May 2016

We’ve been working hard on getting Verdant Skies ready for 2DCon, but the blog fell behind a little bit. One big reason for that is because we got a new team member!

Check out this cute little guy!

He’s about 4 weeks old now, but this picture was taken in the first week or so. Things have calmed down and I’ve been back at work on Verdant Skies. There’s been a lot of fixes to all sorts of areas, improving playability and getting things ready for our first public showing.

If you’re in Minnesota, we’ll be doing some very small scale testing tomorrow at Glitch HQ’s Playtest event.

-Andy

A lot of games in this genre have a fishing system based on waiting for a bobber to move, quickly hitting a key, and then some sort of button mashing to reel in the fish. Most of these mini-games are sorta okay, but they are never too interesting, involve a lot of waiting, and can be pretty inaccessible to people with lower manual dexterity.

Instead, Verdant Skies includes the more exciting: Spear Fishing!

Video available: http://kortham.net/temp/FishingDemoHigh.mp4A major inspiration for the spear fishing is the hunting system from old Oregon Trail games.

The fishing system isn’t 100% finished yet. The size of the shadow of the fish and how far away it is from shore will play a role in determining what kind of fish you get. I’d also like to dress it up with some trail effects on the thrown spear. Also, the fish count has already been reduced to a more reasonable level since the video was taken.