Fisherman Game

Fisherman Game (FG) is a complete one made using Game Maker and described by its developer as a tactics RPG. This is the first Game Maker I have ever played. So did I like going fishing?


Story/Plotline:

Your town is suffering a food shortage due to a bad harvest. As the only fisherman in town you have decided to take the task of catching enough fish to prevent a famine during winter.


Writing

As you would expect, there isn’t much of it in the game. However, the background information and instructions given at the beginning of the game were clear and well written enough for me to understand.




The light blue circle represents your fisherman. It reminds me of the square adventurer you control in “Adventure” for Atari 2600.


Gameplay

The goal of the game is to increase the town’s food supply from the starting 900 to 1,000, while preventing it from dropping to 0. There are two basic tasks involved in doing this: catching the fish and emptying them into the town’s pond so that it counts towards the food supply.

In order for you to catch fish, you have to place your fisherman, represented by a light blue circle, next to one of four possible fishing spots outside of town that must be active and press an action button to start the fishing process. A light blue gauge becomes active and gets filled up at a rate that depends on the current “Speed” value. After the gauge is finished filling up, you get an amount of fish added to your current inventory that depends on the current “Strength” value. It should be noted that you can’t move until you finish fishing.

There’s also an unnamed separate light green gauge that gets filled up at a constant rate that could be described as an “Upgrade” gauge. Once it finishes filling up, you can choose to increase by 1 the values of either “Strength” or “Speed”. The value of the earlier determines how many fish you will obtain per catch, while that of the latter determines how quickly you will make each catch.
In order to empty your current fish inventory, you need to place your fisherman next to the town’s pond and press the action button.

As you are doing one of the two basic tasks mentioned, the value of the food supply is going down steadily.

Based on the gameplay mechanics, I wouldn’t describe the game as a Tactics RPG as the developer has on RMN. Rather, but rather as a time management, strategy game. Whether or not you win the game comes down to making real-time decisions about where and when to fish, how often to empty your inventory into the town’s supply and which of the two stats available you choose to improve.

In terms of difficulty, I would say the game’s not too difficult to win. It would take A LOT of decisions for a player to lose the game.




My Game Winning Screen




Game Over Screen: You can actually get it by doing nothing and waiting about 10 minutes


Graphics/Sound

The top down graphics are relatively simple, with some nice detail and a light pastel color palette. There was a very quiet background music track that played during the whole game that was a bit droning.


Conclusion

The developer mentioned that this game was a mini-game created by him to practice his game making. I think the game successfully implemented the gameplay mechanics as well as other elements, although I thought it was a bit too easy and perhaps could have had a better soundtrack.

I would recommend it to anyone looking for a quick game to waste away 10 to 15 minutes. I can easily see this game being ported to those other touch-based gaming platforms.