Burned out, figured, eh, instead of working on the game, let’s make a blog. Problem is, we’re too burned out to write a blog too.

We could talk about all the systems we’ve been getting online the past few months, yeah that’s doable, that doesn’t take any creative energy, and honestly we haven’t really taken the time to look back on all the massive amount of crap we got online recently, and we really don’t take enough time to actually discuss all the hard work we do in these parts, so let’s actually talk about what we’ve been getting done of late:

Our loading system works, everything enables and disables based on proximity to the player, and it’s broken up into “chunks” and the system perfectly detects the 4 nearest chunks creating a 2x2 chunk section where all assets are loaded into a set of nearby objects, and it cycles through that based on your speed. The faster you go, the more assets it checks per frame. And it does a more performant “XY” check, where instead of getting the actual radial distance from the player, it checks the base x value and y value independently. It could be many magnitudes more performant if it used the ECS systems of Unity, but eh, we’re not at that level with code and this is more than performant enough for our uses. There’s something to be said for a system simply being usable and easily iterated upon. So this system is mostly entirely done, it auto instantiates on start and it doesn’t take any weird setups outside of having to tell all parent assets to have the “Container” tag assigned to them, so on initialization the game knows to pop all the assets outside the container so they can properly be fed into the list for cycling of distance checks.

Our Item system is fully online, and i have advanced NPC item systems where NPC item have unique collision detections and ranged items can be used to “destroy” them. But when you break them, they don’t just shatter, they actually pop off the enemy and you can swim over them and equip them! This means that in some instances not only can you get the item from the enemy, since they’re still alive, you can smack them down till they’re small and then swallow them whole which will bestow their unique bonus.

If you destroy an enemy’s item, they will enter retreat mode and run for their lives. Speaking of retreat and AI, I’m pretty darned happy with the state of AI, it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for now, and it’s pretty fully featured and enemies are pretty good about not acting like morons swimming into walls and navigating hte oceans now, and I’ve got quite a bit of unique logic where roaming fish will remain in their spanning confines and fish are good about not trying to swim into the water surface or against walls like idiots.

Our Bonus system is fully featured

https://youtu.be/YBFPL8tl8y0

(older video)

We can now quickly create bonuses, integrate them into gameplay, and with great confidence define if they approach a specific value, if they are a multiplier and should start at 1 and go up or down from there, and our pipeline is polished and easily iterated upon. We can throw together new mechanics and bonuses in no time and now that it’s up and running i’m excited for all the cool things we’ll be coming up with in the future! Oh and we have added features like being able to rename bonuses which will go through all our scripts and apply the proper name to all enums, resort them so they’re still alphabetized, and also generate new ones, inserting them in the right areas across all our scripts, it’s actually pretty bitchen, I’m actually super proud of this system and it’s barely visible so far in current demos, same with itemization.

Our healing/ growth/ Hefty system

Healing is a tough balancing point in RPG’s because if you make it too powerful the game becomes too easy, not strong enough and the game becomes impossible. And I think we’ve found a really innovative, fun, and unique mechanic for healing that just works so well for a game about hungry, canabalistic fish creatures, and that’s the hefty heal system. It’s super rough and needs lots of tuning, but the way it works, is the more you lifetap bite, or gobble fish, you fill your stomach up, and this makes you grow larger in size as well

https://youtu.be/gf8yu_irKWo

When you’re “hefty” (Fat as SHIT) you swim slower, and you attack slower, but you deal more damage and your max health is larger. But when your stomach is full, you receive a large healing penalty up to 80%, making it MUCH harder to heal back your life. This means that against tough enemies you might be able to heal back to full a time or two, but beyond that, you’re going to start encountering MUCH more diminished ability to heal back your life.

Each of these new mechanics from teh slowed movement when you’re hefty, to the max life increase % for being hefty, to how hard you hit, to the healing penalty for a full stomach, they all feed into more elements for bonuses to improve your build, or make you stronger, or allow for more unique styles of play.

I could say add a unique item like say “Jaws of the Bottomless” that causes you to lose your full stomach at a really high rate, but maybe you’re never able to gain chungus fat. And chungus fat you can burn off by swimming a lot and “exercising” and with the “metabolism” bonus, you can actually transfer that blubber into muscle and gain more max health! So all these mechanics and bonuses are set to play off each other and come together to form all these neat interacting styles of play and opportunities to grow stronger over time in fun and organic ways that make sense.

Like in real life, bodybuilders will spend months overeating and putting on weight so they can transform that weight into muscle, and it’s going to be the same in seacrit! This is just a small little nugget of potential play. And though it’s exciting to think about, it’s also a bit daunting as we have SO MUCH to tune and get online. And how does the world fit around all these mechanics? How much do we bank on the player understanding how metabolism works? How hefty mechanics works, how to find their way around the ocean, figure out which areas are good for farming stats, which areas are good for farming bonuses, where certain seacrit shops are with special bonuses that fit certain builds.

And it starts to make you go crazy yourself overthinking all these broad elements.

Are we ready to start adding this stuff? Shouldn’t we start building up the setups so it’s easier to generate this mass content? But does that lock us into those mechanics we haven’t even felt out yet?

We’re spread so fuckig thing, and we’re so burned out.

There’s this concept you need to start being keenly aware of. Systems you add to your game are very likely to make your game WORSE than they will to make it better, until you polish the every living crap out of it, and the more systems you add, the more work it takes to polish and tune everything to work in tandem.

It seems so strange to me, that after all these years, after finally reaching the point I had always wanted, we’re just burned out, and having stage fright. It is so incredibly draining to work on a project such as this and be the sole developer, I have a hard time myself remembering why it’s so hard, it’s such an overly complex mess even I can’t quite grasp it, let alone try to describe it in a quick little ramble such as this.

And this is what the industry at large doesn’t understand about games. A game is not some giant pyramid you simply place more blocks on top of. You can’t just haphazardly throw more and more shit on top of each other and expect the structure to hold up, expect the aesthetics of the pieces to fit together, for the eletricals, plumbing and conditioning systems to all link up, play together, and produce a cohesive whole.

You need to keep that vision alive, you need to know that all the mechanics are going to tie together that the spawn systems are going to spawn fish worth fighting, that the fish worth fighting are going to drop items worth equipping, and those items are going to have bonuses on them that won’t totally invalidate other bonuses, provide enough of a power boost to keep the combat engaging, but not trivialise them, and through it all everything is woven together in a way such that the game won’t crash, the framerates won’t drop, the loading bars won’t stick,  and when the player ultimately dies, they think to themselves, “That was fun! Let’s go another round!”

Eh, we won’t be burned out forever, and all these systems are more or less online and ready to go.

I’m terrified these systems won’t be fun, that everything is going to take more and more and more work, but that’s just how it is. That’s gamedev.

We are in EXACTLY the same spot I thought we were years ago. “We just gotta get a few fish in! We just gotta get a few bonuses in and the game will show it’s potential!” 

Per usual wish this world wasn’t so tribal, and petulant and wish we could learn to hold our damn tongue!

But like I always say, IT IS WHAT IT IS! And you know me! I CAN’T COMPLAIN!