This week at Mutant, our artist gets her wish and we talk combat.

Weekly Dev Update #70
Week of March 21, 2022

This week at Mutant, let’s talk about fishing as “combat” and look at a sneak peak of an update heading directly to the Kaiju Fishing Demo.

FISHING AS COMBAT

We’ve spent a lot of time trying to make the fishing feel alive and appropriately difficult but we know we can push this boundary further. We want fishing to act as our game’s “combat” system and to reach that goal, there are a couple of angles we want to tackle.

Our current system primarily focuses on “reaction” moves. The fish does a move and you react, either with a button press/hold or a movement counter. To us, this was a natural starting point as fishing has a lot of reactionary actions in real life. But in our fantasy adventure game, we can do more! We’ve had ideas to give players more abilities and tools in the back pocket for a while now and this shift in philosophy is going to give us the room to play with those.

These abilities are going to start at the larger end, at least from a development perspective, but we want to be able to apply these actions all the way down to small fish. One idea that we’re bringing back from an old, old version of this project is a dodge… so we’ll let you imagine how we might apply that.

We also want to double back to our fish AI, in a few ways. We want them to feel more alive and give them more responses to your actions too. If you want them to go somewhere, they should counter you. If you throw an attack at them, they should be able to dodge or resist.

And that’s all you get for now… we’ll share more as we get further along. Let’s get to the immediate Demo stuff!

LET. ME. UPDATE. THE. CLAMPJAW!!!

“Please let me update this fish!” Our artist is a driven and proud person and while we always think her creations are wonderful, she is determined to keep her work evolving. The Clampjaw is a classic example of this. This medium fish was one of the first designs we approved and one of the first she modeled for the game. It’s also been one of the only medium fish in the Demo, so it’s the one we look at most often while testing.

In her eyes, this makes the Clampjaw a prime candidate for “I can make it better now.” And y’know what? We believe her. We’ve finally made space in our schedule and she leapt at the chance! So here he is: the updated Clampjaw.





New colors, new effects, and a new rig. The detail and effects should be obvious but where this lil fella will shine is in the rig. We’ve got big plans for all of our fish and hope you enjoy the update.
We have other visual updates planned for the Demo, including some effects and visual quality things we’ve been working on but I’ll unveil them another day. Have a great weekend.

FOLLOW US FOR MORE

Be sure to check out the Demo and share the game with your friends! Every little bit helps. You can alsojoin our Discord if you want to share your best catches amongst our community, give us feedback, and get access to the newest test builds. We love seeing all the new faces (well, usernames) who are playing the game and we can’t wait to give you more!

As always, thanks for reading! Stay safe out there. <3 If you want to stay up to date with KAIJU FISHING, you can Wishlist the game on Steam, join our Discord or follow us on Twitter @MutantStudios.

we talk combat.