Ahoy, cosmic debtors! It is once again FISH FEAR ME Friday!
Let's jump right in with the patch notes. As always, notes tagged with ⚓ are community suggestions!
PATCH NOTES
Balance changes
- ⚓ Buffed Cursed Crown: now, instead of the curse being that you're stuck at 1hp forever, it's that you can no longer heal. This is still a very significant downside, but it should hopefully provide build niche opportunities outside of Ghost Ship runs.
- ⚓ Added triple invincibility duration on expending a Stitched Heart
- Accidentally nerfed and then partially buffed Chum. So it turns out that Chum was actually getting called twice per fish summon initialization, which meant that it was significantly stronger than intended when combined with Ichthyomancy, Dragon Tooth, or Tamed Shark. I fixed the double call to rein in the balance more towards what I'd intended... and then gave it a more intentional buff so it'd stay competitive in the meta. It's weaker than it was, but stronger than it was originally supposed to be!
- Improved fish summon AI
Bugfixes
- ⚓ Fixed a bug where the Trawler and Party Boat would show missing day 4 unlocks
- ⚓ Fixed a bug where using the Bell of the Deep would consume junk fish lots, causing the spawn pool to deplete prematurely
Misc
- ⚓ Changed the sprite for Moonwater Lure to make it more apparent when it's been unlocked (and cuter)
- Made the "continuous hold" fishing minigame the default. I'm keeping classic mode in the options menu for the real sickos, but it's very apparent that this new version is strongly preferred by pretty much everyone. I'll be doing some UI changes on it soon to make it more visually clear what's going on, but the long and short is you can hold down the spacebar forever now to just continually summon new fish!
- Did a gigantic optimization pass on pretty much the entire game.
I want to talk a bit about this optimization pass. As I mentioned in the last newspost, I brought in visiting programmer (and absolute genius) Noé Charron to help fix some of the lag spikes the game was having, and they REALLY delivered. To showcase this, I ran a benchmark on my old Thinkpad, with the build the community's started calling "the lag bomb" (Ichthyomancy/Cursed Crown/Absolute Violence/Summoning Ritual). Here it is with last week's build...
(VAR is short for Framerate Variance; basically the distance between the longest and shortest frames in the past 60 frames. High VAR means a huge lag spike has just happened.)
And with this week's build.
Long story short, Noé's a miracle worker.
Now, there's two things to discuss with optimization. First off, this is a continuous process. There are still parts of the game that need optimizing, and I'll be partly relying on y'all to point out specific circumstances that cause lag spikes! I'm already aware of one element that still needs fixing (squid trails are a huge lag culprit at the moment), but I'm sure there's other elements that I haven't spotted yet because I'm just one person.
Second off, optimization can introduce some really subtle bugs. The way that optimization works is you take a previously-flexible part of the game and make it more rigid by encoding some gameplay assumptions as fundamental rules. Stuff like "attacks will never change size over their lifetimes" or "fish all have the same set of components." Then, you suddenly remember an edge case to that, and then an edge case to the edge case, and now you have a bunch of tiny changes to game logic where things don't work quite like they're supposed to. I've gone through and already fixed a fair few of these bugs, but it's a near-inevitability that I've missed something because -- again -- I'm just one person!
So, with both those in mind, if you notice anything odd about the game over the next week or two, please let us know! Community manager Hearth has put together a bug reports thread in the Forum for your convenience.
Now, on to the future! My current plans include:
- Continuing to work on optimization
- Continuing to work on usability
- Giving the new fishing minigame a more unique look
- Making controller support a lot more functional (this one's a bit of a bear to fix, but I promise it's on my list)
- Starting production on the free WOMEN WANT ME expansion
Actually, on the topic of WOMEN WANT ME, I've got two pieces of news!
First off, I'm excited to announce that Josie Brechner will be returning to make another song for the expansion! Josie's the composer for the base game, and I think we can all agree her music is one of the best things about it. The new track doesn't have a name yet, but I can already tell you it's gonna be a great one.
Second off, I want to highlight one of the new fish I'm working on for the expansion! Say hello to the Lake of the Lady's stealthiest occupant, the Mimic Octopus...
Question of the Week
What do you most want to see in a new map?
Happy fishing,
Heather Flowers
P.S. Here's the new sprite for the Moonwater lure! As is indie dev tradition, both it and the Moonbeam Catfish are based off my real-life cat.
