I don't normally brainstorm for the game, I just wake up most days, dread getting to work, when I do think of the game it's, "ugh, how much longer do we have to trudge through this hell until the game becomes good?" And then we get to it, we get into the flow and remember it's not so bad. It's kinda like getting in a hot hottub.

But I was just laying down trying to take a nap when a few ideas hit me... "Chungus" (the fat form in my game) doesn't have to be a detrimental form. It can actually be really awesome. And a lot of ideas starting swarming in my head.

So I haven't talked about it or shown it often, but fish in SeaCrit can get fat. They can get FAT AS SHIT. 

And it's pretty funny if I say so myself. And in my mind i'd always thought of it mostly as a detrimental form that was a sort of balancing act for healing too much, for eating too much, for being "gluttonous". In my mind it's more fun to swim around fast, and deal fast hitting offensive attacks. 

Back then, SeaCrit was much more  a straight up beat 'em up, and I hadn't realized how much platforming potential was in the game. And I kinda toyed with the idea of "Hefty" form allowing you to float out of water, but now i'm starting to see so much more potential.

Imagine if you will that you find a chest floating in some water high above and you wonder, HOW THE HELL DO I REACH THAT?! And maybe you see some floating coins, and some caverns blocked by big rocks that you can't quite budge out of the way.

Well what if your fat ass were able to float higher and punch rocks harder and smash open cave entrances to interesting new locations?

When we think of gating players from areas in metroidvanias, we generally think of getting the double jump to reach new places, getting the grappling hook, getting the roll bomb to blast open secret rocks to new powerups. It's a boolean unlock, it's the illusion of branching pathways. In SeaCrit what I want to try exploring is a bit more grey areas, I want there to be a multitude of tricks and bonuses and abilities that you can use together to get that extra bit of speed to jump a little higher out of the water to be a bigger fat ass to float a bit higher to reach that one really hard area. And once you're there, you're still on your own to try to survive against the hard new monsters! I want the expansive world to be this grand adventure of leanring where you can sneak to to get great new powers and bonuses, and learning where you gotta creep by to survive, where to fight and grind and farm if you want to. And I want there to be totally viable means of playing the game if you don't want to engage in combat at all!

One example of that is what I call the "mashless" play style, which is super viable. Since adding auto bites for being near enemy fish now, the player no longer has to press action buttons to deal damage, which means that just with the directional movement they can attack enemies and employ heavy hitting waveswim explosive crash attacks by swimming into enemies at high speed. Once I get auto turrets in the future, range will be viable as well! And with all the in game menu settings you set just by swimming into them, you can TOTALLY play SeaCrit with no buttons at all! And I think that's really cool, And not in some gimpy half arsed way, it's totally viable and fun and soothing, but I'm still also very proud of the button press mechanics and charge systems we have coming online. I'm REALLY excited about getting all these systems online.

It's hard not to get overwhelmed with all these ideas! But it's not a bad thing! It's why this game has taken so long to show it's potential, we keep getting side tracked by cool shit! But it's all coming online! We are FINALLY getting it in the game! And though it’s a bit rough around the edges and it’s hard to manage all this shit, we’re getting there, every day we take huge steps towards this all coming together. I have been having MASSIVE dev sessions the past few days. Sleep hasn’t been the best but health is going STRONK.

So anyway, I no longer try to view progress or bonuses in this sort of singular rush towards a viable build. I’m trying for something more experimental and untried and hopefully more interesting. As someone who’s stumbled through life, bussed tables, parked cars, delivered pizzas, failed out of several community colleges, I internalize the notion that we don’t always know exactly what we’re doing or where we are going.

Too often in games we have this very defined path before us, get damage, get lifetap, get crit, rinse repeat, HOW LONG ARE WE GOING TO GO THROUGH THIS SAME TIRED NOTION!? We use the same tired logic game after game and it’s like good lord. It largely stems from D&D rules, roll a die if it’s 20 you crit. Can’t we come up with better this than a die roll? We’re not restricted by dice any more, we haven’t been for almost a damn century at this point! Why aren’t we trying cool shit?!

I’m not going to get into the regression of this industry, we have whined enough about that.

The thing I’m most excited about right now I haven’t really spoken about at all, let me make a quick video, I can’t put too much effort into it, but I’m so damned excited about making and tuning bonuses now. It’s a dynamic system that allows me to select from various bonus types like “Approach Zero” Good for things that modify armor. And “Multiplier starts at one”, this is for things like damage amps. So often we get confused “is this a multiplier that starts at 1 or does it start at 0?”. I don’t worry about that shit any more, I bake it directly into the bonuses.

And this is where it starts getting really cool. Every bonus can have 2 secondary values tied to it. I mean I  could talk about it and try to explain it all damn damn day, but i’ll just show the damn thing.

I thought spend 5 minutes showing this off but it ended up being 30 minutes. To be fair we did run into a bug but we sorted it out! So I don’t feel like I’m totally wasting my time on this blog post.

Trying to gear up for work, but head is spinning. What do we get to work on next? Do we dive in there and fix up all these bonuses that haven’t gotten online just yet now that the system is FINALLY online?

Or do we clean up the clunkiness of combat now that gobble is in and there are all these numbers and effects and mechanics all fighting with one another and mucking up the flow of combat? To say nothing of all the force knockbacks and forward push forces that need adjusting!

Whew it’ll drive you made to think it all over. No point stressing about it, just gotta get in there and get the progress continuing to move forward.

For over a month now we’ve been hitting it hard trying to get over the hump, thinking that we were one day away from moving on and making all the cool stuff, but that’s not hoe gamedev works.

Anyway, enough rambles, gotta go get to bleedin’ payin’ that m*ther fucker piper. 

Edit: ROFL, I just realized after posting this I didn’t explain the reason for the title “You glorious fat sack of #($*”. So i have this section of the game where you have to waveswim through cave and smash a rock on the other side to progress. And I thought it might be funny if we have a secret way of hopping over the top, but you’d have to be “Chungus” or “hefty” (Gotta figure out my own lingo regarding this) in order to bounce and float over. And I had the thought that there would be a fish on the top of the rock structures that could tell you, “You glorious fat sack of #&)(“. That’s all, that was my reasoning behind this blog.

All my life i’ve always thought to myself, “It sure is a good thing I don’t have a TV show, or that I’m not running a movie cuz I would put the STUPIDST sh*t in it just for funs.” And it’s dawning on me… I have my own game. I can add whatever retarded crap I want in it XD!