Welcome back to another Fall Update! Today, we are joined by 325 other games in an event all about incrementals! Black Hole Fishing will be 30% off until October 22nd.
To celebrate the occasion, I've released a few extra changes and fixes. This builds on the previous major update, and includes a couple of regression fixes as well.
A few more visual upgrades
Our artist originally designed the Hatchery to have some fun little lines connecting each fish to its information column. This is one of the many small tasks that didn’t make it into the game on launch day, and then sat on the backlog for way too long. Thankfully, my stack of artist notes is almost gone now, and I think the hatchery looks lovely with its new styling. The little info toggle (i) shows this extra detail, so you can hide it if you prefer.
We also added a few extra little pieces to the Lab, including some bubble effects and better animation.
Finishing the Codex
Last week, I announced an overhaul of the Trait Codex and fish cards, but two currencies were conspicuously missing. We now show all available information on the cards so you don't have to guess. If you want to make the most optimized fish for Lab scanning or the LHC, or try to make the most valuable fish for the Autumn biome, you can do all of that now without frustration. Don't worry, there are still plenty of things to discover and learn.
Mechanical changes
The fish scanner's time is now based on the fish's spawn time rather than a hidden value. In general, this makes scanning faster in the early game.
Steam Deck support was broken in the last update. Unfortunately, my new Steam Deck had a bad fan, so I was waiting for a replacement last week. I have a Deck again, and I've verified that the game works 100% with the touchscreen. I also started working on controller support. It's not perfect, but we have a virtual cursor that you can control with the joystick. I'm working on 100% controller support, so please send feedback if you use the Deck, or a controller to game.
I tidied up a few extra things including a couple of places where localized text still overran a box.
What's next?
There was a good discussion about achievements on the last update. I do have multiple new achievements already set up in the code, but Valve doesn't give devs a good way to "test" achievements, so I haven't published them yet. I decided that the best course of action is to release a content update with new achievements all at once so players have a reason to come back, and completionists don't get annoyed that the game keeps losing its 100% complete status. If you want to preview the next update, hop in the beta branch to see what's coming. It's currently up to date, but I'm going to start building the next update soon, so there will be a trickle of tweaks and content coming over the next month or two.
Thank you everyone for the support, and stay fishy!
~Matthew
One more thing:
During this past month, one of my developer friends released a little game about birdwatching. It's not an incremental, but I still think it's pretty cool, and I wanted to give a shout-out! If you like birds as much as you (theoretically) like fish, then please give it a look :)
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