Dev Diary #2: Rewards Worth Chasing

This week was about pace. Fish Frenzy was giving everything away too fast, and World At War's vehicles were too simple to be fun to fight.

Fish Frenzy was too easy to finish

After last week's growth changes, we played a few sessions and spotted the opposite problem. Growth, coins and spins were all coming far too quickly. We'd have seven spins within a few minutes, and could buy every skin in about an hour. When you can finish a game in an afternoon, there's no reason to come back tomorrow.

Part of it was a bug. Eating a fish gave you half its mass and dropped all of its mass as food, so every kill created mass out of thin air. Kill chains snowballed, and players were hitting max size almost every life.

We fixed the bug, then rebuilt the economy around three ideas:

1. Getting big should take skill. Food and kills now give less the bigger you are, so the first few thousand mass come quickly and the top of the leaderboard has to be earned.
2. Levels decide progress, not coins. We reworked the level curve so the last fish is about 30 hours of play away, not over a thousand. Fish prices went up to match.
3. Pearls should matter. Before, pearls had almost no use. Now every Lava skin costs pearls.

Treasure Nets: a reason to keep growing

Slowing things down only works if there's something to chase, so this week also added Treasure Nets. Growing past size milestones earns nets, the nets get rarer the bigger you get, and when your run ends a treasure chest bursts open with everything you've earned.

The chest is deliberately a show: it rattles, glows in the colour of your best net, and fires your rewards out one at a time. Dying is the worst moment in an eat-and-grow game, and we wanted it to also be one of the best.

Listening to players

A friend testing the game pointed out two things that felt wrong. First, they'd needed to be thousands of mass bigger than another player to eat them. Second, the Sardine was the fastest fish in the game, which made grinding for better fish pointless.

Both were right. The old "10% heavier" rule felt invisible and unfair at big sizes, so now if you're heavier, you can eat them. Speeds were also retuned so they rise with unlock order, and the Seabass is now the fastest fish. While testing, we also found that kills between fast fish were missing because the hitbox was tiny, so that's fixed too.

World At War: armour, not health bars

In World At War, every vehicle had a single health bar, and tanks felt like boxes on wheels. We wanted them to feel like armour: hits that knock off parts, tracks that get thrown, and turrets that stop working when you shoot off the barrel.

So every one of the 24 vehicles was rebuilt with detailed models, real suspension and part-by-part damage. A vehicle's health is now simply how much of it is still attached. You can see exactly how hurt an enemy tank is just by looking at it.

We also made sure the game will run on phones. World At War has a lot going on, with destructible cities, fires and a 600-part kaiju, so there's now an Auto graphics setting that turns detail down on weaker devices, plus proper touch and controller controls.

Next

Next week, Fish Frenzy's biggest change yet: fish you catch instead of fish you buy.