《Refished》Devlog #17：抱歉沉默，说明发生了什么

First, the truth

I owe you an apology. Almost three months passed since the last devlog and I didn’t say a word. The reason is simple. Personal problems and, above all, school. I didn’t have enough time. It wasn’t a lack of motivation, it was a lack of hours.

Sorry for the silence. You deserved this.

And here I bring you the devlog

What happened these months, week by week.

August

Week 1, the game already existed, the repo didn’t

The game already existed. What changed is that I finally uploaded it to GitHub, to my repo. All that work was loose, with no backup, so the first days were just settling the house in. Map, fish, materials, first fixes.

And the confession. The work from late July was lost because the game didn’t live in any repo yet. Yes, it was lost. It hurt quite a bit. The lesson stuck. Now progress gets saved every day.

Week 2, the week of the broken menus

The interface fell apart as soon as you navigated. The camera died between screens, the map froze, clicks didn’t respond. A whole week fixing the first thing a new player touches.

Weeks 3 and 4, survival, missions and languages

The Great map finally got its own list of 22 species for Survival, with the live-born and the egg-born properly separated. The Whale Shark got real missions to hunt. The game learned seven languages at once. And we fixed a bug that locked out anyone starting from zero.

September

Week 1, invisible fixes

A week going after bugs you don’t see but you feel. They piled up while you played and eventually the match broke by itself. None of this shows in a screenshot, but you notice it after 40 minutes of play.

Week 2, the far world wakes up

Before, the fish that were far away stayed frozen, like a photo. Now they keep swimming, eating and growing even when you’re not looking. You come back and the ecosystem continued exactly where you left it. For me, that’s the change you feel the most when you play.

Weeks 3 and 4, every species with its purpose

The Narwhal and the Cuttlefish had no objectives at all. Picking them meant having nothing to do. Not anymore. Each one has its own hunting missions. And the art now generates itself, every fish with its own color and its own silhouette.

October

Week 1, the cleanup week

A purge of old bugs we had been dragging since August. And another confession. We tried to reorganize the code on the inside, saw it couldn’t hold up, and undid it the same day. It sounds like a defeat, but sometimes letting go is also moving forward.

Where we are

The project is going through a restructuring stage. Along the way we’re working on the splashes and ripples when a fish breaks the surface, the plants that bend when a fish swims past, and a river that finally has a current.

And I owe you an honest word about the update. I announced it for late October and I don’t think it’s going to make it. I’ll do everything I can to make it happen, but I’d rather say it now than promise and not deliver.

Thanks

To the team that’s still there, thank you. And to you, who keep putting up with us.

I promise the next one won’t take this long.

Refished · v0.15.4 · j1mmyy.itch.io/refished