development update #121

It has been quite a few months since the last news/update post and I would like to quickly allay any worries you might have. We are alive and well and we have not stopped working on fishery. We have been taking things a little bit easier over the summer. The last updates that we made involved adding entirely new item types, shrimp and snails, and it really took it out of us. Then all of a sudden it was summer and was very hot indeed. It was so hot that we could only really be productive in the morning and early afternoon because after that time the temperatures became unbearable. We decided to just take things a lot easier and recharge our 'fishery' batteries so to speak.

As summer was coming to an end we got an amount of requests to do freelance work which was more than usual. We have always done freelance work in parallel to working on fishery to help keep things going. Though as I said it was more than usual and therefore has taken more time away from working on fishery that we would have otherwise liked.

This is not necessarily a bad thing because having some time away from fishery has allowed us to see it with fresh eyes. One of the things I realized is just how much fishery is beginning to creak under it's own weight and probably more disturbingly is creaking under the weight of things that are yet to be added.

User interface and code in general: There is quite a substantial amount of code which is related to the user interface that must be reduced and simplified. This is especially important because there is still more UI to add and at this point adding more would just make things even more bloated from a code perspective. The code in general across the whole game needs a good cleanup because as our ideas have evolved over time the code has not always kept up with those ideas and as a result things are a little ugly and making changes becomes difficult or time consuming.

It is sort of like decorating a Christmas tree with new decorations while the old decorations are still attached to the tree. There is an extra amount of work needed that is not related to the decorating at all but it is for making sure things do not snag on other things or knock off other ornaments. It becomes like performing surgery which I must say is what programming the game feels like these days and that is not good.

Languages: Another problem related to UI is about making fishery support other languages than English. Now is a good time to start coding in support for other languages because if we do it later when the game is more complete it will just take longer. It makes sense to do it at the same time we are fixing up the whole user interface. The number of non English speaking players contacting us asking for the game to be released in their language continues to go up every year and it makes a lot of sense from a sales point of view to put this in sooner rather than later.

Tutorials/Help: After we did the snail update we started working on tutorials and found that we cannot really seriously start working on tutorials until the user interface and language support are in better shape because any help or tutorial system will require a lot of UI and language related work.

Campaign/Story