Hi folks! It's been a busy month here! I finished almost all our major goals for Alpha 6 so it's now time to move onto Alpha 7 - Shop Content!
Here is some of the goals for Alpha 7 (I still need to plan things out more so this might change a bit)
More upgrades to expand the store
A 2nd floor for your shop - Your home floor. Customers can't go up there, but it'll give you space for your fish collection/decorations you find
Paint Tool - Try to prototype/figure out how to make a tool to paint the shop floors (Walls and ceiling can be later, I'll try out floors first to get it working)
Sets of furniture you can only find as relics from fishing
Filth Mechanic (Customers will leave garbage, if your store is too filthy people will not shop)
Shelf Stocker NPC - Try to prototype this, I'm very weak in NPC AI systems so I'll try to keep this simple and see how it goes. Make the shelf stocker only stock fish that are from your freezers/storage, and make sure there is a option for you to mark storage as 'Do not touch'
More upgraded versions of current machines for your store
Upgrade/Change your store sign
Improve the ATM's shopping interface
Buff Mechanic - Build a coffee machine and get a speed boost
Companion/pet options to choose when you start, I'll see if I can make a cat and goose
I'll also do a community vote to see what interests everybody the most (It'll most likely be on discord, Steam doesn't allow you to do polls or votes directly sadly). Join the discord or post on the steam forums if you have ideas or things that your most excited about - I take this to heart so always happy to hear out ideas
What didn't get finished in Alpha 6?
Rare Bait - I did a community vote and this was the lowest of all the things so I decided to push this off for now. It will still happen! In a future biome/fishing alpha. It will give me some more time to plan it out better too
That's mostly it! Everything else we completed, there's a bunch of small ideas I want to flesh out but nothing else major. Very happy we hit our goals
The next alpha that focuses on Biomes, we'll then do the second last Biome. In grand total my plan is 6 biomes in total (I have way more planned but I'm being realistic about scope creep. These could be stretch goals)
Swamp Biome finished!
I wanted to update the youtube folks so I made a video here. I'm planning on making a gameplay update to post tomorrow or Tuesday as well! This is just only showing the biomes and fish
Water Health System
Water will now increase/decrease based on how much fishing you do there
It will loose a bit of health every successful fish you pull out
It gets a health boost during rainy weather
The water will regenerate slowly after each day
The higher the health, the less likely you pull garbage catches
Pulling garbage catches will increase the health
This will need a lot of balancing over time, so I'll let the beta players use this system and we'll make sure it feels good! We could also tie this system into difficulty settings in the future.
New Fisher Stations & Improvements
Ocean Fisher Station
You will now see some NPC's travelling to the fisher stations you've built!
Parliament Fishing Station
This was originally a prototype initially. But a lot of people enjoyed the system, so I've built it up more and given it much more content
Two new stations - Parliament and Ocean
There is now wandering fishers who travel between the station and back home. I just did this for immersion, there's no gameplay for it, hopefully folks enjoy that touch
You can now deposit bait at the fisher stations, which will help increase their catchrate!
Basic NPC Dialogue
I'll try to add more of this over time, it's not a important system and I'm not a good writer but I'll leave tidbits here and there!
Fish Record Improvements
Fish records will now display what time of day and weather is needed to catch it! This was a suggestion from the community and loved it
The UI is still pretty messy but I'm not a very good UI developer - I'm just going to stay focused on making it as functional as possible, and then hope to clean things up more in beta phase
50 Unique fish now working in game!
This is a wonderful milestone - I cranked out a LOT of fish this month and looking forward to getting us to my big goal of 100!
Fishing Rod Upgrade Tech
With the new fishing systems, the later on biome fish are becoming tankier so we needed even a simple solution for now - Fishing Rod Upgrades
It'll increase the damage dealt to the fish and a bit of durability increase
In the future I might get rid of this, and we'll have a fishing-rod merchant in the town who sells you better fishing rods that will do this, and also make the fishing rod look better
I'll maybe also prototype a lure system in the future where you can swap lures which have different abilities