Hello everyone! I've decided to start documenting my journey making Reel-istic Fishing. I'm going to start from the very beginning, and work my way up to present day. From then... maybe just normal devlogs??? We'll see when we get there!!

Origin

So... why did I start making this game? Well, I started it in January as a means of helping myself. I had just finished Omori, and that game had really spoken to me. I won't go into too much detail on Omori, since I'd rather not spoil it- but upon completing it, I felt as though I was doing nothing with my life, that I needed some sort of non-work non-school productive thing to work on in my free time. Healthy mindset? Probably not! But alas, I decided to do something I had been kind of on/off wanting to do for the past month. Making a game for the Playdate!

I came up with the idea fairly quickly, because I had recently revisited the game Ridiculous Fishing, an AMAZING fishing game by the way. But unfortunately, the game is old, and had not been receiving updates... it was very broken to play, the UI was all messed up. I was very sad, as this was a game I LOVED as a kid. I wanted to make a game similar to it to do it justice, so I set out to do that!

Beginning the Game

I could probably say this whole section in two words if I wanted to: Squid God. The absolute impact Squid has had on this community is insane! So many games have been made because of them, and that includes Reel-istic Fishing!

I started with Squid's tutorials, and got a very basic "move the hook to catch fish" game going. Unfortunately, this was months ago, and I didn't know I'd get this far, so pictures and videos will be VERY lacking for the first part of this devlog! However, I can drop a picture of the first ever fish created for this game!

(I plan to add this fish to the final game, and call it the betafish hehe)

If it helps anyone, here is a list of all the things I've used for this game:

• VS Code
• Aseprite
• Playdate SDK/Simulator
• Playdate
• reMarkable 2 for jotting down ideas and brainstorming

Some Toad Lore™

I'll give some background on myself before getting further. I've made games in the past, but none of them anywhere near the scale of Reel-istic.

Maybe 4-ish years ago I made a few games with Scratch.

One was a game where you are a squirrel, surfing on a wave, shooting lasers at a shark, and that shark shoots watermelons back at you. Out of embarrassment, I will not be showing this game haha

Another game was a... fish game! Where you go around collecting bubbles to increase your size, and avoid dangerous fish.

Another was a game of pong! Except with a really cool twist!! The twist is that the ball never moves up or down, and only ever moves back and forth. This means the enemy AI is incredibly advanced, and is able to NEVER miss the ball, AND never move at the same time. The talent on that AI!!

A year or two later I decided to challenge myself more by making a text-based roguelike in Java. I was incredibly proud of it! In it, you go further into a castle, collecting weapons and armor, fighting enemies and the occasional boss (and the difficulty scales up as you play!). I poured my heart into this game, with the intent to only show my friends/family it. I eventually made a sequel to this, and then a triquel plinko spinoff of it that never got finished (since text-based, yes the plinko board worked in the console log!!)

Anyways, this is all to say that Reel-istic Fishing is definitely something wildly new to me. I had never made a graphical game from the ground up, in a real coding language before. That's why I'd consider it my first "reel" game, or at least my first serious game.

Forming the Game Idea

I'm a fan of games that let you upgrade your equipment and get farther, so I really wanted to do something similar. My little caveman brain loves seeing numbers go up. I also wanted to keep the shooting section from Ridiculous Fishing, but to also put a unique spin on it.

So I decided on a gameplay loop. Fish for fish, harpoon them out of the sky to sell them, and then buy upgrades in the shop to improve yourself!

Here are some pictures!

A very, very basic main menu scene existed too, where you could pick where/what you wanted to do. Thankfully, this was replaced by a much more fun system later on!

I was able to get this all working in maybe(???) a week or two?? It's been so long I can't remember. But most of the core of the game was complete, and it was time to just start building on that and refining it. First though, I had to make a shop!

The shop went through many, many iterations in my brain before becoming what it is now. Here is the first ever version of the equipment shop!

I had originally used the SDK's built in grid view system for this shop, but unfortunately when it came to run that on device, it ran VERY POORLY. I later needed to completely recode it, and make my own navigation system... which sucked... (test your game frequently on the real device!! or find people to do it for you if you don't have one!)

A Conclusion for Now...

So, I've been writing this for the past hour, and I think I've gotten to a decent stopping point. I'll be sure to post more devlogs soon! If you made it this far, and have a request for something you'd like to see me cover, please leave a comment :)

As always, thank you all for all of the love and support you've given me. This game literally would not be what it is now without the support and positivity of the Playdate community. You all are seriously awesome. Thank you.