The making of Midnight Fisherman

Hello there!

I wanted to document a few things about making this game, my inspirations, process and ideas. It is my first actual game, and I don't have a lot of gamedev experience, which might be apparent in a few of the gameplay aspects. I had to constantly look up tutorials on how to do things in Godot, so everything was slow going. I also have an 8 hour workday, so that didn't help with the time constraints. Still, I am quite proud of what I was able to accomplish in so little time with so little experience, even if I was unable to implement all the systems that I wanted to.

Inspiration:

The inspiration for this game came from an old Warcraft 3 map I used to play for hours on end as a kid. It was called "Go Fish!" and it was rather basic as mods go. Still, I loved it and wanted to try to recreate the feel of it that I remembered from my childhood.

Another inspiration for the fishing minigame itself was Club Penguin's Ice fishing minigame. It's another game I spent so many hours on as a child. I did want to spice it up a little, so that's why I added the reeling rotation mechanic (more on it later).

The theme of the jam stumped me a little. I have actually never owned a gameboy in my life, so I didn't have any nostalgia for the medium. Ontop of that I had to make it spooky? Using the limitation of the palette as an advantage, I decided it was going to be night-time fishing and the world was gonna be quiet, eerie and unsettling.

I suppose another unintended inspiration is a game that I finished recently - Dredge. It is a lovecraftian horror fishing game and I think its inspiration is apparent mostly in my worldbuilding (what little there is of it) and the fish sprites.

Discarded Ideas:

I had so many ideas for this game. As an unexperienced gamedev, I really let the scope creep get out of hand and ended up implementing unnecessary things before essential ones, just because they were more fun to work on. For example I always made sprites before writing any code for that object. Or made the entire game, then remembered that I need sounds and music, which I avoided working on, because they are hard for me (I have zero experience with sound design and composing). I did intend to do them, but with the limited time I had, I never got around to them. Here are some mechanics that I wanted to implement (and still might if I decide to work on this project further):

-Fishing boat: This is the big one. Once you made a lot of money selling fish (currently money are not used for anything, lol), you could purchase a boat to fish from. I even had a collision layer for them on my tileset (ended up using that for landing the fish bobber). However, implementing a boat would have opened up so much more work - like implementing outer islands to sail to, more content to fill these new areas, maybe even procedural generation for these islands. I realized pretty early that it was not feasible.

-Dynamic fishing spots: The current fish schools are all static, placed by hand and don't respawn. It was not intended to be this way. I wanted them to spawn dynamically, move around and most importantly, contain a different amount and types of fish.

-More fishables and better fishing minigame: I wanted to implement more fish types with more interesting movement patterns. Currently the only time a fish moves up or down is if it's being scared by an Anglerfish. I had an idea for a big, slow, easy to bite, hard to reel fish called the CHONK (creative, I know). Other additions included more junk, like seaweeds, crates with items, sea monsters, etc. I also wanted to make the fishing minigame much more polished - fish could snap your line if you don't reel them quick enough, your hook could get stuck in the sea floor, you had to use bait to catch bigger types of fish, your hook could dangle horizontally, be swayed in the current (and the current would be different in different areas), be pulled sideways by fish (not just down) and in general have all the good physics stuff that it currently doesn't.

-Better story and NPCs: I wanted the story to be vague and ambiguous, with parts of it revealed through visual storytelling, and snippets of conversations with NPCs. Very little of that got implemented, with "NPC" conversations (more like door conversations) being very flat and uninteresting with a few exceptions. I wanted NPCs to have in-world sprites, conversation options with branching trees and quests. I also planned to have a merchant UI, instead of just clicking items from your inventory to sell them.

-Upgrades: Currently gold has no use. I wanted to make the player able to purchase upgrades for their fishing rod with different stats, like ease of reeling, strength of reeling, etc. Other things that cost money would include bait, boat upgrades and fuel. Without these things it feels like there is no actual gameplay loop, because you catch fish, to sell them, and then what? No use for gold whatsoever. Nothing to help you progress and get better at fishing. This is the one thing I most regret not implementing.

-Sound and music (duh.): already talked about it.

-A better title: I really don't like the title of my game. I guess it describes what the game is about well enough, but it doesn't have any creativity to it. I also wanted to have an actual logo for it, instead of typing out the name on the title screen with a font like that.

As a whole, this was a huge learning experience for me. I had a lot of fun (and only one mostly sleepless night) making this gamejam entry. The experience I gained will go a long way towards making my future games better. Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned is that I can't do everything on my own. I'm a good artist, but a beginner programmer and no sound designer. My presentation skills also leave a lot to be desired. So perhaps for future gamejams I will try teaming up with other people, so we can cover each other's weaknesses and boost our strengths :)