Small bit of work

Lots of things going on in my head, and there's a warning siren going off saying "STOP TRYING TO PLAN THINGS OUT IN YOUR HEAD AND JUST DO THE DAMNED WORK, FOOL!"

I'm thinking about how I want the game to run on low tier devices but I want the levels to look really good. I'm thinking about how adding new zones and music is going to greatly increase the download size. I'm really happy that right now the game is only a small 70 meg download and can run on low end phones.

My head spins thinking about how I need to develop proper pipelines and try to make things look good, but also they have to be fun, and how much of the game should I try to make platformer? How much of it should be combat oriented? These aren't yes or no decisions they are multi dimensional and they all play off each other, and the way I build things now will affect how future content is created.

I'm way too much in my head right now. I've had no success thus far, and this rising standard can start to consume you to the point you freeze. EVERYTHING must be better than every game ever made, the level design has to be better, the combat systems have to be better, the pipelines must be better it has to be optimized, it has to be fun, it has to be replayable, it has to be perfectly balanced...

Being a solo dev without a net is really starting to take its tole on me.

BUT! I think the game is becoming decent, and I sense the world is becoming sane again, and maybe if I'm lucky an avenue to salvation will emerge and this hellride will some day be over and all this hard work will ammount to something. I say hard work, but the past couple weeks i've been pretty worthless, need to keep getting exercise and try to get back into a working state of mind. On the bright side, a few weeks of no work feels outlandish and overall work has been going "swimmingly" lately, so I am still grateful for that.

And hey, I got a pain in the butt thing done today...

...that kinda sets me up to create the next zone I'm planning on calling "water fall" which is very fitting as it's going to play around with underwater caves where the player is going to have a lot of vertical play area where they will invariably be falling very often. Lots of platforming with water volumes of positive and negative space, and i'm giong to try out underwater waterfalls to boot that the player can swim up, and have this big sprawling area with lots of fun things to find and I'm thinking some light combat, spiked area to fall into, chests, upgrades, secret shop, intrigue, lots to do! And once the zone is set up I plan on filling it up with some ominous and interesting story elements. So really, i've got all the pain in the arse systems and coded and set up, I just need to add this crap to the game in a way that is hopefully fun. I'm spread so thin...

How big should zones be? How modular should I try to make this crap? Should I make prefabs? SHould I just copy paste stuff all over? I need to stop worrying about this crap, cleanup can always be done later. Sometimes I need to stop over thinking stuff and just go in and make some cool stuff, learn the pipeline and I can fit that pipeline better in the future.