Crabmeat news & patch notes

Hello Fellow Penal Colony Workers,

I'm heading to Korea in August to exhibit Crabmeat at BIC so I wanted to get another round of improvements in before that and continue to improve whats already there.

More Localisation Improvements

• Journal entries now have fully integrated localisation, so instead of a baked texture in english i'm rendering it all in engine with localised text. This was hard to get looking good for all languages, especially those that aren't mutually intelligible with English so please notify me if anything looks odd or is hard to read.

• The Patriotic/Not Patriotic text on the crab hopper is now localised

  • NOTE: This is using google translated copy as I wanted to turn this around quickly. Please notify me if it seems like it did a poor job. Don't blame my awesome localisers if it's bad, that's on me.

CPU Rendering Improvements (Minor)

The game is CPU bound on most machines due to the high physics overhead which is hard to optimise any further. There was still some blood to squeeze out of the rendering stone however so I fixed that where I could.

• Fixed some materials not batching together on the deck

• Reduced map rendering polycount by 3/4 of the prior total

• Optimised rendering for wiring around ship

Bug Fixes

• Fixed contract not updating after signing during opening cutscene (I think this got broken in the last update)

Hello Fellow Penal Colony Workers,

So after Bitsummit and watching players for 3 days straight I had some clarity around some issues with the game I wanted to address as well as noticed some smaller stuff I wanted to tackle.

Navigation/Input Change

Thanks to our discord community for helping find a bunch of edge cases and provide feedback to refine this.

• Allow the player to click on a significantly larger area to move including walls up to a certain height from the ground, hotspots still take priority if they are selected

• The true destination will be previewed as a low opacity footstep

• Hotspot navigation reuses this and also shows the destination preview

• Footstep marker now changes to a slightly animated icon when player is running and will be marginally brighter, hopefully this makes the state distinction clearer

*This change could still use fine tuning, so please report any funnyness you notice with this

Balance

• Added an extra ammo box to starting weapon locker

• Increased player run speed from 3.5 > 3.6

• Enemies now move slightly slower when giving chase to a fleeing player

Localisation

I tried to tackle the worst offenders here, there are obviously still places where localisation is missing (ie. hopper sorting decal) but I wanted to get this gameplay critical ones fully translated rather than the half baked solution I had in 0.4.00

• Contract localisation now imbedded directly and updates for each language rather than being only updated on mouse over

• Large direction signs now have custom decals for each language rather than requiring mouse over to translate

General Improvements

• More steamdeck text size increases (We've got the steam deck green tick now!)

• Added another clock to the ship

• Added "hold {Interact} to sign} text next to contract signing

• Bulkhead switch light now blinks while active

• Prepare to use item and use item tutorials now SHOULD only appear once per item and will appear once for every item so they can act as a reminder each time you pick up a new item for the first time

• Lowered priority of open inventory tutorial so it's likely to appear after you've experimented with the blowtorch not before

• Fixed gamepad item highlighting in inventory overlapping with item descriptions

• Railing around the ship now uses simpler colliders and the thin top rails will no longer block line of sight for movement and rendering

• Ship damage nodes placement tweaked to prevent them spawning inside things making them hard to see and repair

• Fixed tiny hole on ship railing

• Fixed traps slightly visually overlapping on trap loader

Hello Fellow Penal Colony Workers,

My apologies for the delay, the state has been working me hard and this patch ended up being much more work than anticipated.

Future of Crabmeat

This is the last planned feature/content update for the game. I have been working towards getting the Steam Deck green tick which I believe I'm quite close to. Expect future patches to be improvements to UI for said Steam Deck approval and small bug fixes to resolve new issues introduced that I missed in testing.

This is a Save breaking update!

Flagging this upfront, I had to increase the save version of the game and was unable to write a compatibility tool to move saves forward due to some of the changes.

What's New?

Localisation

The game is now playable in 7 Languages including, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish and Russian. The majority of text elements in the game will appear fully localised when playing in a non-english language. Some elements of the game remain in english when localisation is enabled and will display a localised string when moused over and a small segment are left untranslated like decorative signs that don't serve a mechanical purpose.

Gamepad Support

There is now full gamepad support, yes it's still click to move. While i still think mouse is the best way to play, this lets the game work on Steam Deck out of the box and with most gamepads. I made the slightly counter intuitive choice to put "Look" on the left stick by default. I found with the other actions you perform this is the most comfortable. Gamepad Inputs are rebindable same as keyboard and mouse.

Narrative Notes/Keys Tweaks

Notes have been visually improved and the content has been revised slightly with additional notes, keys added. This is not a fundamental revision, more of an edit that should have been done prior to launch but I simply did not have time.

Binoculars Change

Binoculars are now a full item, this means they work like a regular item and can be raised/lowered and "used" to zoom further in and out. This is a bit of a tradeoff but I feel like it makes for a more consistent experience and makes them significantly more useful as binoculars as the zoom level is substantially increased. This was another change I had planned before launch but just didn't get to.

Afterburner Change

The afterburner now has a dedicated engine unit in the lower deck. It will appear on the ship's computer map and can be damaged by attackers.

Full Patch Notes

Warnings

• Save breaking update, saves from older versions of the game will be discarded on boot

Improvements

• Localisation Added

• Gamepad Support

• Narrative notes polished

• Binoculars are now a functional item and not a hotkey

• Afterburner now has dedicated engine more like the ships engine

• UI has been revised to read better on smaller screens, handle new languages better and support gamepad navigation

• Localisers Added to Credits

• Minor Pacing and Polish pass on final encounter

• Added more rare fish

• Signature signing now has visible pen (this is partially for gamepad support)

• Engine update to Unity 6.3 from 6.1

• Paralomis now has two attack animations it's randomly picks between to create more audio and visual variety

• General optimisation to ship rendering and physics but it's unlikely to be noticed

• Palette swaps added to brachys as you get closer to your goal

Fixes

• Fixed some ugliness on ship snow mesh

• Fixed AI spawn path that would cause them to get stuck still

• Fixed bug in jumping attackers

• Fixed % collected on crab trap being incorrect in a rare context

• Fixed deeply embarrassing spelling mistake

• Fixed "Exit Hotspot" tutorial in How To Play menu looking janky

• Prevent screens rendering in more cases when they aren't visible for to reduce cpu overhead

• Fixed bird particles scale not being uniform

• Fixed blow torch end use sound bug

Audio

• Audio Pass on final encounter to beef up the ambience

• Unique audio added for using keypad

• Fixed after burner sound playing after engine shutdown

• Metal surface footstep sound broken into two types

• Unique Pick up sound added to binoculars

• Added an engine blowout sound when the engine is shutdown

What's Next?

I've started prototyping development live at twitch or you can join the discord to chat with me and the community. Thank you to all the players, streamers, youtubers, everyone who has left a review (even people asking for WASD, I still love you). It's been pretty wild to make something this big solo and whilst Crabmeat hasn't been a huge success it's sales will give me time to tinker on the next project without having to immedietly rush out and look for funding.

Happy Crabbing,

Nick

Just pushing out a small one to hopefully fully resolve this steam cloud issue.

Fixes

• Actually updated Steam Plugin and validated a fix for it not initing properly and preventing saves from loading from the cloud location

  • If after you get this patch your save is now incorrect it is likely because your save is in the non-cloud location, you can copy it across from DRIVE\\Users\\USERNAME\\AppData\\LocalLow\\Searching Interactive\\Crabmeat\\ > DRIVE\\Program Files (x86)\\Steam\\userdata\\STEAMUSERID\\3671850

• Fixed key unlocking logic not using the mouse position so dragging wasn't tracing the scene properly.

Improvements

• In progress pass to improve steam deck compatability, UI size text should be unified and on deck specifically the text size is increased. This is WIP but i made sure there were no regressions so the progress could come in.

Happy Crabbing, Nick

Hello Fellow Penal Colony Workers,

This time a mid sized update fixing some issues raised by the community and also addressing feedback around the time limit.

Time Extension

Some players have asked for an "Infinite Mode" and I've also observed players running out of time due to getting distracted (ie. streamers) or just generally not understanding how to play efficiently. I don't believe infinite play is within the spirit of the setting or suits the scope of content available. However, bricking a save due to running out of time isn't a great experience.

So I have added an in universe way to extend your debt (marginally) and time (significantly) once per run, when the timer is close to expiring. Don't worry about not finding it, it will trigger on it's own.

Minor Features

• Added invert Y mouse option

• Added controls tab separate to game tab for input config

Improvements

• Updated directive page 1 to make optimal play a bit clearer (ie. spread your traps out between fishing zones)

• Tweaked crane instructions and directive page 4 to improve direction around the same issue

• Ocean looks better on the underside when you drown

• Replaced anchor bay with proper anchor mechanism visual

• Fixed popping shape of text UI backing in cutscenes and tweaked sprite to handle deforming better

Fixes

• Fixed game over state not being saved and loaded correct if you returned to menu after re-docking in main docks

• When transferring a save from the demo to the full game, any progress towards achievements would not be saved. Now the game stores the progress separate to saves, and this is validated on booting the full game to trigger achievements if they are not unlocked and should be. Unfortunately, it's not retroactive but anyone who plays the demo>>fulll game flow from now on will have this resolved.

• Improved tank readout panel blinking lighting sync and brightness during end game sequence

• Fixed two issues in code causing bait in a trap to being consumed when it didn't need to be

  • Fixed a fish that was incorrectly tagged as a crab causing an issue with

  • Fixed a bug where the trap would consume it's bait if it was in the water long enough even if it doesn't collect anything

• Fixed slightly outdated snow model

• Fixed clip height for player when drowning

• Fixed player breath particle appearing on roof of cabin when you spawn in

• Made paralomis stomp sound more audible

• Made Ocean ambience (near sides of boat), more audible

Thanks again for playing, if you wanna support the game and help it grow, please leave a review on steam or share it with your friends.

Happy Crabbing,

Nick

This is a potential fix for issues with Steam not connecting when the game boots up.

If this fix sticks it will resolve save files not being loaded reliably and fix achievements not popping reliably. This has been an issue since launch so I really hope it works.

-Nick

Hey Everyone,

Just a small update addressing some more issues. I had to spend a lot of today on marketing work so I wasn't able to get as much done as I would have liked.

• Updated the bait refill station icon on the map to no provide ambiguious directions

• Made the bait refill panel button brighter when blinking

• Added a sound to the bait refill panel button when it's active

• Improved Brachy/Paralomis surface rotations when they're on a path

• Fixed a bug in the audio occlusion (Only on some sounds) that caused some popping when they started playing

I gotta wrap early but I'll push the same patch out to the demo tomorrow.

It is also live for the demo.

Happy Crabbing

-Nick

Hey Everyone, Thanks to everyone who's already picked up the game. If you haven't already please consider leaving a review, it helps a ton. Here's just a few fixes for lingering issues and a tiny bit of polish. Where it's relevant these changes have also been patched in the demo

Improvements

• Made debt randomised, now it's unique to each player

• Return to menu now fades to black instead of instantly transitioning

• Can now pause slightly earlier during fade to/from black, pause is only locked during boss sequence and when the screen is 100% black ie. a load

Fixes

• Added a soft fix for weird nav if you try to go up the deck stairs while the boss claw is down, it's not perfect but it helps

• Fixed missing colliders in world making the player fall as they're being dragged in final cutscene

• Fixed refill station not handling save if you have refilled but haven't left yet

• Replaced buoy animation on winch with one that is more stable and doesn't have the rotation/position race condition the old one did

Hello Fellow Penal Colony Workers, It's finally out, you can pick up Crabmeat now. Please leave a review on the store page if you do, every bit helps.

Thanks to everyone who checked out the demo, gave feedback, sent bug reports or has been helping test in the discord. I'm going to keep my eye out for bugs or issues to fix in the short term, so please report anything you run into as the full game has obviously had less testing than the demo content. As for the future of the game many people have requested both gamepad support and localisation. Both are possibilities based on how the game does but right now I can only say I'd like to get them done. Happy Crabbing, Nick

Hey Everyone, This is just another small patch, focused on recently polish work and bringng the demo build into alignment with the full game. Speaking of the full game release is very soon, check the store page to see the time in your timezone.

Improvements

• Updated inventory icons to better match games style, and more accurately reflect the 3d model

• Some art polish around the ship

• Made map boundaries blend into the actual level geo and applied a gradient style so it's not dead flat, design goal is to increase ambiguity and improve aesthetic appearance

• Move marker now scales it's clipping so it's more visible on far glancing angles

Fixes

• Pause is now blocked by the Fader, this does introduce a little clunkyness as it's fading out/in but also prevents the pause screen from being visibly full black.

• More optimised culling zone detector 30% reduction in traces required on average

• Fixed issues with nav around bulkhead doors

• Fixed an AI pathing bug if they started a path on top of a nav link joint ie. bottom or top of the ladder

• Reduced player X axis tilt inherited from camera from 50% to 25%, this greatly improves the camera clipping through walls issue since the player will no longer lean as far forward (this doesn't affect actual camera rotation, just the procedural animation on the player body)

• Fixed the position of some audio occlusion nodes in the bridge that were inside the walls (might have caused some subtle bugs on the few sounds that use the occlusion system)

• Fixed cursed UI mouse over text appearing without a BG bug (very subtle but you would have seen the text appear 1 frame before the bg)

• Made limbs or joints (crabs included) that get triggered by the toss gate increase mass significantly so they pull their attached bits down with them more easily, this should further prevent things getting stuck after triggering on hopper toss gate

• Some minor physics and rendering performance optimisations

Happy Crabbing

Hey All, This is just a quick update to fix some bugs we've found through testing and watching streams.

• Brachys now attempt a small backup when player is super close and they're not mid attack

• Brachys respond to gunshots nearby

• Fixed double click lock up (only noticeable if you hammered the double click)

• Fixed Brachys getting too close if they're approaching vertically

• Fixed brachys triggering aggro stop if they lose line of sight

• Made bait supply button blink if it can be used

• Added new map prop

• Fixed super busted volumetric lights on crab tank and colour/brightness desync

• Fixed not being able to draw if you hold LMB before signature UI appears

• Fixed Ladder text display not including repair state info and broken flag

• Fixed ladder not being used if you try and path down the bottom from above

Hey Everyone,

Time for a medium sized update. Yet again we've jumped some version numbers as I've been testing with the community. Again the focus is mostly on stability and performance since launch is getting ever closer.

Save Update

Unfortunately this build does need to break saves in order to move to a more stable system going forward. This comes with me discovering some issues with how I was separating saves from the demo vs the full game and transferring demo saves to the full game.

• Added a save trigger to the demo when you succeed (so completed saves are actually where you last stopped and not when your last auto save was)

• Fixed game not handling save reload properly when exiting to menu or reloading to menu from death

Opening Flow A new opening flow has been added. The changes are designed to help direct you a bit more as you leave the cabin for the first time and get to the bridge to exit the docks. This should reduce some of the learning pains for new players.

Bindings and Input

• All primary actions are now bindable (this includes unbound actions like quick turn L/R)

• All inputs now have icons instead of text displays, this applies to the binding UI and the tutorials

  • This was part of my investigatory work into gamepad / steamdeck support which is ongoing

• Added mouse over readable versions for instruction panels, this is disablable in the game options

Physics

• Physics reduced from 100fps to 80fps

• Max frame delta changed from 3fps to 15fps

• These changes decrease physics death spirals in worse case scenarios (ie. lots of crabs in the hopper) and improve base CPU performance

Improvements

• Fully removed boat damage klaxon (it was already playing only in some contexts before) the collision sounds are audible in all contexts and this should remove the ambiguity for the "did this collision cause any hull damage" because yes they all do.

• Tweaked handling for equipping items and then clicking on hotspots that were already highlighted,

• Small art tweaks across the ship

• Increased bait supply capacity from 5 > 6

Fixes

• Fixed some input binding bugs

• Fixed water fx clipping into boat (both on deck and in the lower deck)

• Made anchovy colliders bigger

• Made the players breath particles world space so you should only really see them when you stop moving

• Fixed walls/surfaces that you could previously click through to navigate which were not by design (some thin surfaces are still flagged to not block the players movement trace by design)

• Added decorative strings for ambiguous terms in input bindings

• Improved some Ai pre built paths

• Made paralomis jump to target slightly later cause it looked dumb

• Fixed some over optimised animation controllers breaking init if not visible ie. bait refill station tube

• Fixed button in signature UI that wasn't framed right

• Tweaked animation for coffee so you shouldn't see fingers through the cup

• Fixed one case where it was possible with a 1 second window to begin winching a trap that was already breaking its rope and causing it to get into a weird unhookable state

• Fixed initial ship rotation on load save (it would start 0,0,0, then snap a frame late) causing some issues including docked saves at refill station from the reverse direction rotation the ship back to the other orientation, this also added a mad initial physics kick to any physics objects on the ship

• Reduced some GC allocations

• Fixed bandage dropped by healing station animating funny if the ship is moving

• Shifted the player world trace back to reduce chance you can use it to clip through surfaces

• Minor navmesh pass

• Replaced old push off walls code with new method that just uses the navmesh so it's a bit cheaper

• Tweaked base camera offset slightly

• Better culling logic to reduce overhead slightly and get more reliable results in the case where you were standing on the edge of two + zones

• Some more rendering optimisations

• Fixed trap queue not being reloaded when a save is reloaded causing desync between traps that have/haven't been baited in order

• Increased cam draw dist from 3500>5000 to prevent clipping

• Made tossed bait visual on ground bigger to make it harder to miss

• Fixed bug where things dropped in the hopper could collide with the gates and get knocked out

• Also tweaked the ocean trigger zone

• Fixed case where holding RMB on exit hotspot would trigger inventory on release

Happy Crabbing, Nick

Hey Everyone,

Just rolling out a small one, Fixing some regressions from the previous patch and addressing the known issues.

Features

• Sensitivity Slider (sorry this took so long to go in)

  • Option added to menu

  • "Camera lock on Drag" option removed as it's now redundant

  • Any time the player is attached to a fixed camera hotspot (excluding the Hook Gun), sensitivity will not apply as we want to match "true mouse" position here

Improvements

• Some props added to the bow of the ship

• The game now fires a save event after you complete the cutscene

• Added some water fx to the trap Buoy as it moves through the water

• Brachy AI now use a prebaked path to help them get up the ship sides much more reliably

• Brachy AI also now have more nav links to vertical routes

• Added a hard upper limit to dynamic physics elements positional and rotation velocities, hopefully this will prevent some of the extreme blow out cases.

  • If you had this bug before and this fixes it please let me know so I can tick it off. Since this issue was related to high framerates and my PC is a potatoe I could never replicate it.

• Improved main menu lighting and ground texture slightly

Fixes

• Fixed demo fade out music starting too early and getting cutoff

• Fixed being able to nav through the cabin door without clicking on the door in an edge case

• Fixed ship nav drop down panel defaulting to the incorrect state

• Fixed the save game status message not going away after first appearance

Thanks for your feedback again. -Nick

Hello Fellow Penal Colony Workers,

Update 0.3.11 brings a bunch of changes as I've both been working on getting the game closer to launch in 2 weeks and address demo specific issues. (We skipped versions as I validated build candidates)

I want to thank everyone who's played the game so far and shared their feedback and experience. I especially wanna shoutout our testers on discord who have been testing builds and sending me bug reports. This project is mostly a solo endeavour so I could not get this far without ya'll <3

I also want to re-iterate it since I got some questions from people who didn't see the formal announce but when the game launches on March 10th (PST) it will cost 7.99 USD with a 10% launch discount.

I also plan to keep the demo up after launch to let people try the weird controls before the commit to a purchase. I am well aware they aren't for everyone and that's ok. I do however want to do everything in my power to make the game more comfortable to play where issues like animation or navigation cause problems.

Highlights

Demo Saves and The Full Game A "completed" demo save will now be able to carry across to the full game. Unfortunately this does come with a save wipe as all older demo saves will be invalid in this build.

Navigation Stability

Older versions of the player/enemy navigation worked fully in worldspace and lead to many subtle physics and floating point desyncs. I have fully converted to a local space solution, this has been thoroughly battle tested and resolves some subtle nav bugs but in particular the edge cases where players can get stuck in space on or above the stairs. This change also comes with a small CPU perf boost.

Culling Lights/Props on the Ship

When I'm talking about culling and pop-in here I'm exclusively referring to ship related props, the world uses a different system. Anyway I've further optimised the culling system and addressed many glaring pop-in issues as you navigate around. However there's certainly still a few so if you notice any please do let me know.

Full Change Log

Threat Indicators

• The ships computers will now do an idle beep when the ship has a hostile threat

• Additionally in the case of flooding a different tone will play if the ship is >25% flooding

• Added another Ship computer to the middle deck

• Changed the light on the ship computer so the indicator is easier to spot visually

• The navigation hotspot in the bridge now also has some helpful ship status indicators added

Tutorialisation

• Prevented some tutorials from showing in bad context

• Show item raise and item use 3 times before hiding fully

• Fixed inventory close tutorial never showing

• Made edge of screen turn tutorial clearer

Gameplay/General:

• The game now has a death screen that allows you to reload your save or return to the menu, this should make whats happening on death very clear

• Smoothed camera pop when setting new destinations for movement, also softened jerkyness in walk, run animations and transitions to and from idle, Generally moving around should just feel smoother

• Fixed head bob slider not working in some cases

• Fixed being able to nav to the deck from inside the bridge ladder area

• Fixed visible move marker when you started from bed

• Fixed the hopper disabling it's gate triggers when the player is not on the hotspot

• Made nav around ship engine a bit tighter to prevent players head from going inside

• Added a nav based way for the enemies to get down if they get stuck on the crane (assuming they actually reach the top), it's not ideally but should prevent them getting stuck up there in some cases

• Icebox renamed to deck locker to match key and

• Made enemy attacks only ever damage the thing they're trying to attack(also uses cheaper math)

• Fixed map not reset to ship center when the game loads up

• Winch hook will now not hook to traps if they would be at max dist and snap off the winch the next frame anyway

• Buffed blow torch min and max range slightly

• Decreased the out of bounds timeout slightly

• Crab trap now works like the bait supply, clicking on the base will act as a move target, and the top will open the lid, the bait bucket will not now auto open the lid when you try to fill the trap

• Fixed navigating on the ladder not being used if you click on the ground at the bottom of the ladder but not the ladder itself

• Fixed camera moving a bit after you load a save in bed, in the rare case the game will load you back on deck instead of from the bed, the player should no longer turn around on start up

• Tweaked hook gun accuracy to be a bit easier and handle overshoots easier

• Juiced up the hook gun but also added a bit of a delay between shots

• Prevented the player from taking damage inside the cabin

• Moved the axe and fuse box locker on lower deck to better location for opening flow

• Fixed boundary visual and test out of bounds not actually lining up

• Refill station now blocks refill until bait supply is fully repaired

• Fixed not being able to mouse over stuff on ship computer hotspot (unsure how long this has been broken for)

• Fixed bad pathing if you click to move on dropped bait

• Fixed insane upper limit on hook gun

• Fixed Paralomis taking a few seconds after death to remove itself from the attached hotspot

Art:

• Fixed low health green flicker (at least in the case i was able to reproduce)

• Fixed IK weights on hands not reverting if you weren't holding an item

• Added a new unlocked cabinet up on the upper deck and tweaked visuals near the bridge entrance

• Fixed LOD issues with some world props that were set too aggressive

• Cutscene cigarette is now correct (thanks tyler....)

• HUD and Inventory UI brightness now capped at 95% to bring style into alignment

• Brachy and paralomis death now crossfades shader out and lasts slightly longer

• Added some VFX when the bait supply contents change

• Fixed clock not rendering time at appropriate times

• Added a more diegetic output to the button panel on the winch and crane

• Disable player body while on hook gun and hopper to prevent player from seeing their body

• Tweaked ocean wake compute shader to reduce GPU overhead

• Fixed item shimmer shader using worldspace instead of boat space to animate causing it to speed up when the boat was moving

• Added a bit of motion to the ship map marker to help draw the players eye

• Added some prop polish in opening cutscene

• Made the button panel animated rope slightly use a line renderer fallback when in motion, instead of a runtime generated mesh, when it was active this was a 4-5ms overhead so it's a nice saving to remove it and I think it's pretty close visually

• The sink now has an actual animation

• Added a tiny bit of juice to refill station pour

• Fixed missing shimmer on ammo box

• Fixed security camera rendering (and made it cast fog on the water so it looks a bit better to)

• Fixed coffee mesh visibility

• Fixed micro animation jitter on bed loop which if you left the game running long enough would cause the player to rotate slowly around axis (this would fuck up the get off animation)

Audio:

• Ocean ambience sounds when you're near the outside edge of the ship tweaked, now there's 3 sounds that crossfade based on the intensity of the water instead of just one

• Improved some audio fade in issues from any non game state into the game

• Added demo end sound when you "win"

• Improved enemy aggro sound

• Added death sound that plays into the death screen

• Added movement sounds for paralomis

• Added scuttle sound for crab inside deck locker

• Fixed winch up loop sound finishing too early and re-added missing finish sound

• Ensure player footsteps stop playing sounds if player has already stopped

Saves:

• Decreased default auto save frequency from 5 to 2 minutes

• Previously using many hotspots would block auto save while in use, now only the bed and ladder do this

• Save validation improved

• Added a message next to the continue button if the game attempts to load a save but rejects it for some reason

• The game will no longer write non-default save files to disk until the first save occurs

• Saves now blocked when ship has >.25% water to prevent soft lock

• Fixed an issue where if you have items/crabs in the crab hopper and reloaded a save they would disapear (actually they just fucked off into nowhere)

• Fixed race condition on startup that would stop dropped bait from respawning when loading a save

UI:

• Options UI, Made font sizes more consistent, made float labels always be format 0.00

• Cutscene dialogue is now centered, tweaked opening cutscene dialogue slightly

• Pop up notify when new items added is now clearer, handles multiple at a time, doesn't overlap with lock UI and pops up when ammo, and items are added

• Added option to fully disable tutorials

• Made "Hold To Raise" option label include seconds in subtile

• Improved UI clarity when mousing over ammo and bandages

• Added a QA section to credits and added additional playtesters

• Opening cutscene contract now requires you to draw a little more before buttons appears to continue

• Made tutorials generally easier to read with a background image

• Improved text readout on bait supply, so both the move target and open target display the same info and properly handle damage states

Known Issues

• At high framerates physics can still cause issues for the Crab Traps flying away when dropping from the Crane or Crabs dropped into the hopper missing their target. This is something I'l be attempting to address ahead of launch for obvious reasons.

• It is possible for ammo or bandages to be fully consumed but appear in the inventory again in a bugged state.

• The game is not auto saving when you first boot the game and finish the first cutscene. Auto saves after you leave the dock all work fine however.

Happy Crabbing,

Nick

Hey All,

Thanks so much to everyone who's played so far. Here's a small update to just resolve some visual issues and regressions since launching the demo.

• Fixed Janky arm animations, this used to be fine but i clearly broke it before releasing the demo

• Fixed a few culling pop in cases

• Added a few more props to the culling system, this should boost framerates a tiny bit in many cases

• Exiting a hotspot the player will now attempt to maintain the rotation of the camera, so if you are facing right and then exit the you will still be facing right and wont have to fight the camera

• Fixed save data not being properly reset when you die in the case where that does not end the demo

• the player will now catch the bandages when they eject from the healing station, you no longer have to back up and pick them up

• threat onboard indicator on ship computer now flashes when alert

• fixed a case where the ocean wake would get really funky when you die or reset the game without fully closing

• some buttons on hotspots are more statefull and will appear unlit and depressed when they can't be used, inversley they will also be brighter when active

• bait supply now fully empty visually when empty

Happy Crabbing,

Nick

Hello fellow Penal Colony Workers,

I'm happy to finally announce a release date for Crabmeat! You'll be able to play the full game March 10th this year! Keen to play the game right now though? The demo is available now! Check out this new trailer mitch and I put together to announce the date.

Devlog 6.

So what have I been working on? In the lead up to the announce we developed the new trailer (see above) and as part of that I needed to add a ton of improved lighting visuals and props to the ship to finally start detailing out a bunch of the dead space visually. I've also updated all our screenshots on steam. Here's an example showing off the refreshed lower deck. In general visual improvements and polish has been my main focus for the last month with a lot of the games features being locked in. For those following along optimisation has been an ongoing struggle as the games unique constraints mean traditional rendering optimisation does not work. I did a full breakdown of a new occlusion method I wrote to optimise rendering of the boats different rooms.

The TDLR is essentially I'm using a legacy portal technique where we break the ship up into zones, props and lighting gets assigned to zones then we limit which are enabled based on the players position and line of sight to said zones. It's still not perfect but as I get closer to launch I will continue to refine it and improve the occasional pop-in it produces. That's all for now, I hope you enjoy the demo and I can't wait for ya'll to play the full game at launch. Want more frequent updates?

Hello fellow Penal Colony Workers,

Welcome back from your government mandated December breaks. I hope you've all actually gotten a chance to chill and take it easy. I for one was enjoying a whole lota cooking and catching up on some games.

Right before I went on break I ended up starting what became a bit of an odyssey to try and update my ocean shader to improve how it looked both in terms of getting higher fidelity and just better selling the vibe of the ocean.

Here's the before/after for the main water

And a before and after for the boat wake

Devlog Video

I go much deeper on the topic so if you wanna learn more go check it out.

Demo Coming VERY soon!

I'm committing to putting out a short demo for the game before the release. Not much more to share yet but it's gonna happen before next fest and I can't wait to share it with ya'll.

Want more frequent updates?

Watch development live at twitch or join the discord to chat with me and the community about the game.

Hello fellow Penal Colony Workers,

I'm back - This time with more sickness!

Ok so, MIGW and my holiday were great but I did also get a flu that stuck with me for almost a month. Dev is finally back on the menu.

The Goal

Between now and the end of the year I've got a list of features that I would consider critical for moving the game from MVP to a less shit MVP. This video shows off a few of them. Parasite Behaviour One of the area's that needed love was parasites. Previously these little guys would just spawn, damage the boat components and wait for you to remove them. In this pass I gave them actual movement so you'll see them skitter around the boat before reaching their target. And now if you wait too long to kill them but are close, they'll get mad and jump on your face dealing a little bit of damage. Visual Optimisation One big performance sink in the game for the longest time was all the dynamic lights on the ship, especially the interiors. So I had to build a custom culling solution to deal with that. Fortunately we already had the ship broken up into AudioZones so I was able to make this system more detail and hook into it for our culling. The optimisation can be disabled cause it does cause a tiny bit of light popping but the extra framerate you get back from only have 20% of the lights enabled at a time is well worth it I think.

Bilge Pump and Repair Systems A major system that got a pass was how damage to the ships hull and it's repairs worked. Now the damage to the ship increases the water level ship proportional to how much damage there is and that water will stick around even after you repair the holes. The pump allows you to eject the water and is super juicy to use. (video timestamp) Finally we've got fish now. That's right when you pull up your hauls sometimes you'll get fish, or maybe other things. These currently add nothing but juice up the visuals a little bit, but I feel like they're a necessary part of the crab sorting process. Want more frequent updates?

Watch development live at twitch or join the discord to chat with me and the community about the game.

Hello fellow Penal Colony Workers,

It's been another month since I last updated ya'll on development progress so here it is. Dev has been pretty full on as I've been working towards a hard deadline to wrap the MVP (minimum viable product) of the game by the 3rd of October. Whilst this is not the release it marks a shippable build that if i got hit by a bus tomorrow my ghost wouldn't be sad got released into the world. Now there's a ton of still I'd still love to improve and work on in the game but this officially puts the game in the final stages of polish and improvements only.

Finally life gets in the way, MIGW is happening next week and from the 12th of October till the 30th I'll be on holiday oversea so development will be paused till i return. This break should give me a good chance to reflect on what I still want to work on for the final release and lock down a release date.

Regardless there's plenty of cool stuff to show off, below is a video where i just jump through stuff in a chaotic manner or you can read below and avoid hearing my voice.

Store Update I've done a nearly fully overhaul of the store assets. This includes replacing all the screenshots and gifs to match the current quality of the game. I've also tuned the text copy to focus on the games key pillars and removed superfluous stuff like my game release history. Go check out the changes if you're interested.

Ship Controls and Map

The ship controls have finally been polished off, I have baked everything down to a nice model with a unique texture, made the map a lot smaller and organised everything to give much better visibility out of the window. The controls for the rudder and throttle are now much juicier using a drag to interact rather than click to interact

Misc

I've added a bunch of stuff and polished more, some of this includes but is not limited to

• actually adding achievements

• key rebinding

• optimising da crabs using the same technique I used for the bird

• Polishing REDACTED

• more unique death animations

• Gore Pass

• new ways for threats to board the ship

Anyway here's a bunch of the tank full of crabs which now doesn't totally chug the game now they're using the vertex shader animation rather than skeletal anims.

Want more frequent updates? Watch development live at twitch or join the discord to chat with me and the community about the game.

Hello fellow Penal Colony Workers. It's been about a month since the last update so I wanted to get something out to keep ya'll up to date on how dev was going. Over the last month I've been going pretty hard trying to the narrative content in the game locked down as that's one of the last things I need to do to complete the next MVP build.

Now I can't share much of what that looks like but here's some cool updated props for the Crane and Winch on the ship, if you re watch the trailer you'll notice these we're pretty crusty. I have also been tackling some backlog work that has been troubling me for some time, that being pathfinding.

If you read the last update you'll know that the player controller operates like an NPC Agent under the hood and of course the enemies in the game use some kind of path finding as well. Given the nature of the game taking place on a small, cramped and highly detailed space navigation for the player, and especially the enemies has just been somewhat broken for some time now. I set aside a week to finally put the issue to rest so I've made another devlog video to breakdown the issues visually. This one gets pretty technical around Unity quirks and the nature of A* pathfinding.

Stay Up to Date I've been streaming development over at twitch, you can check out progress roughly twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays Melbourne time. You can also join our discord community here. -Nick

Hello fellow Penal Colony Workers.

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who's wishlisted the game so far and shared it on socials. It was a bit of a bumpy announce but I got through it.

I thought I'd take the time to give you a little update on the state of production. I am not yet able to announce a release date but the game has been tracking nicely. My hope is to have it out in 2025 but I have no intention of rushing it out if it needs more work to be awesome.

Mitch is back on the project, so sound design is starting to get some love. Most of the game's major features are now complete and I'm moving into a loop of testing and polishing. Whilst this feels like it's closing on the finish line I've shipped enough games to know that this phase of production can really drag out and the more time that goes in the better things will get.

Here's some nice low poly Seagulls that fly over fishing zones

What is a first person-point and click game control like? For a TLDR just watch this video.

If my voice is too grating for you here's how it works :

• The entire game is played with your mouse

• Left Mouse is used to interact with the world and navigate

• You can freely move the camera around up to a point

• Clicking on the sides of the screen quickly turns the player

• Items can be lifted up and readied for use with right mouse with left click activating their use

• No i will not be adding WASD support

Anyway I'll try and get some more of these out as I work on the game more. If you're really determined to follow along with more updates I set up a little discord server ya'll can join. I'm also streaming dev over at twitch if you want to follow along there Tuesday and Thursday. -Nick