This menu lets you customize your fishing experience:
Depth -- uses the same depth mechanic as Neptopia. Letting you customize it globally is a big UX upgrade.
Speed -- more on this in the speed section.
Crates -- assuming they're unlocked, lets you do Crate fishing.
Bait -- lets you switch out different baits.
Lure -- Lets you switch out different lures.
Fishing Speed
Starting out you have two fishing speeds:
Slow -- consumes bait at a 50% chance but takes longer to actually fish.
Fast -- much faster fishing speed, but consumes bait every time.
As an upgrade you'll also unlock:
Auto -- Does multiple catch attempts but wastes more bait. This gets worse the more you do, like maybe 5 attempts uses 10 bait but 10 attempts uses 30 bait and so on. You can specify how many to do here and obviously you're limited by the amount of bait you have available.
Autofishing does the same targeted calculation that Hiring does, the difference being that it's can pull up multiple fish at once. If an area has fish A at weight 1 and fish B at weight 7 (without lures) and you cast 8 times you'll always get 1 A and 7 B. Catch chance works similarly.
You can maybe see a readout of what you're getting before you actually fish (+ the bait decrease)
Fish Distribution
Each location has a palettized collection of fish. There are various sublocations that change fish weights. Identical to Neptopia basically.
Fish have variable values, weight ranges, depth ranges and properties. This is identical to Neptopia. Some will be worth more, others will be practically useless.
The bigger their median value, the harder they are to catch. Attempting to catch them outside of their depth will also give them -25% and -50% catch chances depending on how close you are.
Bait is paired to property(s) and has +%. Some are better than others. These stack with composite baits. Value is dictated purely based on that percentage.
Worms are neutral. They cost the least.
The Baitery will allow you to combine baits into a composite bait that stacks bonuses. This will then be available to buy in the shop.
This costs money to have the service available (for each new bait) and the resultant bait also costs more money than the sum of its parts, but you can discontinue the service and get the startup money back. The increase in money here is linear and based on the amount of composites -- 2 is obviously the cheapest but it gets worse the more you use this system.
If you run out of Bait, you can dig up some worms at the Baitery as a service. This takes time and probably has a skill mechanic associated with it (like in Crate fishing), and also you only keep half the worms you get. But it does prevent softlocking. Starting out you have no bait so you *have to* do this.
Lures and Antilures aren't consumable. You just always have them.
Lures are also tied to a single property and double the adjusted weight of a fish with that type appearing.
Antilures halve it instead. Antilures are a great way of catching a new fish by lowering the weights of all known fish.
Lures/antilures can be combined. This costs money, and the more you combine them the more money it costs. It maybe adds an extra +N for each composite, so you pay N for combing two lures and then 2N for combining that with something and 3N for combining *that* with something or combining two double-lures together, etc.
You can separate Lures back out. This is free thankfully.
Lure Buying
You buy Lures at the Angler.
I could see a scenario where you'd want to buy more than one of the same Lure (antilure-like scenarios) so yeah they don't disappear. The archiving feature makes things easier here.
Shop Archiving
To get around how bloated shop lists can become, you can "archive" a shop option and unarchive it later. These will appear on a different offbeat menu. This doesn't cost money; it's purely a QoL thing.
Every region palettizes fish. There's always an even number available.
The museum is separated into areas by region and all fish have slots available -- it doesn't tell you what they are.
You can bring a fish in and put it in the museum. A fish with a normal weight will be worth 1 upgrade point while a fish in the top 10% of weight will be worth 2 upgrade points.
Restocks and new features unlock with every half the total upgrade points available. So like if there's 10 fish in the region, 10 upgrade points are necessary for the next upgrade. This can be one of each fish, 5 that are in the upper 10%, or some mixing and matching.
Restocks
Every upgrade, you get bait and lure investment options. These cost money but will allow you to fill a Baitery or Angler with new options. They append to the shop; they don't replace the existing ones.
You also get to choose from several options -- not the specific items but one of several batch sets. You also don't have to do this immediately -- you can wait until you've explored the new area a bit first.
New areas
New areas unlock every time you reach an upgrade threshold. Given the limited amount of upgrades in the game, these should be handcrafted, though the fish definitely aren't.
Opening up a new area costs money.
Actual upgrades
Each upgrade also gives you access to a new mechanic, which will be explored in their own section:
Auto Fishing -- this has been covered. It's a great way of getting your money up faster.
Crate Fishing + Shop investments
Hiring + Residential
Markets
Citybuilding
This means there's six total handcrafted fishing regions, which I'm going to theme out.
Game Goal
The ultimate game goal is completing your Museum. That last area is a private fishing area and costs money to actually fish, quite a bit of it in fact, so you need to make the entreprelurial/citybuilding mechanics work for you to be able to utilize it.
The private retreat also has some new mechanics. Other than just requiring absurd amounts of money for everything whatsoever.
Crate fishing gives you grab-bags of junk. They're colored and named the way they are in Shatterloop, and also palettized to each region and weighted in areas accordingly. They also have different chances of different categories of junk.
Crate fishing requires Hooks, which are neutral but more expensive than Worms. They're well worth the investment though.
The Baitery has worms at the top, followed by hooks. Works can be archived while Hooks cannot for sanity. If you haven't unlocked Crate Fishing yet, you can't buy Hooks and get a message accordingly.
Crates will always be caught, however you can't Auto fish. The slow / use less Hooks mechanic still applies.
Crates basically give you a grab-bag of random loot that I've detailed out in the Trading game. These can be sold at the Pawn Shop for their normal value, which is somewhat paucial.
Shop Investments
For a bunch of money and some initial stock you can create specialized Shops to sell specific types of junk for top dollar. They take both money and some unique items of that type to set up but they're worth it.
Since their only mechanic is selling, they don't need to be separate links. A "market" building or whatever handles everything all at once. They could also just be Pawn Shop upgrade targets, but idk the separation is probably a good thing.
This mechanic allows for a kind of Automation of fish catching. It's real-time (while actively playing) so you get money over time as you fish in other ways, or you can go away from the computer to let it autofish for you.
There are some steep mechanics though thankfully not as bad as Dungeoneer. Just something to create more challenge since the system scales up very very quickly.
Basic Stuff
You're hiring people to fish for you. You can give them one of your Lures, and you define their fishing rod settings and which region and subregion to fish in. Once you unlock Markets you can also specify which Market to sell to.
The calculation is handled for you (it's identical to the one used in Autofishing), but it basically runs some averages or hand calculates what they're likely to pull up with, say, 20 of the specified bait, and its resultant market value. It also factors in bait cost. If it isn't profitable you can't do it.
I'm thinking that they just spend all their money on bait and the value calculation comes from the fish they're selling and overall profit margins. Idk though, this seems kind of weird.
People you hire also want to make some money from the endeavor -- I'm thinking a fixed value, which varies. They also require some money at the outset.
I'm thinking different people can influence catch chance / fish weights as well. You can see all of this before you actually hire them -- same deal with trying out specific combinations of market/location stuff. You get to do a lot of preplanning before you make an investment, which is essential. Every 10 minutes you wait is less passive money you're making though.
They also have only a select set of regions they'll want to visit. It's maybe about half of what's available.
You can't automate Crate Fishing -- as mentioned there are skill mechanics there. Also there has to be something for *you* to do.
You earn money every 10 minutes from all of your autofishers.
Social Mechanic
The people you hire can like or dislike other people randomly. They'll have some decrease in their stats (or want more money) if they go to a region with people they don't like.
You can usefully vet new recruits with your existing ones before actually hiring them.
Residential
You can build residences for your recruits. This cuts their money requirement in half which makes formerly unprofitable ventures profitable and existing ones more profitable.
However, the sociality mechanic still applies -- outside of the first house you build and the last one you've built, every house has two neighbors and a recruit will refuse to live anywhere they dislike either of their neighbors.
Sourcing
When you want a new recruit, you pay a marketing cost. This will give you three potential recruits. They're random. You don't have to hire any of them, but then you've wasted your marketing cost. The sociality mechanic kind of limits your upscaling though.
Citybuilding is basically your R&D division or the game's magic system. It layers on top of all existing systems and allows you to really fine-tune the way they work and ultimately break the game (or at least grant yourself easy access to the Caldera Retreat).
You're basically investing in various things to:
Genetically reengineer fish
Alter fish concentrations in areas
Make specialized crate shops sell stuff for more.
Make crates have more of a particular item category.
Get people to like each other (The Tavern mechanic, though I guess in this case it would be much wider).
Train people so their stats are better in some capacity.
Make food farms and stuff so recruits require less money from you.
Given all this and the overall potential of breaking the game, the mechanics are unusually erudite. Granted you *need to* break the game to dredge up all the unique fish in the Caldera Retreat.
Citybuilding runs on the Webmats engine which I developed today. Once I get it fully balanced/polished that is.
The regions are themed after the existing handcrafted areas.
Links will always be the same and flow naturally in ways you'd expect to improve the UX a bit.
There's a similar tree of buildings needed before you can achieve your goal.
There should be a couple targets that manipulate this mechanic itself. Ideal targets are resource amount, the amount of times you can mine and making permanent roads between two locations (affects all future gameplay). There should probably be some limits though -- I don't want to make it too easy.
Resource spread definitely changes with each target.
All gather/settle/mine actions cost money. Money won't really be a problem as you get more into the mechanic but it makes you think twice about just grinding.
Additionally you have to actually finish the puzzle before leaving, to cut down on the absurd size of the save file. If you fail though you get back all the money you spent so resetting you find a new strategy isn't a terrible idea.
Completing 3 high-level buildings within a region turns it into a fully fledged settlement with its own fish market and baitery/angler. A section of the main town will open up that lets you visit other settlements.
The overall goal of this is making the magic system rather hard to attain and also giving you something useful to do while you wait for autofish besides just crate fishing.
Up at the top you can specify an amount of bait to buy, an amount of money to spend, or a percentage of your total money. This defaults to 1 bait (also the three boxes are mutually exclusive). These settings are saved for future trips -- it makes buying bait a lot easier.
The amts of bait and their price changes accordingly -- the button will be grayed out if you can't afford something.
This is probably too cumbersome and I'll need to play around with it to really hammer out the UX.
As mentioned, the mechanics here differ *substantially* from the rest of the game.
There are no weights -- all fish in a particular pool are equal. There is no catch chance -- fish will always be caught. Sounds great, right? Well...
2D engine
There are several pools. Each has exactly one of the fish there and once caught you can't catch it again. Money is just a consumable at this point so the goal of completing the Caldera Retreat is finishing that section of your Museum.
The pool is generated -- it might be a square or it'll likely be generated in a Keydrop-esque way (or there might be multiple pools with different terrain that have the same fish settings that you choose between). Fish names pull from a different pool and continue to be procedural, along with their stats. Should theme it after divine/magic/etc stuff for flavor, like Holyscale or Firetooth or whatever. Both the prefix and suffix are unique.
The areas a fish appear in and their movements are all procgen so pools are like puzzles that you can try multiple times. This includes drops -- the probability of a drop is the same but it'll always drop at the same time.
In any case, it's a 2D grid. The fish within it are actual entities and they'll move around (doing some CW pathfinding stuff if they get blocked by islands, edges or other fish) as well as drop below the water (these fish can't be caught). Movements and potential drops will get telegraphed assuming you have that upgrade unlocked.
You can move to any edge tile (or island tiles once you unlock that potential). You fish orthogonally and can cast up to half of the mainline distance (this'll be an average with keydrop generation). You do get to see your distance somehow, ideally in a way that's mobile-friendly.
Some graphics might be a good idea -- the fish here are handcrafted anyway.
Fishing Mechanics
You cast a line and it'll build it with -| the way the grappling hook works in driller. This happens according to your cast speed stat.
You then click and it drops the line. If there's a fish there you can continue, otherwise you've wasted the cast.
While a fish is hooked, all other fish along its path to you will drop if they're in the way and then freeze their movements.
Once hooked, you have a skill bar where the settings are based on the type of fish. You have to do this several times. A successful one counts as a reel and moves the fish N=2 (or whatever, hardcoded values) spaces towards you, while a failure makes it return N spaces. If it reaches its origin or you fail that first check you've wasted the cast.
If you make it all the way to shore you've been successful with the cast and can add the fish to your Museum.
Fish differences
Movement speed
Movement patterns (it's the same thing over and over so if you learn a fish's movement you can strategize and get around their speed).
Fish drop likelihood.
Drop time.
Stuff that goes into the reeling mechanic -- how fast it moves and the margin for error.
Money Concerns
Each Cast costs money, whether it's successful or not. It's kind of a lot too -- money will be represented in grands or mils or whatever the scaling is so you don't get cipher stroke.
You can also spend money on upgrades and consumables. These are quite a bit. The latter can be bought from within the pool UI.
Cast Speed
Cast speed can be customized. It costs money to change it, but you can test it out before making an investment.
Slower speeds give you more time to hook.
Faster speeds let you get to a fish faster before it moves/disappears.
They both have tradeoffs. Faster is generally going to be better as your skill goes up, but having movement-slow consumables might make slower speeds more accurate. In any case you can find the speed that works well for you.
Upgrades
You can purchase various upgrades that make things easier. They cost quite a bit of money, but they do at least have big perks, not incremental ones.
Fish will telegraph their drops and movement changes.
You can fish diagonally.
Your range is maxed out.
Islands will appear randomly, allowing new spots to fish from.
Consumables
These have to be purchased each time you use them:
