Form Follows Flotsam
I changed the title from 'Form Follows FlapJack" to form follows flotsam, because it just sounds so much better and fits so well. We must make mistakes and fall to ruin before we eventualy rebuild ourselves. But I gotta write this out because the rest of the post relies on the original title :P
Form follows function, but I couldn’t help but say “Form Follows FlapJack”, because once upon a time that was this games name! My idea was that fish could mix and match, essentially stealing the fins of “flaps” of other fish…
And ultimately I abandoned these ideas because the pipeline just felt a bit restrictive and it made more sense to create polished, cohesive fish assets that equip items instead. In essence…
FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION!
This is such a simple concept, how did this industry lose sight of the absolute core tennent of game design!?
You can’t build a game solely around monetization strategies, or genre hybrids, or simply expect raw ideas to do the heavy lifting.
GREAT, Good, and even just passable games must do everything in their power to even release at the end of their development. Ever single day, every single dev session should be filled with doubt, filled with curiosity for how we can distill development, “How do we kill two birds with one stone? These systems are similar how do we consolidate them, and in doing so pave the way for even more content that expands on these working systems? How do we make less content more modular and reusable, but BETTER!
This is the absolute FOUNDATION of gamedev. RECURSION!
Why did games use blocks so much back in the day? I want you to really think about that. Why did they do that. See if you can come up with some ideas before I unload my own!
BECAUSE THEY FUCKING WORK THAT’S WHY. For a multitude of reasons BLOCKS are friggin’ amazing. We even name our most important phases of development after them. “White box” levels. “Block it in”.
Blocks are simple, they behave well in terms of performance, they are perfect when it comes to collisions, EVERYTHING about blocks is perfectly suited to vidoe games. They are very easy to stack in binary volumes of matrices as they exist in worlds in randomized grid blockouts. They are easy to texture. Just everything about blocks is AMAZING. I put some destructable blocks in my game and I’m so happy I did because you put them in your game and IMMEDIATELY your mind just imagines all the cool things you can build with them. With no overhead, no crazy edge cases that they will create. They are the perfect “BUILDING BLOCK”! There it is again!
No one ever says, “SPHERE OUT THIS AREA!” Because spheres are BULLSHIT! I’m just kidding, I use my spheres in my game than boxes XD, I’m just fuckin’ around.
Can I just say how nice it is to have the burnout cycled out and feel as though we are compelled once again to work!?
And sometimes you need a little break, because you need your brain fully unclogged to perceive best the issues facing the game, BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, you need 100% brainpower and commitment, and passion to want to push forward with the best ideas!
And I just had some revelations the past hour that have me really excited about moving forward and I wanna try to jot them down here before I forget!
The main one plays into the notion of content being a prison. We create too much “stuff” and all that stuff gets in the way of other stuff.
One thing that blows my mind is how many game developers invalidate their own content. This is especially true in idle games. Devs will create whole sets of armor and loot and unique items, or skills and skill trees, and they will all take up room in development, and they will take up the player’s attention, and it’s all just sitting there and ages and gets moldy and every year devs spend time to invalidate their own content and make it WORSE! It drives me crazy and no one ever talks about this practice. It’s just seen as normal.
I have absolutely the opposite mentality in SeaCrit. I want every item, every bonus, every attack to have purpose, to be AWESOME at least some of the time to most anyone who plays the game. Like you may be the sort of person who likes melee and getting into the thick of things, but I’m going to add sniper rifles just to spite you that will give you permanent melee bonuses for every enemy you kill with critical head shots. (Speaking of I need to add this to the game! Should be easy just need to do a check on the position of the projectile hit relative to the fish’s size and head bone location, but are head shot’s really something we want to add to a game with fish who’s heads are 50 FRIGGIN PERCENT OF THEIR ENTIRE FRIGGIN’ BODIES!? I dunno I gotta think on it. What were we talking about again?
Well the #1 thought I had was we need to DISTILL things down. We neex to hyper focus on just a few key fish and as I’ve blathered about before, we gotta “Find our Goomba”. It’s funny yesterday we ended up implementing the system I said we shouldn’t without even realizing it in a round about way.
I have these gobblefish and they’re small and unassuming and don’t have much gameplay associated with them, and I wanted them to be able to be spawned in larger #’s, but if each and every one of them gave a bonus it would be overpowered, and muddy the bonus system, so i came up with this system that spawns generic, colorless gobble fish, but every X fish it will spawn one that will give you a bonus, and in my fish materials I have 2 colors you can assign, so the first color defines the bonus family it belongsd to. Green is defense related for example, red is damage, blue is speed. Yellow economy. And from there each bonus has a unique color, so the LIFE bonus might have a turquoise color, and when the gobble fish spawns that gives the life bonus, it’s slightly larger than the innocuous gobblefish and it has bright vivid colors as well. And after I got this up and running which only took lik half an hour, I’m kinda awe struck how much faster and easily I implement this stuff any more, I realized, HOT DAMN we just added that system I wrote a blog post on last month why this was a bad idea!
But it works because gobble fish aren’t combat oriented fish. But now that the system is in and working I might extend this logic to other fish!
What’s neat is these systems create a framework and a design methodology that I’m going to utlize moving forewsrad. I feel as though the design of SeaCrit is developing its “Framework”, I’m “BLOCKING OUT” the game design and gameplay systems that will define the rest of the game.
So after all these yeras of trying what DOESN’T WORK, I feel as though now I am effortlessly just stumbling into what DOES WORK! And the only reason I feel this confident and empowered to move forward so quickly with such working results in such a short period of time, was all the years and years of mistakes and trying new things while building a solid and modular core!
The most important thing of the past 8 years was endlessly going through the motions, endlessly waxing off and waxing on, and having NO ONE to point the blame at, having no fallback, having no excuses! This project rests on our fucking shouldrs, we execute, or we don’t. That fucking simple.
We’re not special, we’re not some uber genius. We’re just a fucktard with a spare chromosome who’s stupid enough to smash their head against the wall harder than all the candy ass mother fuckers around us.
So anyway, the move going forward is to create color things of enemies zone to zone. The Shiummering shallows will have neutral silvery, shiny desaturated color for the main fish, UNLESS they give some special bonus, otherwise they will give the most generic bonus of all “Life” which will increment their health by 1 or more depending on the STR of the fish.
So each zone will have a VERY distinct THEME. A small handful of fish will define the zone, and they will harmonize in color like maybe yellow fish that populate a sickly looking green zone, and these fish will all use poisonous clouds the slow the player, or the sharks will infect the player with poison bites that reduce their healing.
And my thought is each zone will have its own unique challenges, but also offer UNIQUE REWARDS! So only certain bonuses will be found in the poison area, and certain rare items and item prefixes and suffixes, and these items and bonuses will supplement specific other bonuses found in other BIOMS! HOLY SHIT THIS SOUNDS AWESOME. I kinda had these Ideas so very long ago, but dev is a long song and sometimes you forget the tune along the way. And that’s a good thing, because you need to commit fully just very tiny slices of your game at times.
So the idea is, that as the players master SeaCrit, it sorta has the same strategy as Texas Holdem. You’re dealt your random hand, but you have several chances to bet on growing as strong as powerful, and if you play your cards right, you can maximize the random elements, and grow as strong as possible to defeat some boss in an even higher tier than you’ve done before, or survive in Zone Y for longer than you’ve ever done as the difficulty ramps up, and in the future I want these goals to reward some kind of permanent resource the player can spend to further customize their play and improve themselves so they can go even further and further into the game, get more unique items and bonuses and encounter new and rare challenges.
Whew, if anyone here finds all this talk crazy considering how shallow the game is, I don’t blame you… but all these years as I’ve blathered blog after blog, I have wisely attempted to resist the fools gold of content that has poisoned most other studios.
So many dev teams indulge in size and building up their game, and creating the prison that will destroy themselves with headcounts and unproven content, and endless mediocre bullshit.
And I’m just over here like, “How can I just make one fish and make it both the main eney and also the first boss in the first zone, and we’lll just polish the ever living shit out of it with a single spherical rock accounting for 90% of the level design XD.
Gamedev is weird. And more than ever I’m happy to be a sole dip shit floundering around in the this puddle of my own making… that sounded horrible XD.
So plan for today! I wanna focus on just getting two fish in the game and I wantto polish the EVER LOVING SHIT out of them. I want their abilities perfectly tuned, and I want to really figure out how much danger should be derived from their rare attack cycles, how much randomness should exist between the two, or if it should only be every X attacks that triggers said heavy attacks. I’ll likely make it just every X attacks with a bool to randomize it so it requires one less or more to reach said mega attack, and then in the variant scriptable object we can set how many attack cycles are required, and really hard fish may only require 1 or 2 normal attack cycles before they whip out their truly punishes attacks that are hard to evade and do substantial damage.
I really like the idea of modularizing my fish, because it allows me to scale my game in so many neat ways. And if I can make our 1 enemy, our “GOOMBA” robust, AND WE HAVE M*THER FUCKERS, then everything else just falls into place…. LIKE A BLOCK!
That’s essentially what we have done without realizing it, is we have white boxed our entire gameplay loop, and at the very heart of it, is the building block of our goomba. We can scale a fish down in its variant loadout, give it a bonus, and now it’s an inconsequential fish you just gobble up by running into it. OR! We pump up the fish scale on that variant, we give its hefty bone a high value so it’s big and puffed up and intimidating, we give it items that instantly affix themselves perfectly to the body, head and hands, we give it a special ability loadout and BOOM! We got ourselves a boss! And if we really polish the ever living crap out of it, then ALL of our content is good, and we set the standard for future content!
I want you guys ot think about this, REALLY THINK ABOUT THIS AND INTERNALIZE THIS.
Fuckin’ MARIO, for the past FORTY FUCKING YEARS, has had one fucking core enemy type, the GAHDAMN GOOMBA, or maybe you prefer the KOOPA TROOPA (I heard that in michael jackson’s voice how he says “Shooka chooka” and I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but mario brothers just BLEEDS quality.
Ok, so to all the devs out there that don’t know what they’re doing and they think they’re going to make the next big hit because their enemies are going to have advanced attack systems and complex engagements and all this stupid fucking horse shit that just leads to bugs and frustrated players…
THE GOOMBAS IN SUPER MARIO BROTEHRS HAVEN’T CHANGED IN FORTY FUCKIKNG YEARS. THEY ARE JUST DIP SHITS THAT PACE ABOUT THAT MARIO CAN JUMP ON , SMOOSH, AND BOUNCE THE HELL OFF OF, THAT’S IT! The ONLY design decisions surrounding the core enemies in super mario brothers is, HOW DO WE MAKE IT FUN TO KILL THESE POOR SONS OF BITCHES. THEY ARE DESIGNED FOR PAIN, THEY ARE DESIGNED FOR THE PLAYER TO ENJOY THEIR MURDER!
And I actually need to add this to my story doc because this perfectly fits the self aware fish that are emerging in SeaCrit, but that’s a story for another time! Or maybe we’ll just keep all this close to our vest…
So anyway, point is. Our industry has gotten so far removed from just base lessons of gamedev, they are so far removed from making tiny little projects and seeing any minimal system to complesion and learning lessons along the way, that we’ve constructed this entire empire of entitled mama jamma’s top to bottom that are all playing house, they were all faking it till they made it, and most all of them hired because they were harmless and wouldn’t call any of the bullshit out.
And now the walls are burning.

Realy quick before I forget I forgot that while watching those old videos It dawned on me how much these terrains REALLY brought the room together with the intermixed ground types, and it looked really bland just being sand, so I whipped up some shader magic really quick and added the rocks and dirt back in and I think it looks great! Like this looks fully realized again, and wihle it's looked good in the past, this is VERY optimized! So we have a good looking game again that also RUNS LIKE GREASED LIGHTNING ON POTATOES!
Rofl, I wish I still had a bit of savings like back in the day, I would commission an artist to create a "Seahorse" but it would be a unicorn and it would just fit so perfectly in this damn ranbow candy ass looking zone. I'm REALLY digging how the visuals are all coming together, and I like the this blurry nature of hte background and foreground becaue it means in the future I can throw all kinds of crappy assets in there and no one will even know because they're all smudged the heck out!
Anyhow, slept kinda shit, so even though this blog is all over the place and might even hold some areas I totally forgot to write about i'm just goign to upload it rough and raw and we'll come back later likely tomorrow and polish it up. It's funny how gamedev and the pipelines of nothing ever being done kinda seeps into how you attack most everything in your life.
Super stoked to be BACK IN THE GAME! It feels so good to be excited to work again, and know that we are on the threshold of this all coming together. For AGES we have worked in the dark and system after system, never building up the game and tyring ot show the potential. We have kept our SeaCrit. We have focused on what matters while the rest of this industry indulged themselves.
ROFL, I was just thinking to myself, "ok so we just have to work one wish fish, well maybe two fish, and then the rest of the ryhme finished in my head, "One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish." and that's kinda funny, because the art style of seacrit I've always felt was akin to Dr. Suess books. We have focused on rich colors, simply shapes, and complimented it with goofy and educational bits of dialogue.
So maybe to fit with that line, we'll focus on just damage fish and speed fish for zone one, as those fish are damage and speed oriented, and we were planning on working on just two fish!
One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. That is my motto right now. Simple, concise, and it rhymes. That is a great summation of great gamedev!
"PEOPLE AIN'T EXACTLY SWELLING UP WITH PRIDE ON ACCOUNT OF YOU FLIPPIN' FLAP JACK!"
Tim Meadows is underrated as a supporting actor XD
YOU SHUT UP WOMAN YOU AIN'T GONNA RUINE THIS FOR ME!
I JUST WANNA MAKE LIQUOR!
You know what I fucking love? This is our first game, we had no idea WTF we were doing when we started, we had no backing, we had no fucking help in this stupid world, and while all the other mother fuckers were given every advantage, had their asses wiped every step of the way, we're trudging towards alpha and CONFIDENT AS SHIT!
THE GAME IS KICKIN' ASS!
Given the chance, we would all want it that way. We would all want the money, we would all want others to do the hard stuff for us, we would all want to just hire armies of people and like to think that our empire is so wonderous and great.
It absolutely blows my mind how fragile our society is. How people can be entrusted with the keys to the kingdom generation after generation and have NO FUCKING IDEA WTF they are doing on an absolute FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL.
I mean, in a certain light, yay, I guess we have no competition in the west, but on the other hand, our children are growing up in a hellscape of human wreckage and we are all fast approaching a world of techno horrors the likes of which we are totally unprepared for.
We didn't ask for this hard road, we didn't plan to be having to handle so much shit, but after all this pain and suffering and outcasting, I truly believe it was these very things that empowered us, gave us an edge, and we have been using that edge to chisel and refine this game in ways the big studios are compltely incapable of.
And I do actually want it that way. Fuck 'em. Bunch of candy ass, entitled, lazy, shit heads who never attepted a damn thing in their lives who look down from their high towers... which are now falling into the swamp, and are on fire.
AM I CRAZY OR DOES THE END OF THIS SONG SOUND LIKE IT'S OUT OF ZELDA 2 or maybe Castlevania?
Edit: This blog is a little heavy already but I just wanted to jot down some thoughts.
There are many things that I want to try to fix with how we balance SeaCrit. And one of those being that numbers become kind of irrelevant in most RPGs. Why do we scale them so drastically?
I want SeaCrit to have very nice, round numbers, so i'm going to try to come up with some guide points early on that i'll try to balance the game around.
So the player is going to start with a really paltry 10 life and enemies are going to do just 1 damage per hit. I really like this, we're coming out really strong and making a statement with our systems, the game is explicit and it doesn't fuck around and take numeric systems for granted. Numbers MEAN something.
Beyond this, how many games are eveven capable of properly tuning their content in any given area because of how out of whack all their systems get!? If you're in some part of your game, and you need to inflict the player with damage from a spike, should you do 4 damage, or 400 damage? Things spiral WAY out of control.
And the way our bonuses work, I want there to be interplay with numeric values and bonuses that add singular points to things to remain valid into the very late stages of the game.
Too often games just take it for granted that +80% damage is OBVEIOUSLY better than any flat damage add, and they pad their games with ENDLESS noise on gear, and at the end of the day everything is the ILLUSION of choice. The illusion of depth, the illusion of some kind of ineresting talent and gear setup. Everything is meticulously upkept to be a specific level of power. And this is admitedly very important for games with permanent look and talents!
But we don't have that on SeaCrit! Because we we're aiming for a bite sized chunk of a single player game akin to a session of dota. Something that ranges maybe from 10 to 40 minutes is what i'm hoping for, with very long term progress that pulls players back time and again.
This might be the biggest SEACRIT of all surrounding the game. Is that we're not trying to make this simple beat 'em up. Our ambitions are to make the greatest bonus system/ action game hybrid of all time. Are these goals totally rediculous? I mean probably. But it's like I say, SHOOT FOR THE MOON! WHY THE HECK NOT!
This wasn't always our goal, but over all these years we kinda just got bored of the game as is and just started adding more and more stuff, and next thing I know I've got this fully online item and bonus system with revolutionary implementation and over the years I'm able to add friggin' anything I want because i've been through the motions over and over and over again! And we've already got some really neat item destruction mechanics and neet charge setups.
Whew, I sound like a broken record, but I don't think we're getting work done today, didn't sleep well and we gotta be in top form to push through on the next couple days, I want BIG days where we get shittons done and crush forweard. I want to get bosses online, and get all the main fish and playable areas done in just a couple sessions, and I know we can, we just gotta be rested and feeling well. I just get today off though because it is time to get back to it long term.
I indulged games a bit hard the past month, and I am banning myself from playing them any more. No more farting around not getting work done and gaming, I kinda let it slide for a little bit because for the past few years we've barely gamed at all and been through enough shit and eh, sometimes u just gotta enjoy yourself, not like I was in a state I could get work done anyway.
What a REALLY strange moment in this games developement. We will soon learn if we were bathshit crazy or not, or if all these systems that we hope are nearly ready to come online do indeed shine. And then what? I DO NOT EVEN THINK about that. Because it's actually a pretty shitty world out there.
But what choice do we have but to push forward despite it all?
So anyway, while cookin' it up I watched a different video, but this one followed it, and I love watching videos like this, and it just goes to show how similar our own experiences are, and how we are all connected to the world in the same ways. The winners and the losers, we all engage with the same systems, the same equipment, the same activities and the judgements. Someone just happened to have a name that someone really liked, or maybe they liked the smile of a background singer that would never be seen.
Right place and right time, if you're amenable to the era you were born in, your family connections, your friends or if you're a bit of a loner or a social butterfly. There are era's where giving a damn is terribly important, there are eras where just letting is slider is the best way to be. It's all so fascinating, and there is no black and white in any given era. We can whine about what's fair, and what's right and what's wrong, but we have to realize we have our own blinders, we have our own disonances that frames reality in a way in service to what we want.
It's funny, time and again we almost always view reality in a way that we think the right and just way for maximum prosperity for all JUST SO HAPPENS to be what's right for us. That's a little funny isn't it? I mean I'm sure there are some great wonderously kind and sacrificial people out there that labor and fight for what's best for others, but unfortunately for us all, this cruel, fickle world of in crowd jokers and fakes and liars don't want to relenquish that power, they don't want to relenquish that control, EVEN IF IT IS ULTIMATELY BETTER FOR THEM! Because contentment is not having what you need. If that's all we silly monkeys desired, we'd all be content and happy in this modern era.
To most, happiness is having more than the poor son of a bitch across the street.
What are we doing blathering about this crap! This is way too late in this blog to be going on tangents. We're really having trouble holding our yapper shut like the old days of this blog.
Anyway, it's such a strange and unexamined world to me. It will never cease to amaze me just how much insanity and lies and half truths go on totally unexamined in absolutely ever facet of our lives. It's like we all live in our own reality of different proportions of lies and truths and beliefs about others, and some people know the truth about this or that, and they don't know the full truth of these other things. And the truly crazy thing, is we cannot even understand the truth of ourselves. We are constantly letting ourselves down, or suprrising outselves at other times!
It's been a long strage trip so far, but I can't say it hasn't been interesting! Even in this dark, quite cave at 5 in the morning in the dead of night working on this silly fish game and tending to this self satisfying blog, I'm actually rather excited as of late!
WE AIN'T OUT DIS' BITCH JUST YET!
Get SeaCrit
SeaCrit
Deceptively Deep!
Status | In development |
Author | illtemperedtuna |
Genre | Action, Role Playing, Shooter |
Tags | Beat 'em up, Casual, Indie, Roguelike, Roguelite, Side Scroller, Singleplayer |
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