🎣⚓ ALL FISHERMEN ABOARD!!! ⚓🎣

Back on deck and ready to cast off — welcome to another devlog from the crew behind our little fishy adventure! This week’s journey has seen us casting our lines ever so deeper and with some hefty hauls to show for it!

We've been hard at work in the art department, reeling in visual updates for our fishing minigames — from lures to line tension, it's starting to look as good as it feels to play! The waters of animation and movement have been flowing smoother too, as we've continued tweaking and polishing to bring more life and fluidity to our game.

In further exciting news — our core game loop is now fully up and swimming! From casting your line to hauling in your catch, everything's finally flowing together like a well-timed tide. We’ve also kept busy refining the overall look of our game to bring more life and mood to our little patch of sea.

All in all, smooth currents ahead and plenty of fish in the sea!

Now then, let’s see what kind of treasures we’ve dredged up this week! 🐟💡

Art

I caught a sea bass- I mean UI updates!

This week we made the UI for the moving bar minigame, the ending screen, character select screen and worked on the UI for when a player wins a match and takes home the big fat W! As well as, worked on updating the 2D art for our minigames! (more on this until-now elusive catch in a moment). The game now has screens for each stage from start to finish.

We have also updated the art for, and are working on implementing, a screen explaining the game's controls!

Reel! It! In!

Mini games! We worked very hard over this past week on making 2D art for each fishing game. Our artists went through the design process, to making and coloring the art and lastly exporting it as sprites for our programmers to use in the game itself. No more placeholder graphics, here come our finished mini games for all fishermen to try their skill (or luck) at!

First up is the mini game with a filling up bar that needs to be stopped at the right moment for a fish to end up on the hook!

Next came the button mashing minigame where our fishermen not so gently help the fish along to the path onto a hook's bait!

 And last but not least as far as mini games and a little bit of a UI crossover go, we created several images for different buttons that will be used in both our button sequence mini game and as an indicator that a player is able to interact with a fishing spot or the drop off point.

Yeeeeees, it's all coming together :3

This week we also made progress on the overall look and feel of the main level, the colors, shaders and meshes are all coming together. Now that all that is there we can start moving more towards the player experience, for example creating / implementing the sounds and vfx parts that give the player their feedback during the playing.

Coding

Ranking up animation!

This week we continued working on animations and implemented all of them! We made a better workflow for any future updates. We implemented state machine, which allows to coherently switch between different states, which is incredibly useful for state-specific behavior and animations. We also fixed several movement issues and made character rotate faster. Finally dashing mechanic is there as well, but now with cooldown! And additionally you can now also see a fishing line when fishing huraaaaah!

It has come full circle 

We can now proudly announce that the game loop is finalized, allowing our players to fully start the game, fight for victory, and then dive into the fishing battle once again. With the addition of ending screen and options to replay or quit the game it is now possible. We also implemented a few gameplay tweaks, making more fishing spots and making them limited in use, deactivating it after a few uses, before another one is popping up to take its place. We also can announce the completion of the basic item spawner system, that enhances the gameplay by adding the possibility for the players to get the power ups that can help them get even more fish!

It's all coming back to me nooow

This week we refactored code to implement correct coding conventions. And to make sure we do things the right way. We also updated our mini games to implement the correct assets to make everything look more vibrant and bring those closer to their finished state.

Future plans!!

• Updating the HUD to show fish caught and points
• Implementing sound
• Adding RFX
• Further adding to set-dressing

With steady hands and a full net, until next time fellow fishermen!