheekbones, as we soldiered knee deep through the bitter swamps of the voids. It has not been pretty, it has not been easy, and we haven fallen man times along the way.

But we always got back up, passionate, bitter, hopeful, angry. We’ve always found some fuel in our empty tank to push us through the pain and the shame.

I understand now that our “bad luck” was never a curse, it was a SeaCrit blessing. While others enjoyed safety nets, pats on their backs, and every ill-gotten advantage. We had no path but the road least traveled, and through thick and thin, we’ve found the precious rarities that are pilfered and gone from the beaten path. 

We’re on the threshold of our dream. Of making a great game. And we did it in a cave, with a box of scraps.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who strives, who dares greatly, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."