Brief Blather

I'm down a lot of rabbit holes right now, i'm revamping AI, i'm rescaling everything, i'm bringing enemies online, I'm developing new combat mechanics, I'm tuning items, I'm building the game in so many directions all at once. 

There's no escaping this to some degree, but I'm spread so thin I really do need to focus and check some things off the list.

Lots of little things have been bothering me for a while, wave swimming accumulates too fast, and often times it takes large sweeping movements a a positive generator which causes you to wave swim when you don't want to. I need to look into that. Wave swim also doesn't fade away fast enough and tends to linger at low values. Just a few examples. I want to make a list of all these little things and fix them. I want to get the new smash dash locked in in a good state.

But here's the rub. I can either finish up smashdash and be done with it... OR I can develop its damage delivery system in a way that it becomes very useful in the future, or hell I just had a thought, the current way I do checks to see if enemies should be hit by colliders is terrible and I could refactor the entire system. Eh, both systems have pluses and minuses.

I think I'm going to develop a new single frame collision check for the smash dash, so when you smash into an enemy it checks that area for a single frame, and instantly disables itself, dealing its damage and knockback to all enemies in the area.

This opens the door to new attacks and abilities in the future. Floating mines, toxic aoe clouds, all sorts of stuff become possible as I simplify revamp, and expand on damage delivery mechanics.

Feeling a little off today, maybe take my first mulligan in a LONG time. I could use a little time to just relax and take it easy. I've had some INSANELY good progress this month, at some point you gotta just allow your time to not think about the project and recover mentally.

I tried Halls of Torment recently and had a good time. Sometimes I wish i'd startedt his project later because I really want to make one of these RPG arena games, but SeaCrit is pretty close. Who knows maybe I'll think about feature creeping some mechanics from these games into the game, increase spawn rates over time, new wave spawns at specific minute marks, WHO KNOWS!?

TONS to do in the meantime just getting core systems in that are unfinished.

If I wasn't going to get dev done today, figured I'd at least make a little blog and organize my plans. So the plan is to make plans! Figure out what needs fixing and polishing on the recent systems and get those in.

I'm weary of developing things in a way that they invite more feature creep, but I do want to work on this game and make it better, that's the dream. That it becomes good and has a long, fruitful lifespan, so if it means a few extra days refactoring things to be good, so be it. What's a few extra days at this point? The past few years weren't a waste of time, they were a wax on wax off exercise. I kinda feel like I know what i'm doing at this point, anything I want to do in Unity i'm able to pull it off. And now I look back at old code as these terrible shackles that prevent all the cool things I want this game to do.

Before I built out the fish and the levels and Items, I want a solid foundation, and we're getting close. Lots of heavy revisions have been going on, every week a bit more of the tangled fish wire is removed and it becomes easier and easier to make quality content. Things are coming together! Gotta be patient.

(I could have linked patience by Guns N' Roses again, BUT SURPRISE! IT'S THE F*CKING  MOODY BLUES)

Some quick post blather blather. I'm finding myself feature creeping hard. If I add the new dynamic damage delivery system, it would be so easy to add new skills. Firewalls, poison clouds, trails that damage enemies that swim in it. This opens the door to so many neat potential attacks.

Is it feature creep to add core things that will make the game better?

Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever finish the game. But if I'm thinking of really neat things that build on existing systems, I don't reallly thinkn that's feature creep, that's just making the game!

We fixate so much on finishing, we worry so much about going rabbit holes, that sometimes I think we stop ourselves from making the game as good as it can be.

If it makes the game better and builds on what your game is and the core experience, it's not feature creep!

Starting to feel a bit better, might get some work done today.