Hello everyone! It's been an extremely exciting launch week! I have been blown away by the response the game has received, and I'm so happy that you all seem to be enjoying the game I created! I have gotten so much feedback and constructive criticism and I felt that I should address some of the most common problems I was seeing as soon as possible.
Beta Branch
In order to avoid publishing a change that breaks more than it fixes, I have created a beta branch for the game. I will be pushing all changes to the beta branch before making them live on the main build. In order to opt in to the beta branch, right click on the game in Steam and select "Properties -> Betas" and select the beta branch.
This should be done at your own risk! If something is broken, it will cause problems only for beta testers, but their sacrifice will leave the broader playerbase safe from harm. Thank you in advance to our brave beta testers!
Patch Notes V1.0.1
Here's a quick rundown of all the changes in this patch!
Gameplay Changes
- Reduced the time it takes for some fish from Freshwater Friends to grow up to speed up early game progression.
- Made it so that adult fish still chase food but they no longer eat it.
- Increased the offline income cap to one week rather than 24 hours.
- Added several parameters to certain fish to make them more accurately model real-life behavior, including bias towards the bottom or top of the tank and changes to swim speed.
Quality of Life Improvements
- Made it so that music now loops continuously by default. It can be reverted to sparsely come in and out through the settings menu.
- Moved the "Join Discord" button to the settings menu
- Turned "reset data" and "sell all fish" buttons red to indicate danger.
- Added a warning to the "sell all fish" button the first time it is pressed so that people don't accidentally sell baby fish.
- Various minor UI tweaks.
Bugfixes
- Fixed a rare crashing bug on the Windows build that caused the game not to launch.
- Fixed a bug where changes in the system time could result in negative values for player income and fish xp, potentially softlocking them.
- Fixed a bug on MacOS where some fish and decoration sprites did not load properly.
Moving Forward
I just want to say that I have heard your feedback loud and clear. By far the most common requests are for more interactivity with the food system, more gameplay benefits from cosmetic upgrades, and better balance for active playstyles. I would like to address these issues in the future to the best of my ability, but they will require more comprehensive system design, and development time, than the changes included in this hotfix. I hope you will have patience with me as I am a solo dev working on this project in my spare time while trying to finish grad school!
Good luck with the shiny hunting!
-Ben