Hey everyone, I hope you're doing great!
First, I want to say that I really appreciate all the comments, support, and great feedback you have been sharing over the past few months. It really means a lot! Thank you!
For this week's update, I thought I could share a bit about how character progression will work in-game:
-There will be 6 unique skills to level up: Exploration, Survival, Engineering, Swimming, Scavenging, and Marine Biology
-You will be able to improve these skills by performing actions related to them, like swimming further and deeper to improve your Swimming skill, and discovering new species to improve your Marine Biology skill
-Each of these skills will unlock unique bonuses as you level them up, like for example enabling you to repair machines with Engineering or increasing item stack sizes with the Scavenging skill. There will be several bonuses to unlock for every skill.
-There are also more standard stats to improve, like health points, air capacity, swim speed, inventory size, armor, and running speed (for those who want to run very fast on your starting island... or could there be more islands?)
-The player statistics can mostly be improved by crafting and upgrading your equipment + building shelter upgrades
Also, here are this week's demo updates (v0.8.15):
-Changed the action name from "Pick" to "Catch" for fish
-Reduced the intensity of camera shake when chopping wood or mining
-Added an option to completely disable camera shake in the accessibility menu
-Changed the Sandlurkers description to better match their expected behavior (reactive instead of aggressive, as they are less dangerous shallow water creatures)
-Cleaned up some item icons and removed some remaining white outlines/pixels that were still visible on a few of them
-Made the new recipes popup background more visible
-Increased the default looted item popup visibility duration
-Made an internal script to scan the whole project for duplicate components/scripts on objects, as I noticed a single Reef Wood object flickering because it accidentally had its behavior script added twice
-Increased the font size of the encumbered message
-Improved the wording of the encumbered message
-Reduced the relative audio volume level of the new quest and completed quest sound effects
-Improved the wood chopping sound to make it feel more underwater/muted
-Increased the horizontal size of the quest log lines to make sure nothing goes off screen
-Limited cryopod padding scavenging to one at a time
-Upgraded the game code to improve underwater FPS
-Repaired the fish-themed crosshair (yeah, there is a fish-themed crosshair in the options menu haha)
-Limited the FOV values from 45 to 125. This should help limit unwanted visual distortion while still allowing players to adjust the FOV for their monitor setup.