Dev's a long song

I'm being heavy handed with the Tull as of late... TOO BAD I'm not changing the channel.

Third day of being back to work and sorting things out on the project, it's just starting to feel like a routine again. Not easy, but not impossible either. There is so much to do, every single thing needs a lot of work. Force values for many attacks are way off because the system got revamped recently. Combat is feeling really floaty, even for me and I've been playing the game for years at this point. The attacks all need tuning to make them interesting and viable. Enemies behaviors need finagling, enemy spawn locatoins need to be set up, level content needs to be created. I mean... I could go on, but it's easy to get in your head and think of the sheer volume of things that need doing. But progress is happening and the game feels to be taking shape. After all the many years of failure I kinda know what to do, but more importantly what not to do. I will be making seacrit, the side scrolling beat 'em up with itemization. Not the platformer, not the puzzle game, not the adventure game. Just quality combat, decently made levels, and refined progression mechanics. That is the plan.

Gosh what to do in the short term? 

I'm feeling a little off today, I've been focusing too much on work and didn't get any exersize in the past couple days, so I'm leading things off with a little cardio before work. I think I'm going to focus on getting passes done on enemy spawn systems, both the passive spawns per zone as well as arranging spawners that can spawn more interesting fish with powerups and stuff like that. I also want to play with the idea of spawners that can unleash waves of enemies, preferably in a singular direction. I just think it'd be fun to mow down large flocks of fish with charged up power attacks. I also need to do LOTS of tuning to the various weapons and armors and item mods. It's endless.

GOOD NEWS THOUGH! All this work seems to finally be coming together. There's a big moment in your game, where for the longest time you add things and they make your game WORSE. You have this amalgamation of crap that isn't as good as say Pong, because the peices don't fit together and they're not polished. Something brings the experience down, a poorly tuned item, a crappy designed difficulty spike in a zone spawn or a single enemy attack, some clunky dialogue elements. There are a billion different things making your game worse and all you can do is isolate them one at a time and fix them. But there comes a point where all the things that make your game actually start to make it BETTER. Where it shows PROMISE. SeaCrit will not be 100% in a week, or two weeks. But I do believe it will be showing it's promise in the very near future, and for that I am grateful and excited. So much to do... 

That's just the gameplay, I spent a very small amount of time thinking about how I'm going to revamp the story elements. Notice above I did not say that SeaCrit is a great mystery, or story driven experience. To that end I will be removing a great deal of the "fluff" I think. Less NPC's, less dialogue, what will be in there will be quality over quantity.

How many dialogue boxes do you get in mega man? How many dialogue boxes do you get in Mario. NOT MANY! SeaCrit is meant to be pick up and play. "HEY THE WORLD IS IN DANGER SAVE US YOU FOOL!". I think I'm going to roll with the notion of the player being a "light bringer" in a world of darkness. Time old tradition since the old days of final fantasy, I still remember how mind blowing that game was when I was like 7 years old, having a beat up Nintendo power that walked me through beating the thing, fighting Chaos and traveling through time. Reminiscing about this... I come to realize that maybe story is more important than I give it credit for. I may have to spend a little bit more time coming up with some good stuff. I need to stop myself from going down rabbit holes of thinking of fun little cutscenes and animations I could do to start developing a story.

It's times like this I miss not being in contact with old friends these days, would be fun to brainstorm this stuff, but I'm just a stubborn old man on an island these days. Anyway, less Dr. Seuss rhyming, going to try to develop a solid little story with just the right amount of intrigue and personality and fun stuffs. I'm leaning towards just nuking everything and starting with a clean slate with NPC's and figuring out what works best with a fresh canvas. What's the best font? What's the best way to arrange the talking fish on screen? I blather so much but there is also so much to think about and refactor. 

I think I'm going to use Pokémon as much model to develop the story, I think my game shares a lot of the same cutesy aesthetic at the start, so it should be able to resonate with a large # of gamers if I talk about SKULLS, and how you gotta...

COLLECT THEM ALL!!

EDIT: Took a mulligan yesterday, wasn't sleeping well and feeling off. No more coffee at these volumes. Lots of shit to deal with in real life these days, same old shit. But looking forward to getting more work done soon when it's over.

/edit