Thank you all for still trying out the Demo ahead of Next Fest. Hope you will have a great weekend!
This is a short rundown of the Friday update, thank you for StormPE for great suggestions in the discussions once again, very helpful! This is a larger tweaking of the overall experience, and added some better explanation of what the status bars actually reflect. No new fish etc yet, but one might be added before the Next Fest demo :)
Changes
Cormorant will hunt all fish that are appropriately sized almost randomly (including Ruffe)
Increased Cormorant hunting intervals
Waste has been re-balanced, dead fish generate waste, and waste generation is now in the codex
Re-wrote some codex entries for plants
More tweaks to nutrients and plants
Reworked how sizing of fish is calculated, which should result in more accurate behavior
Reduced unlock conditions for snails
Status bars now explain what they mean (50% lake need, 100% 2x lake need)
Increased Ruffe breeding cooldown
Bugfixes
Predators can no longer hunt creatures equal to their size
Plants should no longer suddenly go extinct if the lake reaches too many plants
When it comes to status bars, I am considering whether just flat values would make sense, but then I am afraid the game would become too easy to "crack", because you would know that you need for example one more plant to balance the ecosystem. Any feedback in this area is welcome :)
Also there is still a lot of stuff in code which is not explained in the UI (like fish don't breed under 25% plants, Ominvores will hunt more fish when plants drop past X, so thinking about how to present this information as well..).
Note that currently the game feels a bit too easy for my taste, so might rebalance it later to make it a bit harder, but for now this should support a relatively balanced ecosystem in the demo.