Hello all! This dev log's subject will cover the biggest development issue I've come across so far... rain!

Intro

With a weather system in place, I needed to have rain! The problem was, I wanted randomized rain. I felt as though pre-animated rain wouldn't fit Reel-istic Fishing's vibe, and needed something more.. well.. reel-istic!

Attempt #1

My first attempt to this problem was to make each individual droplet its own object (basically meaning each droplet gets its own brain). This... worked... pretty well actually. The issue was, it performed REALLY badly on the actual Playdate.

I don't think I have a video of this object-based rain, but this video may as well be exactly what it looked like:

Attempt #2

Next up, I tried a mix of pre-animated, and object-based rain. Apparently I had not learned my lesson before, because this performed just as badly. Basically, I'd place a bunch of sprites on screen, each one animating themselves (the animation being a raindrop falling).

Attempt #3

I was losing steam. My parade had been rained on many many times. This attempt was pretty much just me temporarily giving up.

It's a good thing I had given up though, because eventually this method cracked the code to making rain not run awfully! This attempt drew lines onto a screen-sized sprite, completely randomly. It's okay-ish-ish, but really not great at all.

Attempt #4

Finally, I had figured it out. By placing each droplet's information into an array, I could draw them all onto a screen-sized sprite every frame, and maintain 30FPS!

I also figured out that I could control the speed the rain drops, the size of the droplet, the horizontal-ness, etc. Which means I can make the rain get more chaotic as a storm rolls in!

Finally my nearly month long struggle came to a happy ending! Rain that finally did not nuke the Playdate!

Conclusion

I should reiterate that this is all very, very old footage in these dev logs! Even the gifs on the itch page are pretty dated!

Here are some nice, up-to-date gifs I took just now!

The beginnings of a rainy day. A sprinkle of rain is starting!

Some relaxing nighttime rain. The rain shower is in full effect now!

It's now storming! Rain is pouring, and lighting is striking... VERY close to you! (Seagull photobomb at the end)

That's all for now, thank you for reading! It's a lot of fun to put these posts together! Feel free to suggest topics you want covered! Or to tell me if there's anything you'd like me to do differently when writing these!