For better or worse

Still strange days. Just a little positive blurb for tonight, could use some positivity, it's taxing fixating the negatives all the time.

We haven't given up yet. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. 

I'm very grateful for how dev has been as of late. I feel like I finally have all the pieces to the puzzle that will make this a game. For the first time. That's a big deal, let's count our blessings.

I'd always thought that gains on games were supposed to be logarithmic. That you start a project it's exciting, you make these big gains, but as you get years into it, the growth slows, and you're having to fight really hard to make it better. That you're in this glass house throwing stones and the whole thing is this horrible mess you just want to be over and done with.

I feel more than ever SeaCrit will be growing by leaps and bounds, that all the foundational work is finally going to come together. Items are going to be coming online, new enemy fish types, new large level sections, randomized level structures.

I am finally knocking on the door of everything coming together, all the hard work and ideas coalescing. 

It's also terrifying... so long with this decline, so long without a win, not even a little one. What if the game just isn't good enough? Or what if the world is just too far gone and we're star crossed?

Let's not expend too much energy stressing such things. Nothing new anyhow, we've been livin' on a prayer for years at this point (don't have the energy to post Bon Jovi today). 

Anxious as ever for this to show value, to get a win of some kind, to find a lifeline". One can dream...

Oh, almost forgot. Plan for today I'm going to try to get some "platforming" sections in. I'm going to try to work on very small level chunks similar to excitebike back in the day, and just have these areas close to the water level populate and make a random "track" of areas for the player to swim through. I want it to be fun to try to breeze through these areas at a really high speed so you snatch pearls and avoid hazards and swim through obstacles. The platforming elements of the game have really been surprisingly me as of late. Did some work last night to normalize jump strength out of water so it should be much easier to tune  quality platforming elements.

I will also be attempting to get some daily tasks done: one item a day, one NPC per day, a new level chunk or two, etc.

Gonna brew a bit of tea and get to work, not feeling myself these days, but let's at least try to get some things done.

Oh and I also almost forgot. On a whim at the end of my dev session I got an entire system in that I've been meaning to on a whim. So now enemies can have their hats shot off with sniper rounds. It takes a few hits and it's really fun. I can easily expand this so enemies can have multiple pieces of armor and I can add other means of sundering the enemy armor. It could end up being a big part of the game. I'm going to make a note of this.

I'm happy that this many years into dev, i've developed practices and pipelines such that I can add this sort of overarching, powerful new systems that add a lot of value to the game on a whim. I'm very happy with the foundation i've fostered over the years. We've learned how to sorta structure things such that the game can become more and more fun without too much headache.

I hate to admit it, but a lot of that is due to Unity's amazing architecture. The open and easy to use setups allow me to do these sort of rapid implementations, just wish the company was't in such a terrible state of decline.

Yap yap yap, time for me to grab some caffeine and get to it. I don't have much in the tank tonight but let's get this sucker lurching forward. Eery day makes a difference.