Hello everyone!
It's time for another devlog for our upcoming game, "The Fisherman".
In this second article, we'll go over our market research, references, environment moodboards and the mock-up of the fishing minigame.
From now on, we will send you weekly updates on the project's progress. We'll aim to be more relaxed in the way we talk to you in the future months, so we can be a little more authentic in our approach and also be more connected to the community rather than the extremely professional documents (like what we did in the last devlog). We are excited to share with you the progress we have made so far and what we plan to achieve in the coming weeks.
Say hello to our team 😄
To avoid the impression that we are merely robots behind the keyboard, we should start to introduce you to the team that will be working on this project, as we did not do so in our first post on the game.
The Loading Studios team, in charge of designing this project, is made up of 3 students who wanted to take part in this North Seas adventure! Our team includes Vasco Oliveira as Game Designer, Tiago Leitão as Programmer, and Diana Pereira as Game artist.
Market research 💹
Obviously developing games is fun, but if we want to be relevant in stores, we need to conduct some market research. And we decided to conduct a market research focused on the competitiveness we have in the market rather than a worldwide market research (which is full of AAA games that we can´t make having just 3 persons in the team). This way, we can compare projects that have a comparable background to ours, whether it's the size of their teams and their experience, the amount of money they had to develop the projects, or even the market on which they focused.
Keeping in mind that one of the pillars of our project is the Portuguese culture and tradition of cod fishing, we can begin to identify some of our portuguese national competitors who speak a little about our traditions, such as the videogame Careto (MA Studios, 2023).
Careto
Another Portuguese project that ends up focusing on narrative and exploration of the environment and using gameplay systems comparable to what we hope to achieve in our project is the videogame Lousã: My Father once told me (Rio Studios, 2022).
Lousã: My Father once told me
Moving away from the national videogames market and into the indie industry with a strong presence on Itch.io, we can also mention A Red Boat (PirxOS, 2022), which, because of its top-down 3D view and artistic style, has become a reference and competitor to our project.
A Red Boat
These titles are some of our primary market references, and they will assist us realize what we can do with the team, budget and development time that we have!
References 📝
Now you are probably thinking - "They don't have any AAA game research or references??"
Yes, in fact we do, but they are simply some titles that can provide us some references for game elements or art, for exemple. Cause as a team we know that we are not aiming to make something of that magnitude. But, if you're interested, we'll show you some of them right below.
Aside from video games, we are using several books as references to learn more about the history of the codfish and the lives of the Portuguese fishermen.
Environment Moodboards 🖌
Since our game will be in first-person view and set on board the real-life ship "Maria da Glória" for the majority of the time (except for the fishing minigame, which will be in top-down 3D), we'll need some visual references to be as immersed in the ship as possible. Photographs of the interiors of Portuguese fishing boats from the 1940s were difficult to come by, but we did our best!
Additionally, it is vital to note that the portuguese fisherman did not fish the cod in the conventional way. Despite having a big ship (Maria da Glória), the crew members set out on their own to fish in little boats called "Dóris." This boat will be present throughout the fishing minigame, and it has its own moodboard.
Minigame mock-up 🎣
Talking about the fishing minigame, we can show you some early mock-ups of this game feature. This is a small phase of the sea exploration when the player will be in his "Dóris" and his main task will be to catch the codfish. The minigame is actually simple and serves to demonstrate some of the day-to-day activities of these fisherman on the sea.
That's it for this devlog!
Thank you for reading, and we hope you will continue with us on this adventure over the Nordic seas as a fisherman. Stay tuned for more updates!
