Nothing left to say that we haven't blathered incessantly, 5,000 times ad nausium while coming off as a pyschopathic doucher. 

That's not us. 

Have we been enraged? Unhinged? Unreasonable in our padded room? Yeah, but only because we give a damn, only because we really fucking care about gamedev and the past several years have been really fucking  rough.

I hope at the very least it's been an interesting read, if at times terrifying and awkward.

It's beyond time to shift gears. It's time to be part of the solution, not the problem. 

AND I MEAN IT THIS TIME!!

So, IllTemperedTuna, you IDIOT, what are you going todo  with all your free time now that you're supposedly not acting like an abject fucktard on the internets?

Stealth Edit #1: Mundane blog! We are safe, sanded, and DO NOT SAY ANYTHING OFFENSIVE ANY MORE. I gotta stop saying shit like that because it makes me want to break my own rules. So anyway, I'm finding it really hard to bring myself back to working on the game. I know every area will likely require polish, and we are so damned burned out you have no idea. But we've come so far and we gotta keep going so it's whatever.

I wanted to at least get some semblance of a plan so we have SOME level of structure. Just working randomly on stuff has served us really well up to this point, but that's fine when you're building foundations and just need to make things functional. What we're trying to do now is orchestrate all those systems so that we can add everything to the game to be the most fun. But what does that look like? 

Should we focus on making a tiny little demo fun? Or should we be working towards a big sprawling world? Should we just add one little thing at a time? Or do we focus on lots of things and a cohesive experience?

I don't know. But this I DO know. The WORST course of action is to do nothing, which is what we've done the past couple days and I'm kinda over it. But damn it's hard to bring ourselves back to work. I think what's getting to me the most is the isolation, the lack of any semblance of support.

How many more damned days do we just bust our ass alone in this cave without the smallest ounce of support or reward? Like is the game really still that fucking bad? I think it's starting to be pretty damned good! But the silence is deafening.

Oh well, no point harping on that shit only destroys what little fumes we have left in the tank we have at this moment.

So today I think what we'll do is just try to get shields in the game. Get a couple variations, work on the heading values a touch, and we'll get a few enemies in the game that drop those shields.

Super low bar, I promised myself if I wasn't feeling it, we wouldn't force ourselves to work more than half an hour. So really low bar for today.

Hopefully the mojo comes back soon. I'm burned out as fuck.

Stealth Update #2: I'm not sure if we have too much to say, I just really wanted to link this song because ti's such a fucking banger XD

Yesterday went WAY better than expected, and largely becauase we abandond all our plans and ended up polishing pu the core again. Did LOTS of revamps to how attack forces work, for the first time ever i'm really happy with how  mashing combos against fishes feel, and if you're using a keyboard, touch, or joystick there's a mechanic that will cause you to auto face a fish if you're not inputing directional input.

Was a nice reminder that the game is quite fun and all we have to do is kinda shove things into the game and keep building up the founadtions. I realize now it's not content taht's lakcing... that's easy. We just gotta keep building up the core till we can throw it at the wall and it sticks.

Slept like shit, might get a bit of work done, might not. What's it matter anyhow? Kinda just waiting for this idiot world to pull its head out of its ass.

Important thing is our mojo is back and we're looking forward to getting to work soon.

Very brief blog today. I'm kinda getting used to this calm! Still feeling a bit burned out, and that's fine, we're burned out because WE WORKED OUR ASS OFF, so it's like, eh, another day to recharge is fine, we earned this. BUT! I did do some thinking and I think we have a solid plan moving forward. 

Short term I just want to make 1 item for every item type to drop from enemies, and the corresponding enemy that will drop said item. And I had a really big realization about making item varients!

So all weapons/shields have a unique loadout for multiple things: there is a unique combo attack, there is a unique finisher move that grows in power based on the combo hits, there is a charge attack, and there is an alt charge attack, and they generally follow a motif. Like A shield and a sword will GERNALLY do lower damage and rely more on stuns and damage mitigation. Duel wielding sowrds will have various means of dealing damage with no lifetap or defensive mechanics at all, in fact, many of the attacks will leave you more vulnerable to damage for enhanced damage output.

But I had this idea... different weapon types could have 1 unique element that switches this up. Like spiked shields will return damage when you're hit, but instead of having a health boosting shield bash as a charge attack, it might be a bit more offensive, like some sort of attack that sacrifices a bit of life to deal damage over time. And this will create a lot of REALLY cool variance that is understandable by the visual appeal of the item.

One of the things that confuses players is games, it's it's sorta random which items you identify and they'll have this mod or that mod that makes them tanky or offensive, or enhances this skill or that playstyle. Visuals are kinda random and the play that stems from them is random as well.

And it's not that SeaCrit won't have random mods, but I'm hoping to have a more streamlined and distilled sort of play where it's a  TOUCH less random in the item department, and MORE randomness is found in spawns and potent item shop buys.

Same concepts will apply to armor and rings. Items will have certain bonuses and properties that define them, like heavy armor causing you to move slowly, but giving big buffs to damage mitigation for example.

Just theory craftin'!

It's not so much that we came to an idea of this bite sized set of work for when we get back to it, but I feel as though we have discovered our workflow for moving forward AND THAT'S HUGE! It's going to revolve around doing cool shit!

We were coming at this from entirely the wrong angle before, "Ok we're going to make this giant list of items, we're going to make all these monsters and we're going to feel out pipleines... YUCK!" That felt like such a chore, and it did not inspire us to want to get to work.

Now i'm excited, "Oh shit, we're finally getting those shields in, and we'll makea  few neat variations and we'll get to get them on fish and then we get to find the most fun way of getting those fish in the game, like should they be hidden in seacrit areas? Should they spawn rarely in common areas? How many branching directions should the player be able to move into? How big is this game going to be? It's actually exciting to think about. Fingers crossed we don't hit any huge bugs that suck the winds out of our sails.

Health is kinda meh still, I should probably fast and really stick with it, but then I start feeling better and eat something and it's back into the dumps. I dunno. I'm not sure if I'm burned out, or just not feeling well, probably a little combination of both. Anywho, game is going well, I feel as though the world is slowly pulling its head out of its arse and maybe we won't be any "lists" of people not allowed to be succesful any more. But enough of that crap, we have blathered WAY TOO MUCH about that crap.

What's truly exciting, is when we finally get back to it, I think the game will start getting better at a really fast rate, we're on the threshold of the dream. Or a catastrophic failure. One or the other XD