I was microwaving some gruel thinking about how nice it would be to have energy to make some semi edible food, when a random idea I had about the game popped back into my head randomly as often happens sometimes.

I have this system where the fish in secret don't rely on a specific material, they generate an instance of that material, and then I can simply assign a diffuse and a normal map and boom, it's like that material was custom made for that fish. And for whatever reason, after all this time it hit me... We could associate global modifiers with these materials.

So let's say you see a green fish with purple polka dots on it, whether it was a shark, or it was a coral fish, you could know at a glance, "Oh this is one of those fish with really rare hyper regen abilities! I need to output high DPS or it'll just heal it's life back!" Just a random example.

And then my mind started wandering even more... wait a minute, we just put a TON of effort into getting this item visuals on fish, so fish can swim around with hats and swords and even shields. I have this Mexicali fish that swims with a shield and a pistol and it's really fun to fight!

And this rabbit hole of ideas was so fortuitous to happen right now, because I was JUST gearing up to start locking in our pipeline and double down on making all these unique fish variants and hand crafting each and every single one. Making unique ability loadouts, tuning unique stats for each fish, and just doing that old school means of making a game, and that wasn't sitting with me well, because after all these years of developing, if i've learned one thing, it's that mountains of hand written tuning values is a TERRIBLE means of creating a game.

You will end up just rewriting and endlessly tuning everything, every adjustment will break some tiny other thing, and year after year you will end up putting hundreds of hours into the same tired systems and your passion will bleed out and those 8 hours you saved crating a more dynamic system that populates a range of balance over several tuning metrics turns into a constant drain on your energy.

And that's when it hit me... Not only could rare items that generate on these fish modify their stats by say greatly increasing their damage and HP, making them a sort of mini boss, but they could ALSO give these fish Unique ability loadouts essentially creating this endless mishing and mashing of enemies of unique loadouts and defensive and offensive properties.

And holy shit, another revelation right now! All fish currently give a unique bonus, based on type, but those material variant versions now open up the door to these fish imparting all sorts of unique bonus upgrades when you eat them!

I really love these moments when something unlocks in your head, and most of the hard work is done, and it was just sitting there and now everything about the game is about to be easier to make, more fun, and just better overall.

I've really been thinking on game design a TON lately with the POE 2 fiasco going on. And I've come to realize that the ARPG genre is plagued by too many rock paper scissors elements. Do you have lightning resistance? Do you have healing reduction for this enemy? Do you have high movement speed to dodge this enemies attacks? It's like gear check after gear check, and what you really want is a system that just encourages you to MAXIMIZE your time and just unload harder than you did before. That's the sorta game I want to make, sure there'll be randomized challenges and all that, but for where we're at, we don't have the resources to produce tons of challenging content, but that was never our goal anyway. 

We want to make FUN content, and REPLAYABLE content, and FRESH content. And I think we're well on our way to doing that! I'm so excited by how ORGANIC these fish are going to feel and the power and reward of all fish will be visible at a glance. And it's going to be really cool to see very rare fish or very rare items, or rare fish with rare items! And with that draw for more power will be the danger of scaling monster power as well!

GameDev is weird XD. Just a couple hours ago I was dreading getting back to work, and now I'm kinda looking forward to it! If this system goes well our enemy content pretty much creates itself as well as a huge chunk of the progression content, and it's just a matter of figuring out how much we want this to be hand placed / randomized. I can't believe that we're actually at the phase we might actually start BALANCING the darned game!

Whew, feels good to have the mojo comin' back, Oh, and even though we've been blathering our mouth off as late there was something else I wanted to say.

I keep forgetting that working in this cave might be the absolute best thing for SeaCrit. I'm a hopeless optimist, and I imagine joining with other devs and pushing gamedev, and doing all this great work that will make a better industry. But what are the odds of that happening? What are the odds that this industry is ready to whiplash around, spin on a dime and suddenly decide that it wants to make amazing games and ergonomic tech again?

We're doing good work exactly where we're at. And sure, it's stressful, and unrewarding, and painful, and kinda lonely sometimes, BUT! Maybe that's exactly why SeaCrit is going as well as it is.

I keep saying, "No one is coming to save us.", when in all actuality it's really, "there's no one here to sabotage our work"

Life is what happens when you're busy making plans. Same with gamedev. Is it fair we're doing all this work in these conditions? Who ever said life was fair? This is what we have to do, so we gon' get to it. And i'd be lying if I said I wasn't taking any satisfaction in all this forward progress. SeaCrit is doing fantastically well as far as I can tell, and that's satisfying as hell. Rofl, I swear I wasn't trying to rhyme there it just kinda happened. We're so fucking punny.