Spend a relaxing day at the river, fishing. Or, spend a hectic day at the market, selling your fish. Check out the devlog on the blog side.
Economics is fascinating. I've never had the pleasure of formally studying, but I love considering the complex systems of money and goods that happens the throughout the world, and have long contemplated how to model a fun economic system in a game. Fishing is fascinating. I've only fished a few times, with moderate success, but have long contemplated the allure of the sport. People who hate touching fish love to throw a hook and line into the water to see what comes up. People who have no luck fishing love to try and try again. Skilled fishers wake up early to catch the big one that got away last time. What exactly is the magic?
As a purely economic game, I've had multiplayer in mind as a possibility. You start trading in a small village with limited horizons and have the opportunity to take your business to the big city where other players are trading. Build a trade empire, spreading your giant corporation to new cities, building a fleet for international trade, manipulate markets for the highest personal gain. The question is, what is the least common denominator, the basis of all economy? Fishing. If nothing else, you can make a basic little shop where you sell fish that you caught for free. Fish are the great equalizer.
Multiplayer is not simple. Balancing an economic situation with only one player will be challenge enough without having a dynamic online community. Fishing should be simple. So, the game has become focused on the fishing. Click to cast, and wait to see what happens. Sounds boring, right? I believe part of the magic of fishing comes from a combination of a low entry barrier and high potential reward. Gameplaywise, a low barrier means click-to-cast; even if you've never played a computer game before, you can instantly get this system. The high reward is identical to real fishing - the potential to get the big one. This requires knowing what fish like to eat (a food chain of little fish leading to bigger ones) and where to fish (recognize the signs; movement, color, time of day.) A trophy room with any fish that you care to put into it encourages getting increasingly larger fish as well as the entire gamut of types. How about 100 types of fish to catch?
Two main ideas in one game is generally considered a bad idea. For a small game, there should only be one focus (either a cozy fishing game or a crunchy eco game). Especially as a new dev, I recognize that I may be going too big, and a divided focus might ruin either game. However, I believe that as a player, you should be able to ignore either half of the game. In fact, the effect I want to achieve is to sell a fishing game, and if you get bored of the cozy gameplay, there is a completely different game of min-max-ing that will take you away from the comfort of fishing. A player will never be able to find a balance. Do you want to make money? You will be forced to sacrifice all the things that make the game cozy. Do you want to relax and feel happy? You will be required to give up on the dream of being filthy rich. The two are meant to be mutually exclusive in this game. For that reason, I believe that it is worth splitting the focus of the game in two.
So, what will make this game cozy instead of just boring? Refer to [this article] (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TanyaXShort/20180305/315179/Designing_for_Coziness.php) for good information about what it means for a game to be cozy. For CozyFishing, these are the specific features that will be implemented colon
In short, a player should be able to load this game up and literally do nothing and still enjoy it for hours on end. Just like fishing in real life.
On the economics hand, there should be a deep game that is practically the opposite of fishing. This is the crunch side. Everything that makes it relaxing will be undone. Do you want to make the catch of your life? Each day is limited, so make the best use of your time.
I am not a graphic artist. Since my game company consists of only me, and not even that most of the time, I don't see how I can realistically accomplish the beauty required for this game. Should it be pixel art? That can be very cozy and is in right now. I've seen some pretty pixel art, and it's not impossible for a non-artist to produce decent pixel art. On the other hand, I'm a sucker for SVG. A smooth-but-detailed svg style could be slick and maybe easier to apply lighting animations over. I don't want the fishing areas to be randomly generated. They should be custom made, but there should still be enough randomness that you will never get tired of seeing the sunset, and hopefully never tire of seeing the different river locations.
Politics add a lot of potential for money-squeezing. I don't intend to make a statement in the game about politics, either in general or on anything specific, but analyzing policies to see how they affect supply, demand, and your bottom line would unavoidably make some sort of statement.
Endless Sky, a free space trading game, hints at some political affiliations, but the game never interacts with it. Instead, the draw of the game is seeing your credits steadily increase. The bigger your fleet, the better missions you can take, and the faster you get rich. After grinding for a while, you start to feel that exponetial growth curve, and you just can't stop. Instead of going all out political, CozyFishing could have an automated business system to complement the autofishing. Instead of being the best screensaver on the market, when you get tired of buying and selling fish manually, just hit the automation button to watch your guy buy more and more fish and a bigger and bigger market place. With a generous balance, there is little risk, and you can just check in every once in a while to gleefully cackle at how much money your little avatar has stocked up.
Endless sky is pretty generous in balance. In the beginning, you avoid pirates like the plague and worry about whether you'll make enough in this load to pay interest on your loan. But then you get a little more cargo room and take on missions without hardly looking at what it earns. There is a min-max game there somewhere, because prices on planets vary slightly, and you could calculate whether 8 tons of mission cargo is earning you more than 8 tons of highly valuable medical supplies, but that's hard. Why bother when you can just click "yes" on all the missions that you have room to take on and know that you'll come out richer? CozyFishing could take that approach with the market, and that would be great for automation. Or, there could be a risk/reward structure that requires long range planning (voting, knowing what's coming up on the calendar, factions), and has a real risk that you will be reduced to going back to fishing. That would force you to count your pennies and increase the stress, which I believe adds to the vision of the mutually exclusive nature of the two halves of the game. But it would be hard; a game I would probably buy, but not play. Also, the autoplay version adds a symmetrical dimension.
Yes, I'm glad you asked. This is completely an optional part of the game, but I thought it would be cool if you could identify everyone by their hat. Poor fishers have small, grey hats. Royal gaurds have a red stripe across their hat. The richer people have bigger hats, and the shape, color, and pattern would clue you in to what affiliations they have. This would give you something to spend your riches on, and would be a cool way to tie the two halves of the game together; everybody has a hat.
Um, well, my game that I'm "working on" has to be done first, and there are a couple other game ideas that I might hack out first, games that don't require real graphics. I'd like to see it on the digital shelf in 2021. That will require actual work and sacrifice.
Last updated: December 26th, 2018