Week 7 of making my fishing game (almost) entirely with AI

This update comes 2 days early for a simple reason that I have some things to do in upcoming 2-3 days which means nothing will progress from today at least until Tuesday. And this one is the longest video yet, almost 4 minutes long because I wanted to show all the new things I added as well as write about them (It is compressed so that it can get under 1GB from original 2GB file, so it might look a bit worse than it really is, for fullscreen in game images I will leave a link), I wanted this week update to be more like progress report of a sorts, since workflow, costs and similar questions are answered in previous updates. I will still write answers to some most asked questions.

First complete rebuild of water, I know people praised water a lot in previous updates and loved how it looks, but I feel like this water might even be better, while much more optimised. Previous shaders had more than 2000 lines of code with comments scattered across multiple files and my Macbook was really struggling with it (14FPS). While filming now I still struggle with FPS, I can at least without filming now tesst play the game at around 27fps on everything on max, which is good, considering everything on max is basically 33MP image that does scaling on 200% and nobody ever will play it like that. So I feel like optimisation did it's job, tested it on friends PC and he was easily running 130fps+ so that should not be a problem.

New shaders for water also give much better reflections, especially at night where moon light is really beautiful imo, which previous water didn't have.

I added small details also, like graveyard island in bottom right corner with a small truck driving over the bridge there and going back into the woods, since my game is placed in 1920ish period, I wanted one of 2 lights on the truck to flicker and make it look like it turns on and off really fast. Small detail but I just felt like it. Added waterfall to one part, not sure if I showed it in the video though, and also lighting and weather system (right now can only be triggered via "Dev panel", but it will be in the game as weather is something I wanted from the very start). Lightings that can randomly hit either tree or into the ocean (which kinda required a full day of research how lighting hitting water looks like in real life, because obviously not a lot of such pictures exist and even those that do, show lightings hitting water in far distance so I couldn't figure out it too precise, but I did my best).

Dolphins and Whale can now randomly appear in deep ocean, but since we are in coastal waters in the video it has to be triggered by dev panel. Those models (for Dolphins and Whale) as well as Cargo ship that can be seen in the video was done on Tripo 3D as well as their textures. Astra creates models in blenders that are simple enough (like truck, graveyard, houses etc). Fable 5.1 and Opus are doing logic, in game systems, research on other games, connection between in game systems. Basically almost everything is done by Fable 5.1 and Opus (depending on how hard I feel the job is), while modelling and graphic part is done by Astra and Tripo 3D in case of complex models.

I listened to feedbacks and fixed destination line to calculate real path, not being straight line, removed AI generated portraits of the character models in the harbour and made them 3D renders of real characters on the loop (I do not plan to use voice lines in the game, so them talking was not really necessary in my opinion, but can change in the future). Somewhat fixed map look, it still isn't great, ink shader is not able to picture real house and tree models on the islands so I had to generate assets as PNG images and put them on the map, which honestly doesn't look good for me so that will definitely be polished).

Starting zone I feel is fully done now, what is left is probably to add fog (so exploration feels like a big part of the game, since I want exploration to be a thing also alongside fishing). Polish some other things, work on sounds (which are very primitive now, only few ambients and background music).

How much did it cost: So far probably around 700$ on 2xClaude 200$ plan, one Astra 100$ plan, and several other subscriptions (eleven labs for SFX etc...)

Will I release game somewhere: I still don't know, I do it as a hobby for now and it started to take a big chunk out of my free time, but I really do enjoy building it, I will know more probably by the end of October based on where I'm with the game and if I can continue justifying the costs of it.

How was ocean made: I know this question popped a lot for previous version of the ocean that was now scrapped for this new version, but honestly it's just a lot of repetition of generating mockup in chatGPT, asking it to replicate, and then just straight up telling Claude (Or Astra if you use it) what you want to improve, for me it was "I want moon lighting on the right side, I want it less aggressive" etc... eventually you will get it right, while I use editors for most of in game changes to manually move and tweak things instead of endlessly tell it to AI, I feel like this thing (water shaders) have to be done by AI entirely, because with editors I only made it worse. Maybe somebody can make it work (editors for ocean) I couldn't.

What is my workflow: As funny as it sounds I basically "roleplay" (not really like "hey I'm CEO here, do as I say but more in a sense of setup) a game publishing company where I have one "manager" which is Fable 5.1 and ask it to send messages to different sessions (which serves as entire team). So you have "Fishing system Session" or "Sound design Session" etc, to not message each one separately I use one session that you can just tell "send message to other sessions". Astra is now used for graphical work (I still find fable better in other things other than modelling and visual parts, but in visual things...).