Hey anglers! What’s up?! My name’s Yuriy and I’m a lucky guy - happy to be a game designer at Fishing Planet! Being only a casual amature angler, I nevertheless totally get the thrills when my line becomes tense, promising that big catch. Actually, there was one extremely emotional moment that I experienced while boat fishing for pike last fall. And yesterday while playing Fishing Planet I literally had a deja vu and experienced that same sensation, that exact tremor….as I took a kayak into some reed thickets and cast my bait...and felt the line go tight with tension. But you guys know that feeling as well as I do. Right from day one, we designed Fishing Planet as a fishing simulator with boats. All this time, you’ve probably been wondering why we created such huge waterways like Emerald or San Joaquin, with great open spaces that you couldn’t reach anyway. And now, finally, all that great potential is going to make sense! In order to do that we approached the matter with utmost seriousness! Part of the team went out and rented actual kayaks (luckily, our office is located right by the riverside;) to see and feel for ourselves what it’s like to go boat fishing from a kayak. You see, while it may be quite widespread in the USA, for us here kayak fishing was a completely new experience. Many of us were actually riding a kayak for the first time in our life.
Those few of our team members who were quite experienced, instructed the rest, and were only making meticulous notes to ensure that the in-game kayaks would behave just like the real thing and that kayak fishing dynamics and mechanics are true to life.
As it is often the case, the creation process of one boat type alone turned out to be way more difficult than we expected. This was mostly because our programmers wanted to go the whole way and recreate fully true to life physics of the kayak’s behavior, rather than make a primitive model that would be a very distant imitation. The kayak is propelled through the player’s rowing movements and depends on technique to not turn over or get stuck on shallow shoals. This means that it’s rather challenging to control it and that was precisely what we were after. In the future we plan to improve the rowing system to make kayak controls even more realistic, but even now I hope you’ll enjoy the opportunity to explore the vast open spaces of our rivers and lakes and do some boat fishing, of course! Here’s an insider tip for you guys: hurry up and enjoy your kayak fishing the way it is right now, because in all probability our future updates will feature new improvements to make the catch way more challenging and probably put limitations on the tackle you can use for kayak fishing. After all, it’s not so easy to make a cast with that long telescopic rod while balancing a kayak, right? So what’s next? Why, motorboats, of course! So I hope you’re already looking forward to some dynamic boat speeding action! After that will come new waterway maps and fish finders, of course! We also plan to broaden the scope of possible interactions with some of the boats’ separate elements. And you can definitely expect some boat fishing competitions in the future! Believe it or not, but I’ve been waiting for all this for the last few years! So, what would you like to find out about in our next entry? Ask away, give us topic ideas...and we’ll make sure to give you the hottest inside scoop on what’s cookin’ in our gamedev kitchen!;)