In this blog post I will talk reveal the next update, why fishing is taking an eternity to release and why farming will be reworked.
WHERE THE @#?! IS FISHING? IT'S BEEN MONTHS!!
I hear you, and I want the fishing update released as badly as you do. The best I can currently do is apologize for the delays, explain what happened to it and give you a new estimate, so I'll do precisely that. I will start off by saying that I heavily underestimated how much work the feature needs and I revealed the whole thing too early. I've learned the hard way that the more time passes after the update reveal, the more peoples expectations grow bigger and bigger, and I don't think the development speed can keep up with everyone's expectations towards the update. This means that when fishing releases, it might be a little less exciting than you think it's going to be. I'm not saying that the update is bad, I'm saying it's best to manage your expectations to a realistic degree.
What the duck happened to the update, is it ever coming out? Why all the delays? Well, the delays are actually a combination of multiple things. I've taken a lot of time off from developing GE due to personal reasons, there was a month where I barely could work on the project, not because I didn't want to, but because I simply had other things going on during that time. (don't worry, I am back to working on GE as much I've worked on in the past!). The time off automatically has delayed the update by two to three weeks. Other than that, the feature and ideas simply grew too big until I realized I wouldn't have the time to implement everything in a reasonable time. Fishing update was actually supposed to be merged into a much bigger feature releasing at the same time, but now I've realized that would delay it even further, so it's best to just release them separately.
Working on the same feature for months also gets really tiring. The more I worked on fishing the more I started to dislike fishing overall (not that the feature itself is bad, but I really just got tired of constantly thinking "fishing this, fishing that..."). That's when I realized I need a genuine break from working on fishing, and I started working on QoL stuff, new item art, new items and the shop rework. And boy was it refreshing to work on something else. Good news is that fishing feature has made great progress, I am very satisfied how it's turning out. Hopefully you will enjoy it as well when it's finally out. I hope to release the update during June, I can't wait to see you all fishing!
Farming will be reworked
To me farming is a very scary feature to touch. There are players with hundreds or even thousands of hours with the old farming system. Changing it will fundamentally change the entire feel of the game, and therefore should only be changed when it's necessary. Those who have stuck around for a long time are most likely very familiar with the current 'meta strategy' to farming, the quickest way to farm is to break a row of blocks at once instead of breaking one block at a time. This was in fact much faster than the "regular" strategy that everyone starts with.
To me this "secret" quicker way to break always bothered me for one reason: new players. I have witnessed time and time again new players trying out the game and not figuring out the "correct" way to farm, this caused them to ask for items that speed up block breaking, because they were doing it the slow way and not realizing. This problem solves itself when me or any player teaches them the quick way to break blocks. But the thing is, this way of solving the issue is not reliable, I can't rely on someone teaching every new player the trick to quicker farming. Sure, I could add an official tutorial for it, but even that would be confusing, because the mechanic itself is too confusing. Why is the game designed to reward breaking multiple things at once? Why punish those who are not doing it? Why make the whole feature a secret?
I've been thinking of these questions for a long time, and have come to the decision to rework farming in a way that all breaking methods are equal. This means that breaking a single block at once will be as fast as breaking a row of blocks at a time.
For those interested in the technical details, let me first explain what determines the hitspeed and why breaking a row at once was faster in the first place. When you hit a tile, your character gets a tiny punch cooldown, makes sense, right? Other than the player's punch cooldown, each tile also has its own cooldown which gets activated once the tile is hit. This is done so multiple people cannot break the same block simultaneously. The catch here is that for the longest time in GE, the player's own punch cooldown was much shorter than tile's cooldown, meaning when you hit an individual tile, even when your own character's punch cooldown had ended, you would still need to wait until the end of the tile's cooldown ...OR hit an another tile in the meantime the other tile is on cooldown. This caused the meta strategy of hitting a row of blocks at once.
Funnily enough, this secret quicker way to break blocks was never intended to be a feature, it was a bug. I actually fixed this bug once already last year, but people disliked the change so I reverted it back to the original version and kept it as it was. However, I made a crucial mistake when fixing the bug, I never balanced the individual block break speed to be the same as breaking a row. This was a major nerf to farming that was completely unintended (no wonder people were mad at the time). This time I've balanced the fix so breaking individual blocks is MUCH faster (trust me, you'll feel the difference).
The whole reason I'm writing this part of the blog is to lessen the panic on those who are very used to the current farming mechanic. If the feel of farming changes to worse, expect me to fix it with in few days of seeing the complaints.
Next update contains...
18 NEW ITEM QUESTS! 230 NEW CRAFTING RECIPES! Past three days I've been going crazy with adding new item designs. I decided to fill up the item quest section with a lot more quests to give people clear goals to grind towards. I felt like only four item quests was very lackluster amount, and the entire item quest -feature felt like a beta version with not much content. This all will change very soon when the 18 new item quests are added. There are something for everyone: easy quests, hard quests, and extreme quests for those who want a really flashy item to flex with. "But Duckman, what items are quests gonna contain?" Well, you need to wait for the update day and see for yourself ;).
The 230 new crafting items are mostly from mystery boxes, this is because mystery boxes will be removed from the shop after the update and I wanted to make the mystery box items more accessible. Mystery Box rares will move onto their own shop section, each costing 500 000 coins. I still plan to use mystery boxes in future features, so they are not completely dead. But until that happens, the only place you can get mystery boxes are from loot orbs.