Dev Diary #3: Every Fish Is a Catch

This week Fish Frenzy changed what kind of game it is.

The death screen problem

Every eat-and-grow game has the same weak spot: you die, you see a death screen, and you decide whether to play again. Feedback from a friend summed up ours: there was no excitement in dying. You saw your stats, collected some coins and that was it. Their suggestion was to make the fish themselves the reward, with odds as long as 1 in 100,000.

We agreed. Until now you bought the next fish with coins once you were a high enough level, which made unlocking a fish a shopping trip. Now fish are the loot. Every Treasure Net you earn in a run rolls for a fish, and the end-of-run reveal shows what you caught, saving the rarest for last. Crystal and rarer catches get a drum-roll.

60 fish

A loot system only works if there's lots to find. Before we started, we'd already written out a list of the fish we wanted in the game: 60 of them in six groups of ten. That list became the six rarities, from the Goldfish at Common up to the prehistoric giants at Mythic, with the Lilstock Titan as fish #60.

The rarest fish really are rare: a Mythic has a 1 in 100,000 chance per roll before luck.

Merging and the Fishdex

Catching the same Common fish for the twentieth time has to be worth something, so 10 copies merge into the next tier: Shiny, Crystal, Rainbow, Shadow and Cosmic. Every tier gives a bigger bonus and a flashier look.

The Fishdex holds it all together: one entry for every fish in every tier, 360 in total, with rewards as it fills. Uncaught fish show as silhouettes with their odds, so you always know what you're hunting.

Colour skins didn't fit alongside tiers, so we retired them and refunded everything players had spent on them.

Keeping it fair

A collection game makes fairness matter more, so this week also tightened things up:

• You can't dodge a bigger fish by hitting the Lobby button while you're carrying nets.
• Speed and teleport hacks get pulled back.
• The wheel's odds labels were fixed to match the real odds.

World At War: bigger, again

The kaiju is now twice its old height, about 365 studs, so it towers over even the tallest buildings in the city. The bases were redesigned around last week's bigger vehicles, with a staircase straight up to rooftop helipads, and helicopters got new controls and tracking missiles.

Next

The 50 new fish need models as good as the original ten, and the lobby is still a menu screen. Both are next.