Dear Old B1ood

[OndeTv]

I have been following your game for a long time (maybe since the beginning? I do not remember anymore). As the game has grown (albeit slowly), it has become better and better. However, there are still a few very old bugs that still get very frustrating (and a few new ones).

Old bugs which would be great if you could get fixed:

1. Camera clipping/auto rotation in tight spaces. Since movement key input is directly tied into the forward vector of the camera, this gets really problematic when the camera begins to wildly bounce around. This is easy to reproduce even without playing. Just spectate a fish and zoom in as far as you can (easier with larger fish). Does the camera have collision??
   
   
2. Map sides and gravity. Occasionally, if you are too close to the edge of the water/ground intersection at the edge of a map, you will be pulled upwards and outwards rather than being dragged down back into the water.
   
   
3. As your chosen fish gets larger, so does the physics powers. As such sometimes fish "explosions" (aka into meat) get so violent that the meat floats rapidly very far away (sometimes not to be seen again). On rare occasion, these meat explosions will even hit the player fish and often send you flying towards a map edge. Now this wouldn't be more than a QoL problem if it wasn't for the bug above, making it increasingly hard to get back into the water the larger you are because of the weird "up-draft" at the edges. If you just bumped back into the water it wouldn't be more than a quirk. But in its current state, it can mean the death of the fish you have spent the last couple of hours carefully leveling.
   
   Although you are probably aware of these issues, I took a few screenshots today just to make absolutely sure. Here is a lvl 40 mako, which got launched high into the air in the meat explosion after killing "the great white shark" (previously the megalodon i believe??). No amount of camera wiggling could get the poor fella unstuck, and it died of starvation:
   
   • https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486948089
     
   • https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486948116
     
   • https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486948143
     
   • https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2486948187
   
   The last shot is after death obviously. However, as you can see there is not even a meat explosion after dying as usual. I am guessing they fell through the ground.

Now a few (to my knowledge) new bugs:

1. Damage from sea urchins, pufferfish, skates, certain corals (probably many more, but sinc ive spent the past many hours playing the reef map, these are the first i mention):
   This seems to now be percentage based rather than fixed damage. While this makes sense in some cases (like coral damage), it doesn't make much sense in other cases.
   
   This because the larger your fish gets, the less it ought to be bothered by it. Furthermore, the larger your fish gets, the harder it is to avoid f ex sea urchins, simple because the eating sucktion strength become so large making it very hard to not unintentionally do so. And since the damage is percentage base, the player must then spend the next large chunk of food rebuilding the health buffer rather than working on actual xp or eggs.
   
   
2. Passive damage taken (again sea urchins etc) also switches the music clue state from calm to chase, which due to the above renders much of that system useless at some point where you often take some damage simply because you can not avoid it.
   
   
3. Pack alert sound cues on f ex eating a tuna are great. However, at some point in growth they will stop their pack attack, but the sound cue will still play serving no reason other than to confuse (or annoy) the player.
   
   
4. Sometimes, when you are low on food and desperately try to get some, find some and eat, you gain a level but end up with less food than you started with. I am guessing this must be a bug as you ought to be at max non white bar food level when you level up?

Last, but not least, a few QoL issues that would be great to have tweaked a bit:

1. Fry eating aim/area. It can be very hard to eat/aim with some species when starting out. Even more so if the player has several siblings following them (who has perfect aim). Sometimes (with bad luck), it can even lead to starvation simply because food is scarce and siblings eat what is there, or that the mechanic forces the player into dangerous water to get rid of them.
   
   
2. This same mechanic goes for parenting: Sometimes the offspring will simply cause player death because the fry eats what is there before the player gets a chance. This could easily be solved in many ways:
   
   • A small delay on fry feeding
     
   • A parent food buffer mechanic prior to laying the eggs, ensuring enough time to raise the young without starving
     
   • Slower food depletion
   
   
3. Respawn mechanics. There are 2 issues here:
   
   • Sometimes, respawn will happen in an area that is currently being attacked by predators. While the realism of this is good (although harsh), it does make for some poor player experience if the player happens to respawn several times in a row, just to be eaten before being able to hatch.
     
     
   • Map "state" on respawn. By this i mean that the longer a player plays the same map, the more the map will "evolve" because the map isn't reset or repopulated on respawn. This means that some species will almost die out (new spawns can't keep up with predation) as well at apex predators getting exceedingly large, making objectives much harder than intended.
     
     The player can of course fix this by exiting the map and starting the same map again, but the player would only do so if they are aware of this issue happening in the first place.
   
   
4. A very minor issue: Smallest food item spawn positions. As can also be seen in the mako screenshots, various food items also spawn on the ground edges. Performance wise this doesn't really seem to matter. But i am guessing you are only spawning so many of them per area, which means that over time they accumulate on the edges leaving no room for them to spawn in the water. At least that's how it seems to me as a map gets "old" and needs a reset.

I think that is all i had for you. Keep up the good work! Although updates happen very slowly, i always find this game to be a great one to come back to once in a while :)

Cheers

[ALPHA7EVEN]

ambush ability is also broken and so is the thrash ability.

[piotrkan7]

Wow man, very nice of you to take time and list those issues. I hope they'll notice!