HTHRFLWRS #11 - The Precipisce

FISH FEAR ME comes out in exactly one week. If you haven’t wishlisted it, I recommend you do:

FISH FEAR ME on Steam

A top-down action roguelike about catching fish, fighting them, selling their bones, and catching more fish. Upgrade your boat and weapons, hunt down sea monster bounties, and try to become the greatest battle-fisherman of all time.

There’s a lot I could talk about with this game, and a lot I will talk about. Today, though, I want to talk a little about the process of getting here.

I started working on FISH FEAR ME in July of 2024 as a quick side endeavor. One month, take the SNAKE farm code, build something new on top of it, push something fun and short out the door, get a little more runway for other projects, move on. Seven months later, I think it’s safe to say that I overshot a little bit.

This is a constant loop I find myself getting into with solo projects: I start something simple, estimate it’ll take a month or two to put together the most basic version of it, and then I think… why stop there? I already took the time to make these tools; I might as well use them. I think I have terminal DLC brain: making systems is fine, but building on top of pre-existing systems and expanding on basic gameplay premises? Hoo boy.

(Speaking of, I already have plans for post-launch content updates. The first one is gonna be called WOMEN WANT ME.)

There’s something crystalline about working in roguelikes. You have your basic possibility space, and then you have every possible permutation of it. You can’t touch those permutations directly, but you can endlessly build out new content: new areas, new weapons, new enemies, new challenges. I decided to make each area in FISH FEAR ME completely authored, so that players can form an ongoing relationship with each environment. “You can rush to this point on this day with this lure and use this item to gain this result.” By keeping certain things the same between runs, I can require more of players, since they have more guaranteed tools at their disposal.

And it’s so easy to add more. Every part of this game is designed to make content generation easy. Adding a new boat takes exactly as long as creating a boat, writing a description, and giving it a weapon. Most fish only have one frame of animation: not two, one. They “swim” by flipping their x-axis. This is kinda necessary, given this has been a mostly-one-person development process. I only have so many hours in a day, and if each of the 150ish fish in the game had unique animations, I’d never sleep.

So I added more! I started off with one area, three boats, five biomes, twenty fish. Only that won’t do, will it? Only four fish per biome isn’t nearly enough. Ten per should do it — except now there’s fifty fish, and we can’t just have three boats to catch all of them. So let’s push that to seven boats, and start unlocking new weapons for using each boat. But we’ve put in all this effort for one map, so we might as well do two more. That’s ten more biomes, of course — a hundred more fish. And if there’s seven boats in the first area, there should at least be four more for each of the other two, and unlockables for each of them. Suddenly we’re looking at a game with dozens of unlocks and tens of hours of gameplay. And, wouldn’t you know it, all I can see is more?

The game is coming out now because it needs to come out, and because it’s far past complete. It would’ve been good-enough months ago. Now, it’s great.

I’m excited to see how people react to this version of the game, and I’m excited to see how it evolves next. It takes a lot of big swings in the roguelike design space, and I hope you enjoy. The first big update is already calling me, and the next, and the next.

See you next week. We’ve got fish to catch.

— Heather

P.S. I got into this same mindset with SNAKE FARM as well. The only reason I stopped after Economies of Scale was because I’d run through the whole gamut of the game’s possibility space. Fortunately/unfortunately, the possibility space of FISH FEAR ME is significantly larger. Let’s find out what happens together!

Want to respond to the discussion questions? Email me at heatherflowersbusiness@gmail.com!