I feel a little silly making this post ATM, because currently SeaCrit is about 3 screens full of haphazardly thrown together combinations of rocks and coins with a couple tiny little fish you can gobble.

BUT! That is not our aspiration, and after all these years and more confident than ever that our “Vision” is going to maybe work. To be honest I’m not sure if I wanted to do a blog on balance in SeaCrit, or if we just really like this Moody Blues song and wanted to post it again!

So I’m still obsessive and locked into the POE 2 situation and I kinda get where the devs are coming from. They’re going to watch the hardcore streamers, see some random person with a broken build kill a boss in 1 hit and think to themselves, “Oh dear lord, we made easy zoom zoom mode game again…”.

And I could write a friggin’ book on the pitfalls of online RPG economies and drop rates and no drop mods and trade and how all these systems intermix to destroy the “FUN” of gaming. But I didn’t choose to write a book, for one because I’m just an insufferable neckbeard, and for two, I figured it would be more productive to make our own friggin’ game! (don’t ask how that’s going).

So anyways, with all this craziness and the whole of the internet screaming for more or less difficulty, more or less loot, more or less item mods, I kinda felt like we could explain how we expect it to work in SeaCrit. And I don’t want to drone on for too long (YEAH LIKE I’M ANY GOOD AT CONTAINING THESE RAMBLES), but I felt like sharing THE PLAN!

It’s actually pretty simple, my plan is to have somewhat common item drops, somewhat common purchasable bonuses but we modify these session to session with randomness and every play of the game will feel a bit different.

We’ll have some almost IMPOSSIBLE enemies that spawn rarely, and only on your BEST runs will you be able to get away alive, but we won’t put these in the early game, we’ll shove ‘em in the more difficult areas so only players who enjoy a challenge face this.

And my dream moving forward is to have multiple goals at any given time, sorta like in Diablo you can kill any boss. And my thought is, each time you kill a boss they will become stronger, and the mobs leading up to them grow stronger, so the game has this continues long lasting difficulty, and let’s say you’re having a really good run of SeaCrit you can strategize and think, OH WOW I GOT THE ULTRA SHARP MASS O’ MOON OF THE AVENGER! If I farm up a bit of health regen and life I might have a chance of Defeating ultra mega Leviathan Tier 3!

And my hope is that long term, I'll spice up the game with permanent bonuses that you can buy with some kind of currency that you farm from killing increasingly more and more difficult bosses/ just playing the game for a long time.

I probably rambled way too long to get to the point, but to me, so much of the problems of balance and creating thrill in the ARPG space spirals out from the permanence of items and levels and talents. Because if you give an entire internet of neckbeards and over a week of sweaty neckbeard time to play a game, and farm and farm, and farm, and unlimited online resources to learn a paint by #’s build for ultimate power, what you essentially end up doing is creating this massive network of interesting mechanics that gets reduced to a few key item mods and upgrade paths and farm styles. You effectively spend years and years making this robust and interesting ecosystem of mechanics and play that is gutted by min maxxers.

I don’t want that. I want everything I create in SeaCrit to have viability, necessity, and meaning. And I won’t be forcing things to be important arbitrarily, I”m not going to have 6 arbitrary resist types for schools of magic, physical, poison, and bleed, no % dodge block, or any of that bullshit.

You want to dodge and attack? Get better at the game scrub. It also removes the visceral nature of play, if you start just having a % of attacks miss the player, the brain starts to detach from the reality of the game, and things start deconstructing themselves to the simplistic roll checks against your evasion chance and hit chance.

So many mechanics of ARPGs exist solely to REMOVE the depth of play! None of that garbage in SeaCrit!

And I’m very proud of the inventive and exciting points of power and progression we have going on.

I suppose I should stop here, because I’m getting dangerously close to saying SeaCrit MIGHT end up being very good and I’m trying to keep my expectations high, because (and I'm being 100% serious here) one of the most dangerous things you can be in gamedev is optimism.

If you’ve read any significant # of these blog posts I go WAY out of my way to try to stay humble and keep expectations low. That’s partly  because who wants to read a self absorbed neckbeard talk about their shitty game? And partly because it is DEBILITATING to constantly think your game is on the verge of being good only to realize you were wrong.

So the hope is some day the game will be good, and all this hard work won’t be so cringe. I try not to think about it, but what if SeaCrit is ALWAYS ass? How embarrassing will all these blogs be? The only solace I’ll be able to take is that barely anyone reads it! XD

But I think it goes without saying that I do actually kinda think the game might be becoming pretty decent of late, for reals for reals, but I also understand how dangerous that is to think, so I do my best to keep the mindset of “It’s ass we need to work our ass off to make it better” because that’s what keeps the fire alive, that’s what keeps us pushing. And we didn’t get in this bitch  to make an ok game. We came in hard because we want to making something fucking bitchen.

And I can honestly say we are NO WHERE CLOSE to this game being fuckin’ bitchen. So gearin’ up for some hard work!

NO REST FOR THE WICKED M*THER FUCKERS!