In our Developer Blog Updates we’ll talk about some of the work we’ve completed in the previous two weeks and explain our approaches. Through this you’ll get an understanding of our game development methods and tidbits on the features we’re planning for Dredge!

Sprint 17

After spending months in our starting area we’re finally ready to move on to our other biomes in Dredge — we kicked off environment design in earnest this sprint so you’ll start to see the fruits of that labor from next sprint onwards. We also sink our teeth into a pile of UX and Usability issues that our amazing beta testers helped us identify.

Behind the scenes:

• Automated Build Servers
• Gale Cliffs fish data & configuration
• Updated InControl Plugin

Fish Encyclopedia 

Identify your fish, record your catches, learn how many fish species are in Dredge. Your fish encyclopedia is accessible from your cabin.

Aberrant Fish

Not all is right in these waters and especially with these strange mutations of the more common species you usually encounter…

Tooltip Tutorial Animations

From our tests we could see that our players were challenged by trying to work out the correct way to deploy and manage their crab pots and trawl nets. We’ve added a little animated tutorial that appears on the tooltips of crab pots and nets to hopefully help illustrate to players how to perform this action… we’ll see after some more testing whether it has an effect!

Crabs & Trawling are depth-based 

Making use of our new depth-based world, Crab spawns are no longer decided by type, rather how deep the pot is deployed to.

Performance Improvements

• Improved LODs of trees
• Cloud darkening calculation

“Seen” dialog choices now grey out

A helping hand for those of us who tend to forget where we were up to when returning to a game. Dialogue choices that you have already explored now grey out so you don’t accidentally trigger them again.

Usability and User Experience fixes:

• UI Update – Crab Pots & Trawl Grids
• Inventory tab now clickable
• Prevent equipment from being damaged until Shipwright is unlocked
• Boat HP Strikeouts (?)
• Materials Totals at Shipwright are now labelled
• “Catchable” has been renamed to “Catchable fish types”
• “Pelagic” type renamed to “Oceanic”
• Error text for players when they don’t have the correct type of equipment for a fishing or Dredging spot
• Tooltips no longer display while the fishing/dredging minigame is active
• Players can now click a button to “Sell All” materials in their inventory to the Shipwright
• Debt is now hidden until it has been introduced to the player via the Mayor (rather than from the beginning)
• Dockworker will now always appear at Little Marrow even if you lose the package
• Dockworkers quest completion text has been adjusted
• A notification now appears when players deploy a crab pot, informing them what depth the pot has been deployed to