The fish cooking branch is finally complete.
After a ridiculous amount of reworks, fixes, and art generation, all 40 fish recipes and their blueprints are finished. There’s still plenty of testing ahead, but the full system is now in place.
Fish can be butchered into mince, chunks, and fillets, with the available cuts improving as your butchering skill grows. Each species keeps its own attributes and flavour profile, while the form determines which recipes you can make. The meat also uses shared art masks tinted to match the fish species, so we don’t need a separate drawing for every cut of every fish.
Cooking is built around actual weight, preparation methods, ingredient combinations, and seasoning. A recipe can accept different fish species and valid preparation methods, while the ingredients determine the final flavour and attribute distribution. There are also separate rules for Pearl and Mutant fish, giving rare catches a real purpose in the kitchen.
The important part is that we now have a complete reference for future cooking branches. Meat is next, using the same foundation with mince, steaks, and large cuts.
Also
Giving Runelight’s People a Past
Most of my recent work has been on the people of Runelight. I've been going through their backgrounds, personalities, relationships, professions, and the things they actually want from the world.
I wanted to get beyond “this is the cook” or “this is the fisherman.” Who were they before Runelight? Why did they end up here? Who do they trust, who do they avoid, and what are they hiding? What would they do if the player never showed up?
I've also been working out their specializations and progression, so getting to know someone can gradually reveal more than just another shop or a new dialogue option. Some characters have a lot to teach you. Others have plans of their own, and helping them doesn't necessarily mean you understand what you're helping with.
A big part of this has been connecting their stories to each other. Two people can remember the same event differently, know different parts of the truth, or have a relationship the player knows nothing about. I want those connections to matter, rather than having every NPC exist in their own little bubble.
There's still a lot to implement and test, but the background work is giving me a much clearer picture of who these people are and how their stories fit together. It's been one of the more interesting parts of development lately.
I also see people starting to show up - rarely, but they do drop into the game, which is great. It’s only now that I’ve realized just how far from ready it is to show to anyone. But despite that, I’ve made it mobile-friendly (landscape mode) of course, it’s still very rough, but the world is taking shape.
If the game or its world has piqued your interest, feel free to ask anything on Discord. It’s hard for me to gauge the difficulty level since I’m the one creating it, and things look different from a player's perspective.
See you in Runelight.