I was thinking about the gobble mechanics, and how it took us implementing them several times before they were good enough to keep in the game, and I started thinking about Kirby, “It’s a shame my gobble mechanic isn’t a bit more like Kirby, because it would be so fun if when you ate a fish you took on their attributes.

And then it hit me, wait, we COULD totally do this. We would just have to trigger an item equip of a chest item with gobble when you eat certain enemies.

This solves, but raises a few issues I had in my mind, and also invalidates all the hours of work I just did recently making armor item drops visuals play nice in the game, but whatever.

So anyway, THE GOOD!

I Believe it will be more fun! And this absolutely trumps everything else. I fully expect it’ll just be way more enjoyable to gobble up enemies with different armors and immediately get those cool new attacks and stats and bonus mods. It will make exploring the game and knowing what powers and playstyle you are getting from enemies immediately obvious. Eat a bit tanky fish with armor on? BOOM! You’re now a slow but tanky melee fish!

THE BAD!

I’ll no longer be able to show off randomized stats on armor and allow the player to look over the stats. They will need to gobble up the fish whole, and learn which fish at a glance give gobbleable bonuses vs fish that give gobbleable chest armor (thinking we’ll make the armor giving fish larger to start with). AFTER gobbling and getting the armor, only after will they be able to display the bonuses and randomized bonus of the armor. This means there will be less strategy involved when getting armor, BUT it does add some cool new randomness to the game to spice things up. Not wholly bad, but not perfect either, we’ll figure things out as we go.

So all in all this is totally worth implementing and after finally getting a nap in, I’m hoping to get this in tonight as well as a few other bonuses, but as I type this i can feel a little breathlessness setting in so we’ll see how it goes. Was really happy to have 2 awesome weeks without any health issues so maybe we’re due for feeling like shit.

LOTS of tiny things to polish. Damage #’s and alerts are a bit of a mess right now, need to tone those down, and lots of combat movements don’t feel right and those are scattered all over charge movement values, attack values, and each of these have lots of places that might be the culprit, and this is exacerbated by the Chungus (hefty) disparities that are coming online, where your fish may have more or less force values depending if they are fat, and in or out of the water. Out of water Hefty will be light as a feather and bouncy and maneuverable (Oh that remind me to add a slight forward force when inhaling as hefty out of the water and SFC) but in the water they will be slow and cumbersome, taking longer to turn, attack, charge attacks, but their damage will be more than enhanced to compensate for this.

EDIT (Post work): So I realized before I implemented the gobble to get the fish armor mechanics that it was a terrible idea, because it's so darned easy to accidently gobble fish! So I really didn't want to make it so the player was accidnetly eating things and getting entirely new suits of armor, that would be like grabbing a health bonus is a game and automatically equipping a new weapon. That would be bad! So I avoided implementing a bad system.

What we DID end up getting sidetracked with were a MYRIAD of input bugs regarding the keyboard as I heavily revamped it the other day. I don't want to get into it too much since my brain is fried, but long story short, is I ended up polishing movement to allow Keyboard to be less jarring at low movement speeds, and I found after the system was all done up that it can acutally be used to make ALL input devices feel better at low speed, so this is a huge win!

But I am still eternally 2 days away from this coming together. I keep getting side tracked by random crap. It never ends...

The funny thing about gamedev is the moment you make one part of your game better, suddenly everything else looks like crap, and though you may avoid it for weeks, or moths, or even years, there will come a time where you will refactor your code, and then that refactor will break other bits of code, and then you'll fix that code, and then you'll realize that once that your code isnt' terrible, you can add that neat idea you had some time ago. And it just snowballs and snowballs.

I SWEAR we are getting close to getting this demo out the door!

Oh! And exciting Unity news, a video just came out and I only caught a small bit of it so far, but soon Unity will have instant deployment on Facebook and Meta and who knows where else!? This is kinda huge! All these years we just built the game for all platforms on a whim and wondered what the heck we were even doing porting to all these devices, but now for the first time I'm SUPER pumped that we did so. SeaCrit will truly be playable on anything by anyone. And even though it's taken longer because of all the different devices of mouse, controller, touch and keyboard, after today I can also say that because we were setting it up for inputs like Keyboard, it actually came out BETTER!

How many games can say that!? Most games are SHIT because they target more devices, ours is better M*THER FUCKERS!

Ok, I don't like how optimistic we've been getting lately. Gotta throttle this before we get too big of a head. No one likes a big headed doucher. But as optimistic and confident as I think we've ever been on this project, as excited to get to work tomorrow as ever, and I know how rare that is in gamedev. Great times working on SeaCrit of late! (if a little frustrating we keep getting sidetracked)

The UGLY