I've indulged for so long in a sort of mindless development, we open the project and let work just take us randomly to whatever needs doing. And I think that's served us well, I feel the game is on the verge of maybe finally being good, but for the first time in I can't even remember, I find myself holding back a bit thinking, slow down a minute, we're actually at a fairly important stage of development and it's time we begin to set a standard for ourselves.

In prior blogs i've expressed that content is a prison. We can build ourselves into mediocrity if we invest too far into failed systems and setups that are inherently flawed in some way. We end up building a mountain of problems that may take more effort to fix that building that content in the first place.

And I wonder now if maybe we're too afraid of making that mistake, at some point, you have to take a chance that the content is ready to exist, that now is the time to try to get it in, polish it, and trust that it will add to something grander as we add other things.

So my prior plan was to get 1 of everything in the game, 1 of every fish, one of every bonus, shops, portals to other areas  and to just polish the game slowly across the board, and that it would all slowly lurch towards being a decent experience.

But I now thing that this is a horrible plan. And we are entering the content creation phase from a completely different angle than I ever expected to. After all these years creating enemies and ai systems and really expanding on the combat aspect of this game, in the here and  the now, I really just want  to indulge in building up the world and making the fun a fun platformer out of the gate where players can master the innovative movement mechanics we recently got online.

So that's what we're gonna do today, we're gonna polish up movement a bit, and work on getting gobble fish in which are fish that just by swimming into them you immediatly eat them, that reminds me we gotta try seeing if playing a bite aniamtion when you gobble fish looks better than nothing.

All this endless slog, and I still feel the need to pinch myself, are we FINALLY getting to adding stuff to the game, are we FINALLY at a point where this game isn't going to be total ass?

There are still a few pain points, gotta polish up a few movement mechanics here and there, and there will always be those issues you don't expect that eat up chunks of your time in the most annoying sort of way when you're already on empty, but dare I say it, we're knocking on the door to finally make this game. I've been saying this for years now, but i MEAN IT this time!

It's always a fine line throttling expectations. If you build yourself up expecting today to be the day the game finally comes together and the slog is over and dev is about to be downhill you set yourself up for endless frustration as the gamedev drags on and on and on. And if you view the road ahead knowing full well the work it's going to take to traverse and bring the game up to acceptable quality I woulda thrown in the towel years ago.

It's important to think just the  right amount. Plan just enough that you maximize your time spent working, but not think so much that you get in your own head or build unrealistic expectations.

So after all this thinking, very simply, I think it's about time we get to work on gobblefish and get them dropping some gobble bonuses.

Per usual, enough blatherin' time to get to it (or maybe I can get in a quick nap if i'm lucky)