Just another Friday Night on the good ship SeaCrit!

Excited to get back to work! And loathing it too. This is about the best you can hope for in gamedev, usually just bracing for impact but tonight i’m really excited to MAYBE FINALLY get to work on all these bonuses.

As I sat down yesterday I kinda smiled to myself, 

“JUST TRY TO THROW CURVEBALLS AT ME TODAY!” THERE IS NO WAY ANYTHING CAN STILL NEED DOING WITH ALL THE RABBIT HOLES WE’VE BEEN GOING DOWN!”

Well 11 hours later and we got no bonus work done. We did some massive scene revisions and greatly polished our input systems, and fixed some bugs we didn't know existed paying that damn piper, all while tuning and tweaking stuff to not be so broken.

I try not to think about how many values still need adjusting, and the values that will in turn need adjusting to compensate. You gotta focus or it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

So often we’re thinking of this tiny little allotment of game, like the force values on our core attacks, and some damage mods on the scaling difficulty and building up a few nice fighting areas, and that will be on  the forefront of our brain, and we’re obsessing about that chunk of work. SHOULD TAKE ONLY A FEW DAYS!

And week by week, month by month, you work and you work and you work and the days fly by and the grey hairs set in, and you really start to question how important these silly 0’s and 1’s are that you’re finagling.

I gotta start writing outlines because I’ve totally forgotten where I was going with this XD

Life sure is strange. Can’t say it’s not interesting! A decade ago I used to think on about how steady and mundane everything is… careful what you wish for you just might get it!

So anyway, I have been over the moon with how dev on SeaCrit has been going, most days I pray I can push beyond 3 hours due to burnout or sometimes health, but the past couple days we’ve been slamming out 10+ hour days like they’re fooking nothing! 

So often we’re taught our best days will be between 18 - 30 and if you’re older than that, don’t even TRY IT. This goes for sports and tech. But honestly, I feel like I can swing as fucking hard as anyone right now. We have been KILLING IT. SeaCrit is KICKING ASS.

With a little help of AI with some tedious crap I was able to implement a new tool that selects a referenced object that links to an outside Scriptable Object or a prefab. In fact, screw it, I’ll make a quick video. LET ME SHOW YOU ITS FEATURES.

HOLY MOLY, this went TERRIBLY. I got sassy and decided to add a new feature only to come to realize that function calls don’t happen in the editor for non static objects, which means I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to set a rename feature. Long story short, it was a mess and we lost an hour of work showing to the world how we still have no idea what we’re doing. I was starting to get a little cocky so it’s good to get smacked down once in a while.

Gonna go take a nice long bath and think about  the meat and potatoes of these bonuses.

I find myself overthinking these complex CHUNGUS bonuses and diving into the late game, but that’s stupid right now, what I SHOULD be doing, is wracking my brain to think about how to make these basic bonuses as fun as possible.

Like take Heart for Example, it’s the most core upgrade. Right now it gives you 1.5 max health in melee form, and 1 in ranged form. That’s a BIT simple. But simple can be good. Is there anything we could add to this to jazz it up? Or would that just be overcomplicating the game?

The way it works right now is most fish when you gobble them give you a bonus level to heart, so the idea is you smack around lots of fish, eat them and you grow stronger in HP. And there’s nothing wrong with that, in fact the more I think about it, the more I think that’s more than enough new mechanics to hook the player at the start. But now my mind is going down rabbit holes thinking about how to polish the UI and the display visuals that alert you to these new bonuses. IT NEVER ENDS!

It could certainly use a better name, and now I’m thinking about how much of a pain in the butt it is to rename assets in my game, I HAVE AN IDEA imma work with the AI to come up with a tool that renames a bonus across the game. OH SHIT IT SHOULD BE FRIGGIN EASY, NO AI REQUIRED! BECAUSE ALL THE BONUSES SYNC TO THE ICON IMAGE ANYWAY! 

So since they’re all instantiated with a link to the other files, I think I SHOULD be able able to create a bit of logic that checks if the name of the enum it’s assigned to has changed and if so, automagically convert all associated assets to the new name. SHOULD be doable.

Anyhow, enough blatherin’, PART of me thinks we’re getting too sidetracked… is this even worth the time? Hmmmmmmmmmm. I think it is! So we’ll start with that, hopefully not get TOO sidetracked and actually get some work done on bonuses which we’ve been trying to do for like a FULL FRIGGIN’ MONTH NOW

Edit: I found myself kinda just surrendering to get to work and to just get each bonus in one by one and that's never how I wanted to finish out SeaCrit.

Too often we get our little laundry list of things we need to do, and we never take the step back to reevuate if everything we've done is even worth putting in. Far more often than we'd like to admit, LESS IS MORE!

So I'm trying to sit here for a moment and really think on this. I don't want to just open Unity in this moment and just start cramming in all the content we thought we needed 5 months ago. I want to think about the play of the game, the flow of the fun, and I want to think, what facilitates that? What's going to hit the player smack in the face and tell them, SeaCrit is good, we should eat more SeaCrit!

And I think what that means is rather than just going in one by one and adding every single thing we want, it means envisioning that small bit of ocean's going to swim into and come up with really neat, fun stuff. And this is crazy to me, because for the past 4 years or so, we've done almost nothing but built up the foundational elements of this game. The building blocks, from fish to npcs to literal blocks that will build up the levels, unique attacks, unique bonuses, unique charge mechanics, and a SLEW of unique combat properties that I haven't even really talked about in this blog.

Did you know seacrit has deep and complex shield and charge heading mechanics? You can reflect enemy projectiles with them, you get a very solid damage resistance to frontal damage but that falls off the longer you hold block! So it's a neat mechanic I think helps add more nuance to using a shield rather than just having it up all the time. And there are bonuses that cause you to smack any fish that touch your shield, and you can slam enemies with your shield and knock them into other enemies or into the environment to deal bonus damage.

Gahdamn we have so much to do. Now I want to  get the shield in, but i know it might not be the best starting area content. Honestly typing here isn't really helping, this is one of those rare moments where I think I really need to do some medidating / deep thinking. This is a pretty key time, shifting gears away from back end mechanics and LINEARLY INTERPOLATING towards actually creating content at long last.

So might come back and blather our thoughts later, better yet, we just get to work and stop wasting time.