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Fish Wip
Fish Wip was a speculative game designed under the Nice Moves MN mentorship program with Brock Brown from November 2023 to April 2024. The project was used to expand my concept art skills under a professional with a hypothetical game project where I would design the environment, characters, and props that could realistically be used in a video game concept art pipeline.
A good distinction I should make is that the basis of the project wasn't to actually design the game from a technical standpoint. There were lots of flairs added because I didn't have the basis of a studio telling me what the actual gameplay would look like, so playing with things like checkpoints and in-game currency and combat was up to me so I could more easily have something to work from when designing those aspects visually. But it does mean a lot of the mechanics and game elements I came up with likely wouldn't work in an actual game
I feel the gameplay I've described would likely be messy and uninteresting to players for the most part but they were added so I could better show my skills in visual development in a wider variety of areas.
The game I ended up developing focused on an action role playing game inspired by games like Bloodborne set in a small fishing town that was overtaken by mutated fish monsters. The player character was a fisherman, a respected and demanding role in the society, that required him to journey out to abandoned parts of the town that were overtaken by fish and collect resources, fight his way through the hordes, and do what he can to keep what was left of his town safe.
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The function was that many of your items started out as pretty weak so you'd need to go out to retrieve resources then return back to the city with resources to upgrade weapons and trade with different npcs to better fend off the monsters that surround that safe zone.
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The basic premise gave me the starting point of visually designing an environment that was safe, an environment that was dangerous, designing a main character, designing safe NPCs, designing dangerous monsters, and designing the props you interact with along with the props that you use to trade as items.
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Rather than checkpoints accessed through a menu screen I thought it'd be interesting if the only checkpoint was located in the town center. This would mean you'd need to return back to home base to save so if you had good loot players would have to weight the risks of pushing ahead and potentially losing all of it.
To potentially balance this there are stations similar to ski lifts made from old submarines that would carry the player over the ocean between the safe town center and the different overrun islands but could only be started/accessed by first getting to the island where theyre stationed. This function would encourage the player to continue further rather than retreat while in rough circumstances since the player gains access to make progress easier and faster by reaching further points of the island.
I wanted different overrun sections to have the old grimey feel of an abandoned seaside town left to rot but also have the feeling that the sea itself had taken it over. Many location gimmicks would be based off of water biomes as though the land had been taken over by the properties below water- For instance certain sections were based around swamp land covered in algae, other areas were based off coral reefs turning white and bone-like, another was based around deep sea environments that become so dark sunlight can't reach them, etc.
