(Thought about linking "There, There" by radiohead, because anyone that blathers about Depeche Mode too much, especially their mainstream stuff tends to be really cringe and we already did a depeche mode song last week, but you can say the same thing about radiohead fans! Anyway, this song is just too perfect so I don't care. Call it cringe and pretentious, (it is) whatever!)

Can I be honest?

I don't say this as a precursor to saying something derogatory or hurtful no matter how true. I mean this in the more philosophical sort of way that speaks to our human condition.

We're all the lead character of our story. We're the only one that knows our own truths, we're the only one that can truly get us, the only person we know and fully that doesn't put up a mask. Or do we? Can we even be honest with ourselves?

We've all been wronged, we're all trying to get by in our day to day with our own shortcomings and our own strengths, and the our own unique struggles that we contend with. The rich man with all his worries of empire will never know the piece of mind of the drunk hobo happy to be chugging a 40 watching the sun rise with the pack of smokes he found behind the liquor store. The simple minded couch potato that smokes all day and watches sponge bog will never know the satisfaction of solving a complex issue that's going to get a team up and running to produce the next great project.

We all have our mission, we all have things in our way, we all have concepts and problems that others have never even conceived of, have no frame of reference, and yet we all judge one another all the same.

But what keeps me up at night, is though we would like to trust ourselves, we'd like to think we can at least be honest to thine own selves...

Can we? Do we have the capacity to fairly judge ourselves? Our work? Weigh our desires against the others, perceive our place in this complicated world?

I'm already pretty far in this blog and I have no idea where I'm going with this. I mean I have the thought in my mind I was attempting to go to, but as I typed out the above I have NO IDEA WTF I'm blathering about XD. Maybe we're just afraid of getting to serious around here. Maybe we rely on acting the fool a bit too much to take the edge off.

I dunno, making light of things and being a goof isn't the worst thing in the world for someone who's attempting to make games.

What I was trying to get to, is I'm not sure my combat is my game is any good, and that's like a key  component of the game. Am I riddled by delusions of granduer? Or have I simply not even put the combat in the game yet so it can even shine? I feel like the movement is beyond passablea t this point, but I haven't spent the past 8 years making a platformer, i've spent the last 8 years making a darned beat 'em up.

And I took a nice long shower to clear my mind and instead of coming up with a clear plan of attack, to cut through the burnout and get us working on the game again, instead my brain did something really dumb.

I wanna feature creep so bad right now.

I'm happy we redid the movement system and I like the wavey swim mechanics, and an idea hit me... gesture/ momentum based combat.

Right now I almost don't even want to press the buttons, I much more enjoy swimming around at high speed and smashing into enemies.

I don't find the back and forth of combat to be fun. I WANT it to be fun, I want to think it's fun, but I'm not sure it is and that's kinda haunting me.

But it MAY be as simple as changing a few variables, it MIGHT be as simple as reducing the attack speed on enemies, or making enemies a bit dumber.

And this ties into the topic of this thread. FINALLY we got around to that, I wasn't even remembering what we were blathering about.

We are emotional machines. When I look at my code, I can see how everything works, and I can take rational steps to improve it with 100% certainty because it has parameters and they can be measured, and there is no cognitive dissonance hiding between the code.

But this urge in the pit of my stomach to just make wacky new mechanics... is that genuine? Or is that the little goofball kid in me just saying "THROW ROCKET LAUNCHER DINOSAURS IN THERE WITH FIRE COMING OUT OF ITS EYES AND IT SHOOTS LASERS!" rarings itself up again.

I mean... you HAVE to listen to that voice to SOME degree or the game isn't going to be fun. But you have to set boundaries and you have to set those boundaries around the stale technical and feasible bits the adult part of your brain believes to know to be true.

But then a whole new slew of doubts pop up regarding the emotional priorities bounding around inside... how do I know that the "sensible" voice is sincere?

How do i know I'm not just burned out, and I've got so much sunk cost in the combat systems by brain won't even let me ENTERTAIN the notion of going down more rabbit holes?

HMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

So I suppose I should speak to what gestural combat is and the challenges I believe we'll run into if we do try to implement it and we'll kinda decide along the way if we want to do it, I feel as though we've already made up our mind at this point, but who knows. Let's explore the space a little more.

So a gestural attack I thought of would be something like you spin in a full circle really fast and you do a 360 spin attack that knockbacks all nearby enemies. Of if you get close to an enemy and spin your tail as you quickly "flip" around to the other side you would smack them. 

These would be purely movement direction driven attacks. Like in Streat fighter you know how it's a roll from Down to Right + Punch to execute a hadouken fireball from Ryu? 

Well something like that but without even requiring an action button!  Like imagine you're swimming directly towards a fish fast, then just as you reach it, you pull your movement back in the other direction and it caused you fish to do a sort of tail slap sending them flying far away. Or if you spun upwards quickly rather than reversing quickly and that caused a sort of spin attack from your tail, and when you hit the enemy they became stunned.

If you sat still and spun in a 360 motion really fast your fish would just continuously spin attack and spin attack, and if you gyrated the movement back and forth that might do some sort of horizontal spin that sucks enemies inward in a fairly large aoe...

And this sounds BITCHEN AS HELL. And with everything we've learned over all these years, I THINK we might be able to pull it off. But there are so many things to consider...

How do we differentiate between a gesture the player is making to simply move about, and when they're actively trying to attack a fish?

Will it look like ability overload if just making subtle movements starts causing your fish to do all these bizarre moves out of  nowhere?

Will we be able to detect these movements accurately so that we can even play an animation in time for it to look like an attack? I feel confident we can predict the inputs AFTER THE FACT that it was supposed to be an attack, but how do we predict what the player is wanting to do in their mind?

Like if you're doing a long stretch for a yawn and you raise and curl your arms to get a good stretch in that is also almost the exact motion you would make with one arm if you're about to try to sock someone in the mouth, and I BELIEVE we need to detect this stuff early so that animations can make these gesture attacks look believable.

MAYYYYYBBBBBBBBBBBBEEEEEEEEEEEEE... we can come up with some sort of dynamic animation system, so roll with me here.

In Super Simon's Quest on the Super Nintendo, you could hold the attack button down and the whip would turn into a dynamic physics object, and whichever way you moved the D Pad, the whip would kinda flail in that direction, it was pretty fun, but really gimped. And in games like Human Fall Flat, appendages of the player kinda just flop around. So what if we were somehow able to make the tail of the player sort of dynamically extend and flail about like a whip to some degree to show that it's acting like a weapon?

Our bend and turn animations are additive so I think we might be able to just add one more layer for the tail extending and tie that to both angular and momentum rates of change. And maybe we just make this new check based on tail extension and angle, where if the enemy is behind you while your tail is extended they get "smacked". If it's a horizontal angular change fueling this (A spin) I would add lots of kinetic punch to the hit, if it's a vertical spin, it would add an angular spin and a stun to the enemy.

HMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

This is like the dumbest moment to randomly start adding in some new feature, but I kinda feel like I can't help myself.

Ok, so this is the plan, tomorrow I'm going full retard and we're going to try adding this in, and if we're not feelin' it, we've got it out of our system, and no biggie, one day of work to potentially add an amazing system that ties everything together and feels amazing and builds off the motif of interesting movement driven combat could be a huge win for the project.

And if it's a failure, oh well, no biggie we got it out of our system.

What I FEAR though... is it will be pretty good. It will be JUST good enough that I can't bring myself to get rid of it, and we will spend a full damned month adding it and polishing it and it's only KINDA good. And I'm not sure if it's worth keeping or if we should gut it.

Making a note of this here totally out of place because I don't want to lose the idea, we need to add a new "spin" mechanic to enemies when they get hit by the player that will cause them to spin by certain attacks, based on the direction of spin of the player, this will REALLY sell the sense of the player hitting the enemy and that centrifugal force transferring over.

Ugh, mixed feelings. 

Are we going down some rabbit hole of regret, where we will burn weeks more work just widening a puddle deep hole that is our combat, just adding more and more half arsed features when we SHOULD be just polishing the hell out of a small core set?

Or do these gesture attacks really bring things together, and really sell innovative and fun attacks that really shine on simple input devices like phones and other touch devices, while delivering unique and fun mechanics never seen on other devices?

Will we be able to implement this in a way that the telegraphs of visuals, and particles, and attacks feel cohesive and natural?

Will players find themselves accidently triggering various attacks and getting confused why their fish is randomly doing all these things?

Will Ill Tempered Tuna ever SHUT HIS DAMN YAPPER!?

Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting update and more incessant yammering's in the ongoing blog series, Potato Lord: King of the Neckbeards

Quick little edit: I was just thinking. Why is our silly video game blog getting so philosophical? We set out to make a stupid murder fish simulator, why on earth are we up after midnight blathering about existential threats to progress? 

And I think the reason for that is pretty straightforward once you start to think on it a bit and compare it to most other industries, or even most positions within gaming. 

You can indulge yourself as say a construction worker, take all your paycheck and spend it on smack. Or you can be a really crappy teacher, and do a half assed job of teaching kids their multiplication tables and maybe fudge some numbers here and there to make it look like you're doing your job. Or maybe you're a line cook and you're just aweful, and you burn things and the chicken comes out dry, and you dn't wash your hands, and sometimes you spit in the customer's food when they send it back. You can tell yourself it's the quality of the meat  and  unrealistic expectations of the customers.

There's nowhere to hide in  gamedev.

At some point you have to face your project's shortcomings. The code will stop compiling, you'll play your project and for a brief moment the rose colored glasses will clear and you will catch a glimpse of what your project is.

There is no hiding in, no bargaining, no subversion that can stave the wolves for any great amount of time. At some point we must assess the fruits of our labor. At some point that mother fuckin' piper is gonna show up and demand his due.

I don't think our combat is ass. I think it's pretty good, it needs polish and endless tweaking, but what doesn't? Nothing out of the ordinary.

But I still gotta pursue this dynamic combat mechanic with the tail whipping, I think it just has too much potential, and after our little blerb above, I think we can achieve it with some pretty basic animation and attack setups with a singular collision component affixed to the tail check on the players inertias at any given time. We'll see how it goes tomorrow barring any unforeseen health issues.

On the upside, I think the combat is more fun than I remembered it!

So what a stupid blog this all was XD!

But I'm glad I wrote it, because it does capture a frame of the insanity of gamedev, that even many years into a project you can have no concept of what your game is or what it needs to be, and you can go down all sorts of rabbit holes.

Look at mario 64. One of the greatest games ever made, and the main buttons causes mario to do a punch. How often do you do punches in mario 64? NEVER! It's a waste of a key button when you're in the default standing state.

Look at Diablo 2. How unfun and stupid is the stamina bar? Still one of the best games ever friggin' made. I'm sure those designers tried all sorts of crazy ideas to utilize that bar, or future plans, and they just never got around to it.

Gamedev is all about having these crazed ideas in our head, that feel right, you THINK they're going to be fun, but it's nothing more than this loose notion. It's intangible, it doesn't actually exist.

I think at the end of the day, growing as a gamedev is coming to realize that fun isn't derived from big fancy ideas, or big dreams in your head, but rather from endless tooling and refinement, and the gutting of ill formed appendages, and the suturing of new ones in a never-ending process of pain and lost hopes.

If we were building this game from scratch, I think maybe we could have done some revoutionary new gesture based combat system that would have been amazing, but we've built so much here and it's kinda neat in it's own right. It's easy to think that vision in your mind is perfect and if only we had gone for that instead of what we DID create, but there's no point in that. 

The grass is always greener in our mind's eye!