Mini-Devlog #34: Something's Fishy

It's the first mini-devlog of April! And we've also decided to make all our Patreon posts this month public due to the world, uh burning down. It feels a little weird because I'm writing for a larger audience and it's sort of embarrassing. Hi!

Anyways...

Behold! New fish! The old fish looked a little scary, and they were also just bad in general. The biggest problem with them were the sizes. The medium sized fish were so big they didn't fit in the lakes! They did, but it looked very crowded. The new fish are more appropriately sized. Here's a little comparison of the old medium size (left) and the new medium size (right):

The medium fish was used for fish like carp and catfish, and it looks...reasonable enough. But once you get more than one swimming in the pond it starts looking scary, so we just sized everyone down a bit. 

All of this new fishy work to match the new fishing mini-game! Once a fish bites, you have a small window of time to start reeling. This timer takes its form as an exclamation mark above your head - you can't miss it! Once you start reeling, you'll have to keep your line positioned within the fish's catch zone. When you're safely in that little sliver, you can start holding down your mouse or button to bring it closer to you.  Fish have busy lives, too, so there's a time limit shown by the bar below the player sprite. Get too close to edge and it'll get away, so be careful!

Outside of putting the fish on a diet, we also swapped out the jump sprites for some new ones! The animation is much cleaner (and cuter hehehe). We've also changed the way shadows work. This has been something we've been playing around with periodically throughout the project, but I think we settled on simple drop shadows. These used to be cast using a hidden cylinder, but it was creating perspective issues when the sun wasn't shining straight down, which is...most of the time outside of noon, so now it's a decal! A decal is kind of like a sticker that applies itself to surfaces it touches.

You can see the perspective issue outlined above, where the casted shadow from the "fake shadow" model would be off. Is the one on the left more realistic? Yes, but it was a little weird to see in-game.

Why did we go tweak shadows all of a sudden? Because of this baby!

The floaty little green chestnut(?) is a pet of sorts! He's a Land Sprite you meet early in your journey (who you will have the honor to name, of course) and you'll be able to take him along for your adventures. We've always wanted to add a pet system of sorts in the game where it could follow you around and help you in the ways of buffs or actions, like restoring stamina or swatting at enemies. We ended up taking a lot of inspiration from Mags from the Phantasy Star Online games.  Here's some early concept art to explore potential designs!

You'll be able to feed your pet items, and he'll eat everything! Everything. Turns out, baby Land Sprites are always hungry, and he'll happily eat anything you hand him, including houses. Depending on what you feed him, he'll attune to different elements which will affect learned skills and appearance. We're still working on the specifics and the implementation, so you'll see a lot more of him in the near future.

That's all for today! See you next week 🐾