Dev is going well! Almost overwhelmingly so. When things aren’t going well you just want dev to be over with, and you want to finish. I’m having the opposite problem, I’m overwhelmed by all the possibilities coming online. And it’s so painful I only have these 2 hands to smash against this keyboard to make progress with.

We’ve got world building, we’ve got enemy balance and creation, endless abilities, bonuses, tunings, particles, etc. Just listing off the stuff we have to work on gets exhausting.

So that’s why I’ve decided we’re going to hone in and try to have a little bite sized goal for out next demo. This won’t be the big 1.0, but I think this will be lightyears beyond anything we have released before!

It’s kinda crazy to me how much better the current devbuild is than the current released demo that has next to no content.

We gotta start building out the world. And for the first time the world makes sense to me and I think I know what we need to make.

Form follows function.

The starting area should be simple and nudge the player in a free flowing, fun inviting and harmless area where enemies do almost no damage, and there are exciting and cool things to discover in all directions.

So that’s what we’re going to build. No stress, just add all the cool stuff that’s just begging to come online.

We’ll add a few shops here and there with fun upgrades to buy.

And we’ll start adding the items with well tuned and exciting bonuses on them.

And we’ll get the exp items that allow you to permanentlyl boost your damage and attack speed and things of this nature.

And we’ll tune the fish sizes, and start polishing the various bonuses that allow you to grow bigger and stronger, or smaller and more lithe. We’re going to start exploring the balancing of builds.

And it’s really going to show all the unique elements of play we have been hiding away all these years that haven’t really shown themselves just yet, or if they were in the game, there was no real reason to explore them.

So today... LOTS of polish. Lots of reducing the power of some things, and making other things stronger. NOTHING in the game is properly tuned yet. Stun values, Damage, attack rates, enemy HP values, bonus gains, it's all just placeholder chaos. 

Been so much work to finally get to the moment of making the game. But we're finally here. Never imagined it would take this long, or that we would be this burned out, but I never imagined we'd make so much game in our lonesome. It's a bittersweet feeling.

TONS to do, but it's rewarding. 

No rest for the wicked and all that.

Edit: 16 hour dev day. Honestly gotta try to hold myself back because I'm not sure going this hard is all that good an idea, but I  can't stand leaving large issues in the project and sometimes they pop up one after the other.

Such a long dev session I had to break it apart for YouTube again

Glad to be getting a lot of work done, but at the same time, sometimes it feels like no matter how much you work you don't get any further up the mountain. Ok, enough feeling sorry  for our self, yesterday was a huge day, we got so much done, definitely closer.

"Funny" little story yesterday. I keep a small collection of self made functions that help me do simple things, I call it "zz" for easy access. And I THOUGHT I was getting rid of a small bit of redundant Logic by getting rid of my "LowerLimit" function, but turns out it was SLIGHTLY different than I thought it was:

    public static float LowerLimit(float value, float minValue = 0)

    {

        if (value < minValue) return minValue;

        else return value;

    }

I didn't catch that the return was reverse, so I replaced it with Min:

    public static float Min(float value, float value2)

    {

        if (value < value2) return value;

        else return value2;

    }

I lost 2 excruciating hours to this minor mistake, as it was messing up other key elements of my project! Ugh. I don't even want to think about it. I was so damned certain it was safe to do away with and swap out for another function, but the reason I made multiple duplicates of this logic was because the naming convention is so darned confusing sometimes.

Like when you hear "Max" that can either sound like "Pick the max value between the two", OR! it could sound like "This value should be the MAX, and the other value shouldn't go above it!". I HATE the naming of some of these functions, so that's why I made my own, but turns out I either screwed up the logic or gave it a really bad name myself because obviously I screwed it all up. Oh well, c'est la vie.