Sooo... brain stopped working and my concept of time is dwindling at an alarmingly rapid pace! Because of this, I'm going to not take the whole "this devlog needs to be in order!!" as serious as I was previously. It'll still be relatively (reel-atively?) chronological, but now by saying this, legally I can't be sued if I accidentally jump around a bit on ye ol' timeline.

The Inventory

Anyways, I had a shop "done", and it was about time I started thinking of a way to switch up equipment! An inventory screen needed to be made. I tried to get somewhat creative with it, and make it a lil more visually cool than just a standard inventory screen. So I went with making it look like a bulletin board!

The idea of this is that you select a piece of paper to swap out the equipment. Buncha sheets are brought up with the relevant equipment type, and you select one of them by piercing a thumbtack through the sheet (therefor attaching it to the bulletin)!

There is also a clipboard with totals for all of your stats! Wooo numbers!

Revamping the Hooks

The fishing controls felt BLAND. They needed something more. A new layer of gameplay variety.

To solve this, I chose to make each and every hook in the game control differently!

With the Anchor hook, you're shooting for a wrecking ball build. Verrrry slow acceleration, but very high top speed!

And with the Bolt hook, you dash around at high speeds. All agile like a lightning bolt!

And of course, there's a banana-inspired hook too! With this, you get some pretty decent speed, but you'll never slow down on your own! Very slippery!

There will be plenty more hooks than just these three! And there's still one more equipment type to show off later (objectively much, much cooler than hooks!).

Nighttime Fishing

In Reel-istic Fishing, there will be a day/night cycle, in which some fish may only like to come out during the day/night! This, combined with the weather cycle, means that you may not always be catching the same fish every cast!

I also needed a way to visualize nighttime, and since brightness is a bit tricky on Playdate, I chose to take inspiration from the lamp in Comet, and make a spotlight effect around the hook!

A Conclusion for Now...

That'll be it for this devlog! As always, thank you all for the support! I absolutely cannot wait to release this game :)