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Prototyping Challenge: Fishing Girl

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Danc of Lost Garden is back with another prototyping challenge; game designer I am not, but I love these things — especially seeing what people come up with. On the plate this cycle? A fishing game that Danc describes as "Frogger using a polar coordinate system, a frog that insists on drifting to the left and only the ability to move forward":

Fishing Girl is a simple fishing game played with one button. It illustrates a design pattern called sequentially linked mechanics. Often when you try to simulate a complex exercise like fishing, you can’t easily create a single game mechanic that captures the entire experience. Instead, you string together a series of activities. Each activity is simplistic by itself, but in sequence yields a good approximation of the complex experience. The fishing game is split into the following activities: 1. Casting 2. Positioning the lure 3. Hooking a fish 4. Reeling in the fish 5. Scoring the fish 6. Buying new equipment. Each section should take 1-3 evenings to prototype in Flash. String them all together and you have a fishing game. The nice thing about this challenge is that it is all about bite sized chunks that are easy to build and iterate on.

I'll be looking forward to seeing the results and seeing if someone manages to put together a 'gold medal design.' Fishing Girl: Game Prototyping Challenge [Lost Garden]

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