Oct 22, 2015

Fishing Planet - Olcha

Dear Community,

With this post we’ll start explaining the different aspects of Fishing Planet.

And the first topic is about the indicators in our game.

Fishing Planet has vast and deep mechanics within the fishing engine. We heard a lot of feedback about our game and found that many of you don’t understand what all the indicators are about. They speak out to you, but you don’t always understand the language.

First, I’ll tell you about the very concept of indicators. In real-life fishing an experienced angler receives a lot of information from the rod itself. Feeling the force applied to rod, controlling the line tension by gently touching it, looking closely at the rod tip to understand what’s going on with the lure in the water, feeling the fish attacks and strikes and instantly reacting on them. If forced impulse is applied to the rod, a fisherman will instantly react and will try to damper it.

Now, in the game it’s impossible for the player to feel the tension that way. However, in order to make a good fishing simulator we had to give a similar impression and inform the players. The in-Game indicator is telling you about the force. It can also alert you about some unwanted conditions you are about to encounter. A quick reaction can save your tackle from breaking or prevent a fish escape.

You should also know about some good and bad things that can happen to the line. Imagine you hooked a fish and started fighting it. While the hook is in the fish’s mouth, you should maintain the line tension to avoid losing the fish off the hook. On the other hand, if you apply too much force, you can just tear the fish’s lip and it will escape. Obviously, the fish does not enjoy being hooked. It will try to break loose by swimming towards you or jumping out of the water. It’ll pull, shake its head, and thrust in all directions to escape.

The picture below illustrates the key states of the indicator that all players should understand. The idea is simple: indicator stays empty when no force is applied to tackle. This can happen when line is slacked or there is no hooked fish. This is shown in picture 1 and can be seen most of the time.

The second picture is showing a partially filled indicator. When indicator looks like this - you are in the safe zone. You will not lose your fish and you will not break or damage you tackle. This is ideal and most desirable state.

Picture 3 shows an empty indicator with its bottom glowing yellow. This can be regarded as “first warning”. Line tension is too low. Start reeling in and/or pulling the rod up to create some tension. If you do not create line tension, after some time the indicator’s bottom will start glowing red like in picture 4. If this will happens - there is a risk of fish escape.

The same goes for the tension created by the fish itself. Indicator warns you about the force of your fish fight when its top starts glowing yellow (5). You should try to avoid creating excessive tension by pointing your rod down, discontinue reeling in, decreasing the drag force, etc. If your fight continues to be excessively fierce, the indicator top starts glowing red (6). That means you are under the risk of a fish escape because you’re pulling on the fish too hard.

If the indicator is fully filled like in picture 7 - then some of the tackle is overloaded. You need to decrease the tension to avoid tackle damage. In the game you can break your line, reel or rod. When this happens, you’ll lose your lure or hook along with some line. You will also lose the item that gets broken. So it is strongly advised to make sure the weakest part of all your tackle is the fishing line. This will protect you from breaking your reel or rod, which would be far worse and more costly. Typically, the tackle with the lowest load params is under the highest risk of breaking. The indicator is fully filled when any part of your tackle becomes overloaded.

The load can be decreased by changing the angle between the rod and the line and by decreasing the drag force. This should be done quickly enough, as your reaction time is limited and overload can easily result in breakage.
There are also secondary indicators showing you which part of tackle is overloaded.

As you can see, secondary indicators are highlighted when the rod or reel are overloaded. If only line is overloaded, no secondary indicator will be highlighted.

Each secondary indicator has two states. State 1 means that the Rod was overloaded during the current fish fight. Durability of this rod will be decreased. Indicator number 2 means that the Rod is critically overloaded and it will be broken unless relieved of the load quickly enough.
Secondary indicators number 3 and 4 have the same meaning for reel.

This pretty much covers everything we wanted to tell you guys about the indicators, tackle overload and breakage. I hope it’ll be useful for your fishing experience.
Let me know if you have any other questions. And stay tuned for more posts about other cool things in Fishing Planet.

Oct 22, 2015

Developer's journal: Indicators

Fishing Planet - Olcha