Before I approach these blogs I’m really making an effort to put ourselves back into a winning mindset and not the usual morose we’ve been stewing in all these trying years.

It’s a lot easier when dev is going well and health is solid, I tell ya what.

I was going to title this blog “Why we don’t stress about marketing” and that was sending me down lots of rabbit holes about the nature of this culture war, and how we don’t have the same bridges to success that most others do. And I just figured, let’s stop self immolating, so we’ll only touch on it a little.

More importantly, I just want SeaCrit to be successful because its’ a good game, not because we thought of some stupid meme or whatever. Maybe I curse that I didn’t try to do more marketing and shmoozing in the future, but for now, I like to indulge my own ego and like to think we’re an outspoken ass because we have principle, yeah let’s go with that. It has nothing to do with being a cranky arsehat!

So anyway. Back to the slog in just a moment. Much to do per usual.

Yesterday I was speaking to how we were going to throw away lots of bonuses and refine things down to only the good ones, but honestly, I think most of them are pretty decent! You gotta have  a good variety of “okish”, “Good” and “GREAT” item mods, otherwise you lose the fun factor. Most items have to just be “pretty good”.

If everything is special nothing is special!

I think we have  a pretty neat assortment of bonuses that create a sort of “Flow” to gaining power. Early on your want to try to find items and bonuses that will enhance the gold you find, or that give neat means of obtaining other bonuses. I have this bonus called “Metabolism” for example and what that does is if you waveswim, that causes you to burn your “Chungus” fat and you’ll slim back down, and if you have the metabolism bonus you’ll convert that fat into more max life! I have lots of neat little bonuses like this that give you permanent power and I think it’s really fun to augment your play with items to try to build up to something more powerful.

These are the hidden mechanics I’ve rarely talked about in favor of b*tching and moaning over the years.

It’s hard not to talk about the politics of the day in this blog, they are so pervasive, they are so all encompassing. I cannot help but think this endeavor would have been so much easier had we been on the “right team”. And those on that team I don’t think understand just how awful they have been to others, or maybe they do understand, and maybe that’s why they cling onto power so fervently, because they know how far they pushed the pendulum.

Ok, that’s getting dangerously close to the line we’re trying not to cross. But I do want to say, “Geeze, what crazy darned times we are living in”. I have no idea what the future holds, if we’re going to be allowed to be successful or whatever, but it’s kinda scary to think about, it’s already been pretty brutal the past 8 years and it’s not looking like things will get any less rocky in the near future.

Same old ramble, we really do gotta keep our eyes on the prize and try not to get sidetracked thinking of how unfair this world has been.

Oh I almost forgot! I had this HUGE revelation about items yesterday! For whatever reason I had this idea for a “Tomb” item, like a Necronomicon book, that could have a cool hinge join and attack at your fish’s hip and I thought how cool that would look, and it dawned on me, “Wait a second, that would be really easy to add!” All I would have to do is have this book asset, and if you ever got that specific bonus, generate the book visual at the proper transform location. 

THEN I really got to thinking, how easy would it be to have MULTIPLE books, with their own cool visual and each item had it’s own bonus!? These would be sub items unlike the rings, armor, and weapons, that can have up to 3 bonuses and also have a damage and armor value.

So tombs would have a neat visual and also be a strategic item that would only have a single bonus type assigned to it like in the case of the necronomicon “NECROMANCY” skill or something. But maybe I add some kind of training book that enhances all incoming exp for skills like regen, damage, crit, etc.

This solves a really big problem I was running into! Potions that you buy at shops give you permanent bonuses, same with gobbling fish. But this was leading to the player being able to just have WAY too many bonuses and they could kind of become overwhelming. No one wants to play a casual roguelight and look over 50 different bonuses you found at any given time.

With 3 items equipped you’re already going to have 12, then you add the 5 or so common gobble bonuses you’ll get from eating fish and you’re already up to almost 20 bonuses just getting the most common items and powerups.

So what secondary sub items does is it adds even more cool item types like helmets, books, maybe shoulderpads? And all that.

Oh and I had this idea for Set bonuses! Because I thought it’d be silly if players just randomly got items like a wizard hat and goofy shoulder items, and wore a shield and had a thiefs garment. So I thought it might be cool to add some sort of passive bonus for getting all “Cloth” items like +50% gold earned like a thief. Or if you have 3 pieces of plate armor equipped you get -20% incoming damage. 

Imma copy paste this into my “For later” Todo because if we keep having these neat ideas and immediately get to adding them in the game, WE’RE NEVER GOING TO FRIGGIN’ FINISH!

So plan for today. I want to think of one REALLY cool and neat bonus and get that in. That’s going to be my daily goal, something awesome that brings all these cool mechanics together and makes the game super fun. And beyond that, we gotta go through and really dial in bonus values and do a pass over them to ensure the logic is still sane and works, and we will literally “Lock them in” by enabling the bool that denotes that we’ve done a pass over the bonus. 

Hoping to get the vast majority locked in today. Then tomorrow if all goes well we get to start adding in all the items and put bonuses on them! Then we just add a few fish and get them dropping said bonuses, and then we build out the world to hold them! And that’s it! A very solid plan!

I really wonder where all the time has gone. Why didn’t we just do this 4 friggin’ years ago!? WTF have we been doing all these friggin’ years!?

Well… the devil is in the details ;)