Hello adventurers! 👋
Today, we have an exciting news update to bring you about Nice Day for Fishing's upcoming Content Update in the form of our second Dev Log!
ICYMI: In August, we announced that a FREE Content Update would be arriving soon to Nice Day for Fishing! We're pleased to announce that this Content Update is nearing completion, and today, we'd like to share more details about some of the key features of our upcoming update.
Our Upcoming Content Update will bring:
🎃 Seasonal Events
The first addition that we’re excited to bring to you is Seasonal Events, a no-brainer for us, adding variety to Nice Day for Fishing! We’ve had the concept for this since 2022, but prioritised polish at launch over implementing this new feature. We began working on this early this summer, so we could have this ready across launched platforms for both Halloween and Christmas!
Our three Seasonal Events will be timed events that change the appearance of Honeywood, running for around two to four weeks each, around Halloween, Christmas, and Easter! Overall, our aim with Seasonal Events is to create more humorous moments that make it worthwhile revisiting Nice Day for Fishing, even if you have already completed our game, whilst also not disrupting the usual flow of the game if a player picks up Nice Day for Fishing for the first time during a Seasonal Event.
At early stages of planning for the Content Update, we decided we wanted this feature to be more than just a festive reskin of Honeywood and provide you with a task to achieve during the Seasonal Events. We first thought about specific seasonal quests. Then this sparked an idea of a seasonal NPC that sells season-specific items, away from the game's normal Gold currency, and using a seasonal currency instead! This instantly felt like the right call, so we got to work.
During all Seasonal Events, we’ve added a Goblin Shop, which will sell unique seasonal items obtained with a seasonal-specific currency! René (the Creative Head behind Nice Day for Fishing) had the spontaneous idea of having the lousy goblin dressed to match the season run the shop, which we loved!
Every season requires you to obtain seasonal currency, each in a varied way…
During Halloween, lanterns will be floating around the map, some of which require you to progress further in the game to obtain. With lanterns, you can purchase items like a Bat-Rod, a Franken-monster Mask, and more.
During Christmas, festive presents need to be dredged from the sea like treasure chests. With presents, you can obtain items like the Sugar Cane Rod, a Snowman Sail, and more.
During Easter, you guessed it, you’ll be collecting Easter Eggs spread across the world! Eggs will allow you to purchase the Carrot Rod, a Bunny Hat and more.
For the seasons, the first steps were easy. For Halloween, we implemented the pumpkins and a dark post-processing effect. For Christmas, we added a snow particle effect and snow on the ground. We then needed to evaluate what was possible to make the game look as much like winter as possible, without breaking the game and not rewriting the entire code for parallax scrolling!
Once we’d done our thorough checks, we added small changes to round off the events. This included tweaks to Honeywood’s backgrounds, having snowy mountain tops and treetops during winter, and extra colourful trees in spring for Easter!
🐟 Elite Enemies
We’re extremely excited to bring you tougher versions of enemies in our upcoming Content Update, which we’ve named Elite Enemies. Elites are new, tougher enemies that, depending on your level or gear, can feel harder to take down or even feel like a mini-boss!
The concept of Elites has been in our minds for years; however, we never had a concise idea of how to best implement them. When developing this Content Update, we knew we didn’t want players to defeat Elite Enemies and sell them for our normal Gold currency.
Instead, Konrad, our CEO, had the idea to combine two Update features together, which we loved! We’ve linked defeating Elites to purchasing Sails with attributes from the new sail shop, another new feature which we’ll cover later in this post. When defeating Elites, you’ll gain a separate currency named Shady Scales, which can then be used to purchase Sails. By doing so, we created a new gameplay loop and closed it up through the two new features!
Elites will be easily recognisable, as they are much larger and meaner than the original fish in 1.0. At first, we planned to reuse existing 2D artworks and scale them up of the elite enemies, which would have worked… fine! But in July, René said, “I don’t like that. I’ve prepared something. Just look at it”. We looked at René’s fresh, new version of the Elite Common Carp that looked not just bigger… but suuuuper mean. He showed the Elite Pistol Fish looking like a Shotgun Fish. In all honesty, it just looked so cool; we all knew we needed to go that extra mile with Elite Enemies.
For this Content Update, we’ve created 60 new enemies, all of whom are Elites. This doubles the number of enemies in the game! Each Elite Enemy is unique, and once you’ve caught them, the Elite won’t appear again. Also, we’ve made an addition to Thidon’s statue, which will now show the elites that you have already caught!
Some Elites look meaner than the original version and some are more funnier versions, like the Unicod becomes a Duocod. Others are totally different, like the Magic Carp that somehow has evolved into a dragon… huh! We’re thrilled with how this feature turned out, how it links to our new Sail mechanic, and we hope all players enjoy how Elite Enemies work and look!
⛵ Sails
In our Content Update, after Thidon helps you for the first time, Freda will open a sail shop. Our initial idea was for the sail shop to be cosmetics only, changing the visuals of your boat and allowing you to express your personality through your sails! As mentioned earlier, Sails can be purchased using Shady Scales that are obtained by defeating Elite Enemies.
However, as we developed the shop, this felt too limited as a new feature. We got more creative and implemented four attributes, so sails bought at the shop now impact your boats behaviour when equipped! These include and will define your boats:
Acceleration- How quickly your boat will accelerate.
Deceleration - How precisely your boat can stop.
Average Speed- How fast your boat will travel in normal speed.
Sprint Speed- How fast your boat will travel when using the fast / sprint speed.
The way the stats numbers work is slightly different than a standard scale, which might make some look deceiving. Each increment of an added attribute may look to have less effect. For example, the difference between Acceleration 7 and Acceleration 9 is less noticeable than the difference between Acceleration 1 and Acceleration 2.
Our advice here: just try it out! Use the numbers as general directions. Try out multiple sails, and then select the sail that best fits your playstyle. Sail attributes add variety to your ship, and there’s no definitive ‘BEST SAIL IN THE GAME!!! 🤯’. It comes down to personal preference here, as you may prefer an evenly balanced sail, although it may not have the best Sprint Speed, or you may think, “Who needs to break? I want max speed”. Sails with the highest top speed always have a downside to add variety to sails.
Your preference for sails will likely change over the course of the game. At the beginning, you’re relying on spotting fish or treasure immediately from your boat, whereas later in the game, this becomes less important due to the upgrades of your hook.
Our favourite part of sail attributes links to our next new feature, using Items as Skins, which allows you to combine sail visuals with sail attributes. This allows you to match your playstyle with the aesthetic of your boat, getting your favourite attributes with the visuals of the sail you want to equip!
Content Update - Coming soon! 👀
We're getting very close to releasing the Content Update to all, and we'll have more news around the date of our Content Update in our next Dev Log.
Keep your eyes peeled on our Steam page for future information around this and for our next post, which will detail three more new additions that our Content Update will bring for Nice Day for Fishing!
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We'll have a second Dev Log around the Content Update coming to you soon, but for now... Portal AWAYYYYY! 🌀