Sunfish

Sunfish is a clicker roguelite about keeping your own pond healthy and filled! Charge up casts of your rod to hook the many types of fish that appear in your pond. Use the money earned to power up your rod, hook, lake, and more!

Sunfish was the last game I made in my 2023 rapid-prototyping class, made in about 5 weeks. This is the first time I really felt like I've "clicked" (heh) with the roguelite genre while working on a project. Instead of a large complicated project like Lock Goblin (our previous prototype with this same team), we decided to take a similar route as to one I did with SRPOS: A brutally simple concept pushed to its maximum "fun" level. Except this time, we actually kind of hit that goal, I feel.

Sunfish's main loop is: Cast, Reel, Upgrade. This gets repeated indefinitely, or until the "Water Balancer" is purchased. While playing, your lake constantly dries up, hurting the water quality and making it so rarer fish cannot appear. The upgrades you buy either make you better at fishing, or makes your lake more stable. If at any point your like dries up, you lose! The concept is pretty easy to grasp.

We did not intend Sunfish to really be a clicker, but it ended up naturally fitting into the genre. Your rod eventually goes from an icky, slow stick that's frustrating to use, to eventually feeling like you're shooting a harpoon gun into the water that can catch 10 fish at once. The main loop of timing casts with fish movements ended up being quite fun, which I feel is the goal of a prototyping class like this: Find the fun. Making this project however took a bit of a toll on me at the time; I sunk many hours into this project even while in different classes or during my own free time. Was it worth it? Um. Maybe? Who knows.

What Sunfish lacks is diversity in its gameplay past about the 10-15 minute mark, which makes sense for a prototype like this. But the loop makes sense, the systems work, it's pretty low on bugs (but high on fish), etc. A project I could not have made without the help of these individuals:
- Christian Young
- Adam Garwacki
- Hayden Huber