Okay, so let's talk design. The original pitch for Kaiju Fishing was Wind Waker meets Animal Crossing, oh yeah and giant freaking monsters. Well Mutant has shipped games, but nothing that was every really narrative heavy (personally I fall on the mechanics side of the story vs mechanics designer debate). So as we started production the story was always put off to the side and kinda hand waved in a “we’ll get to implementing it later” type way. This isn’t to say that there isn’t/won’t be a story in Kaiju Fishing, just that our approach to building was to put it on the back burner. Well the rubber is meeting the road now as we’ve had to restructure the studio, and well, we’ve got 2+ experienced programmers, but no writers, so obviously something’s gotta give. What we’ve learned so far from attempting a game with a heavy narrative is that it’s much more resource intensive (basically we need more people working on the game, and that’s just not feasible right now). So the narrative has be scaled down.
We’ve got a lot of gameplay systems implemented so far (Small & Med sized fishing, Kaiju Fights, Bait Crafting, Collecting…) but if we were to lose the narrative focus, that means that there really wasn’t a reason for you (our players) to go fishing. Basically the narrative was going to be the glue that binds the game together, and with our new reduced focus on narrative that means something has to take its place. After a bit of brainstorming we think we’ve hit on a system that you’ll like.
Welcome to Upgrade city. Our new direction takes us back towards something Mutant is very familiar with: Upgrading (for you I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gambling fans, how fun was it upgrading your trash can to a shiny trash can! Then you got to put a hat on your shiny trash can!! Then you got to put a shiny hat on your shiny trash can!!!) Except now you’re going to be upgrading something that affects gameplay (sorry I Can’t Believe It’s Not Gambling marketing team): your Boat.
We’ve already whipped up design docs, and even have a prototype done. I would go into specifics about all the cool upgrades we’re working on, but it’s early yet, and I’d hate for anyone to get their heart set on one, only for us to find that it doesn’t work for our design. So I’ll leave that for another day.
So yeah, that’s the news. Kaiju Fishing is going to be much more mechanics based, and you’re going to be choosing to upgrade your boat with a wide variety of cool attachments (maybe even upgrading your boat to hold even more cool attachments).