Fishing Girl

Controls

• Press any key / click to start swinging your rod.
• Press again to cast out your lure.

Context

A while ago a friend, @francoisvn, mentioned the Lost Garden blog to me. It's a space where Daniel Cook has shared thoughts and exercises on game design.

I've been wanting to improve through intentional practise, so I decided to implement one of Daniel's suggested designs. I picked the only prototype which won a gold award and decided I'd try make my own version before playing the winning entry and then compare results.

It's worth noting that the entry was originally from 2008 so I feel like I've got a massive advantage by using modern tools. In any event i found this a really useful exercise.

You can find the original design description here.

Things I did differently:

• From the outset I wanted to have something that was playable with just one button. This meant that I didn't implement the shop as laid out and instead went for items which are statically placed in the world. Now there's no risk of losing your lure and needing to repurchase it, I wonder if there's a way to introduce that risk/reward.
• This isn't explicitly mentioned in the design but I added an acceleration to the lure when luring in. Having a static speed for the lure felt way more mechanical and predictable in a this-isn't-good way.
• The original design required fish to be matched to lure sizes. In my prototype I allow players to catch smaller fish with a larger lure. During testing I found myself ignoring the smaller fish as my larger lure dropped down. I found that letting smaller critter grab the lure meant that I needed to pay more attention while luring and that it added a meaningful choice of grabbing the first easy fish or dodging down to go for bigger ones.
• While working on this I was often surprised by how impactful animations speeds are. Particularly during the "scoring a fish" phase, reducing some elements by just 0.5 seconds changed the experience from frustrating waiting to steady delight.
• Implementing fish rarity made a massive difference to how fun this was for me. It took the game from "let me get the closest fish" to "what fish are nearby? ... Which one should I aim for?"
• The original design included "very large fish" which weren't catchable but increased the risk of losing your lure. I feel like that would have added some challenge to this prototype but didn't get around to adding it.
• I'm not convinced about the bomb lure. Blowing poor fish up feels a counter to life in the serene world of fishing girl. I've included the bomb in this prototype but feel like I didn't get it to a point where it adds to the gameplay.
• During playtesting I noticed friends get frustrated when they were luring in a large fish and it was constantly being nibbled by the small fish. I've changed the design so that only medium fish can nibble on large ones now and there's much less frustration. This keeps the tension (hah!) of needing to cautiously reel in large fish but means there's far less frustration while doing it.