New Fish Designs, The Market, Aquapedia!

 I've had a huge rush of energy to work on Catfishing, and I'm currently writing this at almost 1 am. This devlog will cover a bunch of new stuff, most importantly the new fish designs! 

———–– New Fish ———––

The current fish gang of 5 have recieved brand new designs that I personally think look incredible! For this redesign I really wanted to focus on making the fish a lot more like their real-life counterparts. Currently the cast consists of: *Common Guppy *Clownfish *Sardine Fish *Grass Carp *Red Snapper You can view all of their redesigns below:

As you may notice, there is a blank! Currently I preparing to introduce a brand new kind of fish into Catfishing! You’ll likely see more than one in the update, so keep an eye out for these exciting new fish. Alternatively, a new fish that isn’t as important is the Tilapia, which hasn’t received a redesign so it’s excluded for now. The Tilapia isn’t actually a new fish, it was actually part of the original 3 but never got a real design, it remained as a FinFish copy and paste. Speaking of, the FinFish! This fish is actually not a real fish, but rather a test fish used as a placeholder for when I modeled the first one. Although it isn’t real, I’m including it in the game later on with it’s very own design. We can stop talking about fish now (kind of)

———–– The Aquapedia Update ———––

The Aquapedia was a tool introduced in the first major dev update in the closed alpha build of Catfishing. It remained mostly blank and useless, but I eventually decided to redo the entire thing one night, also known as three days ago. Today I have made some very useful improvements, and I have linked it’s stats and variables with the Market which we will talk about later on.

The Aquapedia includes a lot of useful stats, but not enough. As of now you can learn the name, rarity, largest caught, and unique but useless description of the fish. I plan to include a lot more stats such as best bait, largest/smallest size, and a Callie Quote which will be useful. I’ve replaced the A and D advance buttons with arrow buttons. There was an issue where my broken keyboard would give multiple key press inputs which would skip some of the Aquapedia entries. Replacing these with buttons makes it more accessible. Speaking of accessibility, I’ve made some of the buttons more contrasting with the backgrounds, such as the back button which takes on a lot more of a reddish color. Hopefully this helps in the long run. Let’s move on to the last question.

———–– The Market and Selling Fish ———––

Rejoice, the Market is here! The Market is a brand new GUI which brings you to a local market where Callie will sell her fish and learn more such as how much you have in your inventory, the sell price, and of course the name. Currently the market only has one section, the selling section, however I plan to add a lot more sections to the market including a leaderboard statistics section and customization market where you can purchase customizations such as new docks, UI themes, and in the future– new fishing locations!

The market is currently the most important GUI in the game, so I plan to add way more and make it a bit more fancier in the future! You’ll spend a lot of your time in the Market, so it has to be appealing. You might also notice the money box in the top right, where money is being introduced! Callie can currently only earn money through selling fish, and also there isn’t any use for the money as of now. However, in the future you’ll be able to purchase rod upgrades, customizations, new fishing locations and more!

I’m very happy with how this section turned out, considering how absolutely foul and awful the original design was. I can’t even look it in the eye anymore and I certainly won’t subject you to it’s awfulness. I’m hoping to make it far more appealing than that version will ever be.

———–– Wrapping Up ———––

So that’s just about it, this was kind of short for so much going on in one devlog, but I will definitely be writing longer entries when it’s not 1 am. I do hope at least someone out there is reading this and passionately excited about the game, and as a reward for making it this far I will provide you with a gift, a promotional gift code to be used in Catfishing when the first game releases! All you have to do is dm my twitter account, fexahex, saying you made it this far and want the code. There’s no use for it now, of course, but hold onto it tight.

Anyways, that is all, thankyou and goodnight!