Gone fishing

As part of the Lost Garden prototype challenge for Fishing Girl, we’ve started some work on the behavior of the game’s fish. According to the specification, the fish in this game are defined by the following properties…

Fish are objects in the sea that move back and forth in predictable patterns. Fish come in different sizes, rarity and movement patterns.

• Movement: Back and forth. There are others patterns such as circles or swarms, but that would be extra.
• Size: Small, Medium, Large, Extra large.
• Rarity: Common, uncommon, Rare, Very Rare. This is used during “Scoring the Fish”

Fish are spread throughout the water with more valuable fish located further from shore. Try to have a good mix of big fish and small fish. You can start testing with one fish, but ultimately, you should have 10 to 20 or else the game won’t be very interesting.

All three of the bullet items have been implemented. We’ve also implemented the “attraction” behavior when the fish approaches a lure. However, the integration with the scoring system will come when the fish are added to the actual game. We decided to create a new Fish Tank application as a playground of sorts to experiment with ideas outside the scope of the other game mechanics. We did this for a couple of reasons.

1. Isolation of the fish behaviors makes debugging a lot easier and faster.
2. It provides a nice way to spotlight this single element of the game and rapidly iterate based on feedback. We can also experiment with some of the “hooking” elements of the game in an easily controlled environment.
3. The power of sharing means it doesn’t matter where we create the fish. Once we’re happy with their behavior we can simply share them back to the community and re-use them in any other application! All we need to do is drag and drop them into our game.

Go check out the fish tank and send us your feedback!

Next up…. implementing the lunge.