Sharks and Minnows News

FIRST MAJOR UPDATE RELEASED

Several new areas and achievements have been added to the game, nearly doubling its length. Many of these new areas are secret, so be sure to check parts of the map that were previously locked-off. I highly recommend starting a new game with as little information as possible to get the full experience.

There have been multiple minor updates since the last announcement that addressed bugs or added quality of life features. For example, players may now choose between holding to crouch/sprint or just using the input to toggle between them.

Several missing sounds have also been added.


NEW LANGUAGE OPTIONS (Experimental)

An experimental language selector has been added to the bottom right of the options menu. The first five languages are: Chinese, German, French, Spanish, and Japanese. I have native speakers for every featured language, except French. They will be reviewing the rough translations and looking for things that need to be changed. In the meantime, I felt that many players would appreciate the option to play a mostly translated version.

There are a few phrases that haven't been translated yet, and changing the language doesn't seem to immediately refresh the options menu. Meaning it has to be closed and then reopened to see the fully translated menus.

I have created a thread for feedback on translations here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/3446200/discussions/0/689741428867389183/


NEW PLAYTHROUGH STRONGLY RECOMMENDED

If you were in the middle of a playthrough, it would be best to start a new game. I have made efforts to keep this update as non-destructive to partial playthroughs as possible, but I'm sure that there will still be issues for several users.

In some extreme cases, users reported being unable to progress beyond the EULA. In that case, launch in Safe Mode and click the button that will manually delete your save file. If that doesn't work, please send me your crash report so that I can figure out this issue.


MINOR UPDATES

In case you haven't played since launch, several minor updates have been pushed that have improved the game significantly. Several areas that were previously bland or frustrating have gotten overhauls.

Other features include:

• Full controller support
  
• Rebindable Keys
  
• Hidden Items to reduce soft-lock scenarios
  
• Performance Improvements
  
• Support for low-end hardware
  
• Safe Mode for users who experience crashes upon opening the game
  

THANK YOU

Thank you again for playing. If you don't know, several of my former students helped with things such as textures, sound effects, and animations. I did not think many people would play, so seeing numerous channels post gameplay has been very surreal. Even channels that I used to watch when I was a student have given it a shot.

Most of you probably don't know that I did absolutely zero marketing for this game. It didn't even have proper social media accounts at launch. All the visibility has come from people sharing it with their friends and fans. If people hadn't been so generous about sharing the game, this update never would have happened. So thank you again.

I plan on adding two more major updates. A lore update and a post-game update.

At the moment, I will be shifting most of my development time to a smaller project that I plan on finishing within three months. After that, I expect to be back to creating more Sharks and Minnows content.

While the game has been completable with a controller since launch, the menus have not been navigable with them. As of the most recent update, they are now.

This should hopefully fix the infuriating issue that many users were experiencing where Steam would offer to "map inputs" for the game automatically, which consistently made the game unplayable as it overwrote the proper ones that had been set up.

I was able to fully navigate my game with a gen 1 DS4 controller and I was not prompted by Steam about remapping. If you are having issues with ANY controller please let me know and I will attempt to fix it.


You are currently able to bind any non-gamepad input to any action you'd like. Inputs are not currently restricted beyond that, so you could hypothetically bind every single action to the Space Bar. Since this is a deliberate action by users, I don't feel that it needs to be restricted. Click the "Reset" button on the keyboard options page if you really screw your bindings up.

I would like to implement controller remapping in the future as well.


Now work will shift to the content update for October. The initial plan was to release a lore update before then but at this point it seems likely that they'll be releasing at the same time.


Thanks again for playing and recommending the game! I haven't watched any streams or playthroughs in over a month but I put one on while this update was uploading and its still fun to watch someone experience the game for the first time.

This is the first and likely largest performance optimization update.

CPU usage should be significantly reduced, and RAM on my low-end test device had dropped from 1200MB down to just under 1000MB.

This rework required almost the entire project to be modified in some way. Three days of QA caught several new issues that I hadn't accounted for as a result. If you encounter a bug, please leave a detailed description of it on this post or on the Steam forums.

There will be another performance update sometime before the October content update.

Keybinds and controller support remain practically finished except for some very annoying snags. The entire game has been played through on an XInput and Dualshock 4 device. However, since the menus are not navigable with controllers, Steam will not allow us to mark the game as having "controller support."

That would be fine, except that the Steam overlay will note that it's not officially supported, and prompt users about having Steam "do its best to bind controls." Which ruins our properly-bound implementation.

If you are trying to play through on a controller, decline Steam's rebinding offer when booting up the game if you are running into issues.

Once controllers are properly supported this will not be an issue.

A localization update will be done either alongside the October update or shortly after.

There will be a "lore" update before the October update.

One area of the game was very inconsistent. Players would either get stuck in a loop for several minutes or find the exit so quickly that they hardly experienced anything. The major loop has been removed and a new path has been added that will hopefully keep players engaged more consistently.

Focus has also heavily shifted to performance. When the game was first conceptualized, there was no content beyond the pool itself, not even locker rooms. Now that the game has expanded, there is a noticeable performance drop. I believe this can be at least partially remedied over the weekend by reworking how areas beyond the pool are handled.

Keybinds would be implemented right now but they unfortunately are only bindable once the game has started. Meaning that if you open the options menu before clicking "Start" you are unable to see any bound keys. If I cannot get the "proper" solution to this figured out I will scrape together my own.

Controller support would be formally added right now if it were possible to navigate the menu with one. No matter what I do, I cannot navigate my menu with the controller I have on-hand. I will order one that utilizes X-Input and see if that will remedy the situation.

The game has a cold-open, which I am very happy with. However, this means that certain features such as ray-tracing and reflections are enabled by default. This can cause crashes on certain hardware, including a large amount of AMD cards.

You will now find the option for "safe mode" when launching on Steam. This will set the visual effects to their minimum quality so that you can enable or disable certain features as you wish.

Please update your drivers. For many gamers, this is something common and routine. But I have found that a surprising number of people do not know that they should be doing this. If you have never updated your GPU drivers, you will find significant performance increases in a number of games after doing so.

Other than this, I suspect that memory issues could be causing crashes. If you are still experiencing crashes even after launching in safe mode, please post your system's installed RAM. I have found what I believe will be a substantial memory improvement but I will not be able to implement it until next month as it will require extensive testing.


Finally, keybinds and formal controller support are nearly complete. I am running into some very frustrating issues on the back-end. I would really like to have both of those features implemented in the next few days.