Fishy Friday #5: Into the Vortex

Welcome to Fishy Friday #5 - Into the Vortex

Welcome back to Fishy Friday! The past month has been filled with many exciting things like Design documents, code cleanup, and refactoring. Just look at how organized my code is!

Ok, none of those things make for very interesting announcements, so instead, let's talk about Art. While there is still more work to do, I can confidently say that Black Hole Fishing has found its style!

Art 1: The Magazine

This art journey began when one of the talented artists at Playsaurus sent me a concept image of my magazine. The magazine is the central place for upgrades in the game, so I wanted to ensure that it was as interesting and enticing as possible. Throughout the game, you will slowly collect new pages, which will unlock new systems and mechanics.

The concept image looked amazing, but there was a problem: the magazine makes the reset of the game look slightly bad. I decided that instead of asking for a less good version, I'd just step up my game and make something equally exciting:

Art 2: The World

My first step was to update the environment. There are now multiple pond shapes and sizes, and a variety of props and scenery pieces.

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The world is now generated procedurally from data, just like the fish. There are a few world themes (4 currently), but the pond you fish will be completely unique to you. Even better (for me), inventing new worlds is trivially easy, thanks to the development tools I created along the way. Expect to see many more worlds in the final game!

Art 3: The Water

I have a confession to make: I am a huge nerd, and I actually enjoy spending a weekend programming water to do weird spacetimey things. I've had "write a double-buffer water shader" on my bucket list for months now (as I'm sure we all do). Well, I finally got the chance, and it turned out way better than I had hoped.

I'm still working on integrating all of the systems, but I expect to have more gameplay updates to share with you all next time. Until then, stay fishy! (Yup, we're committed to that outro now)