Blogs - carrotstrip

Happy Thanksgiving! This week we focused on polish and balance. The casting procedural animation got some attention, we fiddled with the shop experience and added a few items, and player guidance was brought up to snuff. Now instead of toasts that are generally pretty easy to miss, we throw relevant instructions up onto the screen when the player is in the appropriate mode. This allows the player to not pay entirely rapt attention to the toasts and not be punished with a total lack of knowledge of how to play the game. We added some more sound effects as well; it's amazing what such a small detail can do for the feel of a game. Even the inventory sliding in and out having a sound effect made a huge difference.

For next week -

- Lots of playtesting and balancing amongst ourselves

- More sound effects

- May cut cannon fire entirely (think it's balanceable but would be difficult in a week)

- Bugfixing

This next week is our final week, and we're excited to finish balancing and ship out our gold build!

This week, we've added the following features:
- More player guidance
- Better feedback during fishing
- A picture of the fish is now shown upon catch
- Each fish now has different difficulties and values
- Shop and inventory UI now use a cursor
- Modified shark path to be clearer

In our previous iteration, players didn't understand how to play the game, so we added more guidance to make the game more clear. We also added feedback during fishing because players didn't understand how the progress bars corresponded to how well they were doing. Additionally, a picture of the fish is shown once caught to excite the player and motivate them to catch more. The switch to the UI cursor fixes a game-breaking bug where only one player could control the UI to purchase and equip items. Moreover, we edited the shark's path to be more clear: previously, the shark would stay in the same area and be very difficult to find.

In the future, we plan to add new items to the shop to give player more interesting decisions to make. One of these items is a trap, which can catch multiple fish at a time. This would constitute one of three major tracks that the player can decide to pursue. We'd also like to add some polish, such as adding particle effects and animations to make the game more engaging.

Reel Time Strategy is an action-strategy fishing game that pits players against each other in a race to catch the grandest fish in the sea. Features implemented so far include:

A novel fishing mechanic

Cannon warfare

Catching fish reduces the amount of fish in the ocean based geographically on a tilemap

Pro shop with upgrades

This week, we're finishing the main gameplay loop such that playtesters can actually have a fun time playing the game! So far our end condition has just been catching a certain amount of fish, but we've reached a point where we're able to implement our initially scoped win condition, the aforementioned biggest fish in the sea, so that should be something that playtesters can explore going forward. That was our primary motivation for this week. We are headed towards a few weeks of balance and polish and then we'll be excited to present an MVP for everybody. Next week we'll probably be doing a lot of bugfixing based on playtester input, and things that we've picked up on ourselves but haven't gotten to yet. We also have a couple different win conditions bouncing around, and we'd like to just release the MVP with one, so we may end up tweaking that condition a little bit when we playtest ourselves.