Fishin

 

How to play

Fishin is a game in which you fish, until you can’t anymore. You can move your boat left and right, and reel your hook up and down. Once a fish is hooked, wear it down with X until you catch it—but time your presses carefully!

Also note that certain fish might only bite if you have better, or more, bait on your hook.

Behind the scenes stuff

My main goal with this game was to finish something using Pico-8 in an extremely short amount of time. I probably spent about 8-12 total hours actually working on it, if we ignore the invisible work of developing ideas while walking the dog or taking a shower. Being able to finish something like this in the equivalent of about one working day is a huge success for me, plus it helps me to establish a really helpful baseline for what I’m capable of if I’m willing to make shrewd decisions about scope and polish.

I definitely want to repeat this sort of self-imposed game jam structure a couple more times, to continue to build an intuition for what’s possible in the span of one or two days, before I let myself expand my ambition to even a week’s worth of work, let alone a month. So I’m hoping to upload at least one more little prototype like this within the next four weeks or so, if travel plans and the day job allow for it.

What I learned

• Pico-8’s constraints are a two-sided coin. They prevent me from bikeshedding or rabbit-holing on anything too technical, but they also make the development process actively painful at times. I think I’ll have to work out how to use a proper text editor before working on my next game, or I might end up throwing my laptop through a window.
• I have a ton of room to grow in expressive programming. I’ve been working as a professional softare developer for quite some time now, and have come to think of myself as being a pretty good engineer. This game taught me very quickly that being a good engineer is not the same thing as being a competent coder, especially when working on a specific platform or in a specific domain. Becoming a good games programmer is going to require me to build up a genuinely new skill set compared to the type of programming I do 50 hours a week for money. Good thing I love to learn!
• Audio terrifies me. I added maybe 3 or 4 sound effects in the game above, and I was grimacing the entire time I interacted with Pico-8’s SFX editor. I shudder at the thought of trying to compose music or put together anything much more complex than what I’ve done for Fishin.
• GPT 4 is incredible. I recently purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, and I used it to help with some of the random coding puzzles I ran into while working on this game. It was able to spit out functional and useful code for an extremely niche language and platform with minimal prompting. The future is bright, and maybe a little spooky.