Tin Foil Hat Fishing

Now that the fishing update has been released, I would like to take a moment to talk about it and some of the design decisions behind it. When we started the design of fishing, we had three primary goals in mind.

    1) Make it relaxing
    2) Make it satisfying
    3) Make it superstitious

Salt is a game where a relaxing, serene adventure is a fully viable play-style, and we want fishing to fall right into this category. Although complicated fishing mechanics can be very fun, we elected to keep it simple on the surface and deep underneath. I'll explain the depth in more detail in a moment. In short, we wanted the player to be able to find a beautiful spot, sit back in their chair with a drink in hand, and fish while they watch the sunset.

Although the feeling of relaxation that fishing invokes can go a long way, it needs a sense of satisfaction. Many factors play into this, from the way the physics and animation of the pole behave, to what you actually catch with it. There is also that wonderful feeling when you finally catch one of the rare fish. We want fishing to be a useful tool with respect to other aspects of the game. There are a number of different fish with interesting uses, and you can look forward to a lot more in the future. Fishing is now a core part of Salt that will get its share in the upcoming waves of new content.

As for our third goal, you may think superstition is an odd thing to shoot for when designing game mechanics. However, this is where we have chosen to add some depth to fishing. It is our full intent to breed superstition and theories among players as to where and how certain fish are caught. Governing the fishing system is a tree of conditions and modifiers to chances. Each fish can have their own conditions that determine when, where, and in what way they can be caught, or are more likely to be caught. Our options on conditions are practically limitless. We could make it where you are more likely to catch a certain fish while on land, on a boat, while moving, during a full moon, during sunrise or sunset, while using certain bait or lures, while jumping up and down... you get the idea.

Overall, though, we want to keep with our normal paradigm of play-style freedom by giving players the option of fishing as little and casually or as much and superstitiously as they please. We look forward to hearing feedback and suggestions from you all.

- John Gamble, Lead Developer