Loan Shark nominated for Best Italian Debut Game at IVGA
Hello there anglers, I'm very excited to be writing this post. Loan Shark has been nominated for Best Italian Debut Game at the Italian Video Game Awards. We'll be attending First Playable, the Italian industry meetup for game developers, from June 10 to June 12. It's the most important live event for professional game developers in Italy, and the IVGAs are part of it. We're really excited abou…
Hello there fisherpeople, Our new horror game, Birds Watching, is out. You can buy it at a launch discount price, review it, and let us know what you think. If you liked Loan Shark , its horror-comedy, it's simple mechanics, you'll probably like this too. Developing Birds Watching was a very rewarding, enriching experience: we learned a ton about how to make games, especially small open-world w…
Hi everyone, We’ve got something new to share with you. Our next game, Birds Watching , launches on March 6, 2026 . It’s a short, narrative-driven horror experience where you play as the last human on Earth, long after the world has burned to ashes. You survive on the top of a mountain, the only place still untouched by the flames, and your only occupation is watching with your binoculars the w…
Big (and slightly unreal) news: Loan Shark , our first game ever, is now on Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X/S! 🎉 To celebrate, we put together a brand-new trailer, feast your eyes: The trailer was conceived, shot, and edited by the incredible Andrea Folino , a rare hybrid of programmer, director, and photographer. The man even wrote his own custom tools just to move the cameras exactly how he…
Hello there fisherpeople! Now that we're reaching the end of the Autumn Sale and of our first major discount for Loan Shark (let's wave our fishings rods for the newly indebted anglers out there), we want to keep the boat afloat with a huge announcement... 🎉 The Multiple Endings Free Update (aka Hooked Edition)! We’ve been listening closely to your feedback. One review in particular (the most…
Hello everyone, We finally have good news for AMD users! As we reported earlier, AMD driver update 25.8.1 introduced a serious issue that caused invisible or flashing textures and made Loan Shark unplayable for many of you. The fix is now live. AMD has released driver 25.9.2 , which resolves the rendering problems not only in Loan Shark, but also in many other Godot-based games. ⚠️ Please note:…
Hi folks! This patch fixes a small bug where the loan shark's timer would reset to 45 Minutes whenever it ran out, allowing people to "get to port" using the boat and waiting, something that should be impossible. Some poeple previously reported this issue and it also happened in the latest video from Markiplier :p We found the fix a couple of days ago and planned to release it with some other c…
Loan Shark has been nominated for the DevGAMM Community Choice Award! 🏆 The team is currently working on a content update, adding new endings and quality-of-life improvements. Thanks to your support, development can continue and the game can keep getting better. If you’d like to help us secure even more time to work on new games, you can cast your vote here: 👉 · 1 vote per email · Voting clos…
Hi folks! This update tries to fix some issues people have been encountering where the underwater camera jitters uncontrollably. We hope this will make the game more enjoyable!
When we released Loan Shark , we thought it would be a small, quiet launch, just a fun way to learn how to publish our first game on Steam. We had no budget, no publisher, and only 3 months to make it. Honestly, we didn’t expect much. But here we are, six days later, with over 10,800 copies sold and a ton of amazing messages, reviews, and videos from all of you. I mean, the game is in the Top S…
Hi folks! This patch should just fix some rendering bugs some people are having, including the game defaulting to the OpenGL renderer even though the game doesn't support it. I'm still gathering info on the camera spinning so fast it crashes people's game! Cheers!
Hey everyone, We just wanted to take a moment to say thank you . Loan Shark is our very first game release, and we honestly had no idea what to expect. Seeing the incredible response from all of you has blown us away: · 4,600+ copies sold in just 3 days!!!!! · 52 reviews, sitting at Very Positive! For a small debut project, this is absolutely beyond anything we imagined. Every time we see someo…
TL;DR · Problem : AMD driver update 25.8.1 breaks Loan Shark · Fix : Roll back to previous AMD driver, or wait for AMD’s next update · Help speed up the fix by reporting the issue: Hello everyone! After yesterday's launch, we’ve soon become aware of a serious graphics issue affecting some players using AMD graphics cards . This issue causes invisible or flashing textures on the main menu and in…
Dear fisherpeople. We didn't believe we would write this new announcement so close to the previous one about the thousand milestone. Yet here we are, celebrating another major (and unexpected) accomplishment of Loan Shark . As many of you may know, one of our TikTok short video went viral a couple of days ago (you can find it here ). It generated an incredible boost in visibility, and is probab…
Hey everyone! We just published a new article on our devlog: 📝 " Using Daily Notes for lightweight, indie-friendly Game Design documentation " It's a behind-the-scenes look at how we design Loan Shark as a two-person team. Instead of using a traditional GDD, we keep our process fast, messy, and effective with daily design notes in Obsidian.md . We log playtest results, sketch ideas, track task…
Fisherpeople, we made it! Much to our surprise, we caught a lot of wishlists in our net during the night, and we finally got to 1000 wishlists here on Steam! This is huge for us, for Studio Carota. Loan Shark was meant to be a simple experiment to release a game on Steam, but it's turned into so much more. Thank you for everyone who took the time to discover our little game. The release date is…
Hello there fisherpeople! We are hitting a small but significant milestone for the growth of our studio: the official Discord server for Studio Carota is open! What Discord server? Actually, it has been open for a couple of months; we simply didn't announce it in grand style. We were a little self-conscious about the server and its appeal, and instead opted to focus on the development of Loan S…
Hello there fisherpeople! Let's see what we caught in our net. Release Date Salty news for y'all: the Loan Shark is coming for payback on 8th August 2025 ! Get ready for a fishing trip amidst water, debt, and blood. New Trailer To celebrate the announcement of the release date, we put up an updated version of our trailer. It shares the same structure and beats as the previous one, but showcases…
Hello there, fellow fisherpeople! Today it's big catch day: the Loan Shark demo has been downloaded more than 1000 times . We're also going strong with more than 400 wishlists in the bucket already. This huge increase in less than 15 days was due to Loan Shark participating in the Steam Fishing Fest, the release of the demo and a lot of content creators picking up and playing the demo. We know…
Hey everyone! We wanted to take a moment to say a big thank you to all of you who discovered, visited, and wishlisted Loan Shark during Steam's Fishing Fest . This was our first-ever Steam event as developers, and the experience gave us a huge boost—not just in visibility, but in confidence. Thanks to your support, Loan Shark gained 228 new wishlists during the week of the event, pushing us pas…
Hello there! The demo for our psychological horror game is out. If you want to get your feet wet in sea and blood, give it a try and let us know what you think about it! - Studio Carota
Have you ever felt like you were choking from stress and anxiety while staring at an obstacle you know you cannot overcome? That's what Loan Shark is about. You play as a professional angler in debt to the mob. During a night of work on your fishing boat, you catch a weird fish that can talk and offers its help to get you out of debt. The only problem is, help does not come cheap. What kind of…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.