Reel Talk — Update 2026-03-30

🎣 What's New

• Mash gate clear celebration and legendary catch screen effects (Tasks 8, 12)

• Time-of-day HUD indicator and rod tutorial highlight (Tasks 10, 11)

• Gate clear sparkle burst and time-aware nature observations (Tasks 13, 14)

• New Sfx

• Ambient_ferry pathing fix

• New artwork

• Fall impact effects, fix FishingUI init error, remove spawn iris wipe

✨ Quality of Life

• Improve demo gameplay: faster first 10 minutes + tighter core loop

• Wire DemoGameplayEnhancer and DemoMissionTracker into game

• Prompt journal discovery on first rare catch (Task 17)

• Improve Quick Sell with summary notification (Task 9)

• Gameplay scene and shopkeepers

• Tier 2: Wardrobe prop, in-game character editor, GDD updates

• Move catch history to bottom-right and remove rare fish tutorial objective

• Bush and mushroom positions

• Refactor ferry system: scene-based models + Path3D routes

• Gameplay_scene.tscn

• Require tutorial objectives for ferry unlock in all modes

• Show all fish in journal with Full Game banners on demo-locked species

• New Fish textures

• Set correct Steam App IDs and rewrite leaderboards for fishing

• Wire Steam leaderboard submissions into PlayerProgress

• Improve first-10-minute engagement and core fishing loop feel

• Replace standalone console with Rabbit Developer Console commands

• Refactor: Extract utilities and remove defensive boilerplate across 49 files

• Refactor: Split 3 largest files into focused, reusable components

🐛 Squashed Bugs

• Fix critical first-impression issues from gameplay loop audit (Tasks 1-4)

• Guard debug print() statements behind OS.is_debug_build() (Task 5)

• Fix bobber direction, mash gate progress bypass, and rare fish rates

• Tier 1 game loop fixes: catch feedback, waiting animation, breadcrumbs, audio wiring

• Fix bobber physics, UI cohesion, ferry tugboat, and fish journal

• Fix player spawn falling through world, auto-unlock ferry on demo complete, make ambient ferry rideable

• Fix ferry movement: use _physics_process and remove Y override

• Fix ferries not moving: auto-discover Path3D when export not assigned

• Fix clownfish icon path to match art filename (clown_fish.png)

• Fix multiplayer issues: leaderboard prefix, double validation, time sync

• In-game debug console with comprehensive command system

• Fix parse errors in player_fishing, juice_manager, and fishing_chat_messages

• Fix ferries going underwater and scale both 50% larger

Thanks for playing and for being part of this community — it means the world to us. If you run into anything weird or have ideas, drop by our Discord or leave a comment below. ːsteamthumbsupː— HeartCoded & the Lost Rabbit Digital team Build 886e585