What a regrettable time we are living in. Can’t have fun, can’t be ourselves, gotta play that idiot game of back scratching and cowtowing to the mediocrity and censorship of the day so you can appease these growing legions of smarm fuck who rule with their iron fists. 

If these nervous nellies, these moral absolutists, these naysayers and easily offended agitators didn’t get offended they’d have nothing at all. It’s the only thing they have to lord over those of us trying to make a difference, those of us busting our asses to make actual do cool shit.

I miss when we could be ourselves, when we could be unafraid to shine and let our colors show. Some of you may have come to realize this if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, it’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s not something we hide either, we are who we are.

I’m retarded.

AND  I’M TAKING THAT WORD THE FUCK BACK.

And I am sick and fucking tired of living in a world where we can’t even utter the word it’s like my mere existence offends people. And what’s worse, I’m not afraid to put it out there and let it shine. I’m RETARDED AS SHIT, and I am SICK TO FUCKING DEATH of these pious mother fuckers being offended on my behalf.

Do you shit stains have ANY IDEA, how fucking awesome it is to be retarded? How strong retard strength is? The sort of inhuman laser focus you get for working on mentally challenged fish as you excete SeaCrit Sauce all into the night?

That’s MY fucking word. If you don’t have the chromosomes in the pocket book, you need to sit the shit DOWN, and listen.

Where were we going with this blog again? Oh right just finding new ways that we can set ourselves on fire!

BAhahahaha! Who gives a shit, this industry is crumbling, all that matters is that we bleed our SeaCrit sauce into the project and I’m gearin’ up to get to it now, in fact I have SO MUCH TO BLATHER ABOUT, and it’s a shame we started with this opening.

Anywho! I really was really happy today because on a whim I forgot I had access to a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 (SM-X200) and it’s a pretty low end device so I had something I  could try SeaCrit on. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s playable! Like MORE THAN PLAYABLE! It looks REALLY FRIGGIN’ GOOD! But you have to make sure you properly set VSYNC and disable MOST EVERYTHING and then decrease the render scale a good bit. I’m finding that to be HUGE for lower end touch devices, because they have these HUGE brilliant high def screens, but the performance isn’t there to support it, and you can drop the render scale quite a bit before you even perceive a difference. Oh happy accident! Because the UI isn’t rendered on the main camera in 3d it doesn’t lose quality!

But beyond the performance itself, there was something that really struck me that I wasn’t expecting. The game IS FUN! Like not just “AS FUN” on the touch device, it’s actually uniquely fucking cool! Because of all the advanced mechanics that overlay one another and feel so unique with the simple button presses.

From the very start we were building a game that had LOTS of depth, but simple input, I didn’t want tons of buttons, I wanted to get AS MUCH out of all those buttons and charge setups and inputs as possible. And I never really thought on it too much, but I just wanted to make the game playable on as many devices as possible because we were a solo dev and who knew where success would come you know? And we’re kinda old school and we know how to count polys and batch counts and aim for performance so it was all in our wheelhouse.

For a bit now i’ve been kicking myself… “WHY DID WE TARGET SO MANY DEVICES!? WHY DID WE INCLUDE SO MANY INPUTS!?” I’d felt for so long it spread us thin, made the game worse, forced us to dev on tertiary shitty things that most teams woulda handed off to some other person to port or as an afterthought. 

But none of these things are afterthoughts in seacrit, and the accessibility added for one platform bleeds into easy to pick up impossible to master mechanics for another. Between the high performance, the improved web builds form Unity with better and better performance all the time (I think, it might just be that I’m cleaning up my shit code and setttings I have no idea haha, but i’m trying to be nice ok!). It’s REALLY starting to feel like a game!

I couldn’t believe it, but as I was fucking around and watching youtube frying up a burger, I found myself just legit playing the game on that shit tablet. And I was just blown away… “Am I crazy, or is this ACTUALLY FUN!?.

So much still to do, I’m still optimizing things, DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN ADJUST HOW MANY BONES ASSETS USE PER RIG!? I HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT IT WAS A GLOBAL SETTING! So I’m going through right now and setting fish that use the hefty bone to use 4 bones and all others to use 2. And there are other things like setting sounds to compressed, 22khz sounds, disabling exceptions, stripping code in the build, and maybe a couple other things. So I’m expecting maybe 5 or 10% more performance gain if we’re lucky.

Oh and the last thing we have to do is go through and reduce poly counts on a good bit of environment assets. There are so many things I can rip the polygons off the back of the asset, remove edge loops, scale high poly assets up so they’re worth their weight in performance hit.

What I REALLY wish we could do, is BAKE SOME DAMNED LIGHTING on these assets without it ballooning our build sizes. That would be REALLY nice, but the way Unity works is you need a unique light bake for all assets so if you want that performance, you gotta just have unique lightbake data for all assets, which is so dumb… BUT WHATEVER! We’re doing what we can with this hodge podge of technical restrictions before us, and honesty that’s a good thing. Because if it was easy EVERYONE WOULD DO IT!

So while our performance is pretty good, it’s still getting better!

Oh funny storry while playing on that crappy tablet I had forgotten that it wasn’t my more powerful phone and I was still impressed by the playability! So that’s REALLY saying something about the performance of SeaCrit I THINK. I don’t really know, I don’t know how well other mid range games play on devices such as that.

SeaCrit has runtime dynamic main lighting so could be WAY better, but eh, what can you do? Shame there isn’t a simple way to bake this into the shader, maybe there is… might have to look into that. If there is i’m giong to have to create custom shaders per zone. It’s a REAL SHAME there aren’t decals in unity… or maybe there are and I need to get them on the asset store so I can start migrating to a baked lighting setup… OR MORE LIKELY! We’re spending WAY too much time catering to super low end devices and the game is more than optimized enough! In fact a new build just finished with a few adjustments so i’ll be back with a performance update.

I THINK we may have gotten another 15% or so, it’s hard to tell because performance is really spotty on these devices, sometimes the VSYNC cap is 30, sometimes it’s 40, seems kinda random. But I was able to get both shadows and depth of field going and a more than playable framerate, and it just felt so damn good. I am realizing that even the smallest amount of transparency kills FPS, so i’ll be adjusting some waterfall stuff taht doesn’t look all that great anyhow to be additive. 

Overall, we really haven’t sacrificed much visual fidelity to be this performant on lower end devices, and I’m really excited about that, because the game is super playable on anything now, and all that’s left to do is make it fun!

Going to close out today getting a few more performance things sewn up. What I think i’ll do is if you’re playing on touch, i’ll set you to a very low qualitysetting unless you’re sitting at over 60 FPS right out of the gate and then i’ll set you to medium, and only on PC will I crank the settings right out of the gate. Oh speaking of, first time i’ve ever played the game on the phone where it doesn’t just immediately start heating the device up, it’s so nice to know that it can actually be played for longer sessions without becoming uncomfortable or killing the battery totally. There is still progress to be made, but when isn’t there?

So a bit of cleanup today, and then it’s FULL STEAM AHEAD getting the gameplay online. There is SO MUCH stuff to fix up it boggles my mind, off the top of my head projectiles don’t get bonus damage for being charged up so sniper attacks are worthless, but it kinda doesn’t matter because all this time we’ve been side tracked building up the foundation and it seems to FINALLY be online. That’s just a drop in the bucket of shit that needs doing.

Oh random cool idea! What about a six shooter ranged weapon that when you accumulate a lot of dash, if you hard pull back and try to swim in the other direction on a dime, whit if it shot out projectiles that ricochette’d all over the place and did damage based on your dash damage, HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE! Just one of hundreds of ideas for bunses and abilities and custom weapons swimming around in my head for trying all these complex systems together and creating some interesting power growth avenues, but we are getting WAY ahead of ourselves.

I almost forgot we had all this combat content and itemization and bonuses and such. It is SO underdeveloped, and the gobblefish that I added thus far that give swim speed are TERRIBLE it doesn’t feel good at all, but I literally threw it in on a whim trying to get it in under the wire for the Unity competition.

Anywho… bit of a retarded blog, and I’m more than comfortable with that, obviously.

You know… really good day today. Nothing special, just not feeling like I’m going to die, game is coming along and all our dreams of potato status is finally real, and I’m more excited for the future of the game than ever. I really do think it’s going to start coming online soon in a big way if we can keep up the motivation.

Gotta save more energy for dev, spent a LOT of time and energy today spazzing out on builds, and looking up performance tweaks, and then writing up this blog and then coming up with a billion and a half things we need to optimize and implement and fix and I forgot over half of them which is always really frustrating, but they’ll come back to us.

Not gonna lie, this blog SUCKED, nothing all that interesting, just geeking out about the game, and it’s actually kinda nice. Just another day, just gonna get a little work done, could be worse!

Alirght, enough blathering, suppose we should stop at this point and get to it

If any of you m*ther fuckers are as retarded as I am, and you sing a cover of "Simple Man" I will link it on my blog, and I have a feeling you'll get a lot of views on YouTube too.

Probably shouldn't post this, I kinda like just keeping this blog constrained to my own crazed rambles, but this video was cathartic for me. People are FINALLY starting to get it. People are finally seeing that industries should probably actually do something, like make games, or movies, or cars, or whatever. And that when you just pay a bunch of people to be a building, and the only thing those people do is cut down others to maintain their privildge, society tends to go to fuck.

Maybe some day we'll have the time and money to get to actually play more cool games, but for now, we gotta get back to bleedin'.

FUCK IT! ONE MORE!