Overview and Inspiration
"Just a Fishing Game" is a short analog horror experience that draws heavy inspiration from the found horror genre. Made as part of a six person team, I acted as the lead Game Designer and Narrative Designer of "Just a Fishing Game." As the lead Game Designer, I began my work by researching existing games that my team suggested as points of inspiration, writing down interesting mechanics and visuals that I thought might be useful for the game we wanted to create. At each step, I referenced a document with a list of ideas produced by our team, to try to include the vision of other developers as well as the director as much as possible.
Designing Mechanics
Once the team had decided on a direction, I designed the central mechanic of the game. Being inspired namely by Club Penguin and Web Fishing, I decided to build the game around a relatively simple manner of fishing. This would assume that the fishing mechanic was easy for players to pick up in a short amount of time, as well as giving the rest of the team more constrained parameters to work around. At every step I made sure to include detailed documentation and paper prototypes when appropriate to make my design principles as clear to the rest of the team as possible.
Narrative Design
In order to make sure every narrative beat was hit, I drafted a synopsis. This way, I could plan out each beat generally before implementation and get feedback from the rest of my groupmates. Organizing in such a way also made it really easy to regroup after a playtest, to change things that didn't work around for things that will.
A section of the game that relied much more on written language than gameplay was the player survey. This section was intended to fully break the flow of gameplay and break the third wall, allowing the story to really pierce its way through. This part of the game was drafted on google docs, then prototyped in twine, so that it could be thoroughly playtested by group members and playtesters before implementation.
Being a largely story-driven game, the narrative of "Just a Fishing Game" was under constant editing. Playtests were frequent, as were check-ins with the rest of the team and director, in order to make sure that the story beats, as well as game feel and art direction, all blended together seamlessly.
