Raph’s Website » Fishing Girl

Fishing Girl

December 21st, 2008 (Visited 3350 times) Tags: dan cook, flash, indie games

Fishing Girl screenshot

As many of you know, my friend Dan Cook does game prototyping challenges wherein he creates and gives away art and a base game design, and then invites whoever wants to pick the the challenge to make a full game.

Often, the art from these pops up in unexpected places — there’s certainly a few worlds on Metaplace that are using the tilesets that Dan has donated to the community!

Well, one of those challenge games has gone commercial and seems to be doing fairly well in terms of popularity on Newgrounds. A Web developer dove headlong into Flash and created a lovely an atmospheric version of the “Fishing Girl” challenge. Dan then encouraged him to commercialize it.

Check out the review here at JayIsGames, and of course, check out the game itself here: Fishing Girl.

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Alan Schwartz said on December 21st, 2008 at 12:59 pm:

Practically spooky. I just found Fishing Girl yesterday on Kongregate (where it was quite popular) and played it to one of the endings. I had been thinking today about how it was a refreshing idea in several ways and wondering where the inspiration had come!

Morgan Ramsay said on December 21st, 2008 at 5:56 pm:

I played the game briefly. Flash is a poor performer on slow systems.

I don’t have a new monitor yet for my desktop, and my new laptop is wrapped up under the tree. I should, supposedly, be able to play Ultima Online on this system though. UO Fishing, here I come!

There should be a shotgun in Fishing Girl. That’s how Denny Crane does it!

Denny Crane.

Michael Chui said on December 22nd, 2008 at 12:05 am:

That was pretty nice, but I found the Bomb Lure kinda sad. I would’ve preferred to pull the shark up. Then again, maybe you use the bird… :/ Liked it overall, though. I definitely played over 15 minutes. Don’t really feel inclined to go looking for the second ending… or replaying it using Experienced.

Peter S. said on December 22nd, 2008 at 10:10 am:

Played it to both endings before seeing it here (one on each difficulty); I actually really like that kind of atmosphere and art style. A great little game, in my opinion.

It’s interesting to have to avoid the little fish with the big lures, which is less “obvious” than a need to avoid the big fish with the little lures. Also, I wasn’t able to fish up the sharks with any lures, including the bird, but the look of the last rod does seem to imply it’s able to pull them up…

Morgan Ramsay said on December 22nd, 2008 at 2:52 pm:

I’m amazed that Ultima Online and Quake 2 exhibit performance on a slow computer that is superior to that of Flash. /boggle

Jason said on December 22nd, 2008 at 10:53 pm:

I found it really interesting to read the feedback about how much emotional investment people put into the game. Just shows that you can do a lot with very little in this medium.

Danc said on December 22nd, 2008 at 11:52 pm:

There was an alternate ending planned where you fish out all the fish and the game tells you that the ocean is now empty…forever. That bit never made it in to any of the prototypes, but it was fascinating watching players react strongly to the natural dynamics of the system without overt narrative to drive the point home.

However, I was very surprised at the narrative that emerged. After she got through fishing some of the medium and big fish, the ocean suddenly became sadder and sadder. I was definitely not expecting that level of realistic depletion in a cute and fun game like this.

I don’t know if you intended this originally, but we could not finish the game because it was just too sad – the only options were catching the tiny defenseless little blue fish, or using a bomb lure (really?) on the poor shark that kept to themselves and didn’t even kill anyone. We stopped at this point.

Curious how a fun game also brought a powerful message with it.

Of course, not everyone picks up on it and some people just like blowing stuff up.

So the system alone evokes a response, but the impact is highly variable. This ties into a continuing fascination mine: Setting expectations for an experience and then telling people what they just experienced dramatically improves the reliability of how someone interprets an experience. Propaganda is an essential art.

take care
Danc.

Peter S. said on December 23rd, 2008 at 10:08 am:

I noticed the depletion of fish, but it’s interesting that I wasn’t sure whether the number of fish were actually finite or whether it was the common respawning issue a lot of games have, where a removed fish was replaced with a randomly-determined type of fish (and thus I was just seeing the statistical depletion of the type of fish I was going after at the time. Selective perception etc.). This somewhat dulled the impact of the loss of fish, but then again I was pretty efficient in catching what I needed and moving on so it wasn’t as noticable.

It kinda relates to that earlier thread in here about how games might be training us to think, thinking about it.