Folderoltasticness

I’ve seen fishing used as a mechanic in many games, and I have to admit that I don’t find it actually fun in real life. But in terms of a game – why should that matter? I don’t find arranging blocks or pulling weeds fun in real life either, yet Tetris and Animal Crossing are fun. And I imagine killing monsters is a bit of a tedious process, yet – well, hell, you get the idea. If something is boring in real life, the best way of making if fun is a game. (Chore Wars isn’t a perfect example, but boy howdy it comes close)

Now, I should clarify that I’m not going full GDC Game Design challenge here (although as a side note, Clint Hocking wins my eternal respect for coming up with an idea for a DS game about Emily Dickinson – I’d seriously play his game). I’m curious about a fishing minigame, which should involve less in-depth mechanics and should be allowed more leeway to sacrifice realism for fun factor. As mentioned, a lot of games have a fishing minigame, and most of them are about as fun as hammering a nail into my eyeball.  Here’s a quick rundown off the top of my head:

* Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I can’t tell you how many people I talked to who said they got the crit path fish and then called it a day and never fished again. The starter rod (which has no reel) is unintuitive, and when I tried it I was flailing around and leaning backwards with the Wiimote, trying to get it to register my pulling motion.

* World of Warcraft. You have to open a menu (or directly drop an icon in your hotbar – any mods that make this easier are banned, for fear of exploitation by bots), click on an icon, and then wait for the little bobber to dip underwater, then click on it. It could take twenty seconds for the damn thing to bob. TWENTY SECONDS. Then maybe the fish got away! Oh gee. And if you do get it, you get a fish (the recipes for which, by the way, are a pain in the patookus to find) and one point of fishing skill. And we’re talking something you skill up to – what is it now, 375? Sure, over 70 levels, but unless you pace yourself and take the time to fish every time you log in, you’re going to be standing in front of a pool of water somewhere, eyes glazing over as you click on a little bobber in the water. If anything feels like a grind in WoW, it’s fishing. Ugh.

* Contact. Follows the WoW model, except less intuitive – you tap the A button sometime when the bobber sinks, and gee, if you don’t get it just right (and sometimes even if you do) you lose the fish. The general problem in that game of having a very high failure rate (hooray, I tried to cook and got a charred hunk of crap, and didn’t raise my cooking skill at all, so I just lost a pair of rare ingredients, oh hoo-frickin-ray), and that extends to fishing as well.

Contact breaks my heart for numerous reasons, and though fishing isn’t one of them, it’s symptomatic of it. Plus you need a certain costume to fish that you can only put on at the boat, which you have to teleport to, and you can only fish in an area of the level you have to walk to, so god forbid you get there wearing another costume, because you will have to go back which means all the monsters will respawn the second you leave the screen.

Anyhow.

Now let me tell you about a game that does it well – so well, in fact, that I have a heck of a good time playing it, and have spent gobs of time monkeying with this element of the game alone:

* Breath of Fire IV. Actually, the fishing mechanic in this isn’t just one, but several mini mechanics bound together: the line’s tensile strength (don’t let it go too loose or the fish will get away, or too taut and your line will break), the location of your cast, your type of bait, and the rhythm of your reel. …No, seriously. The tensile strength - right, very easy. Location of cast - sure, some fish will like shallow running water while others like deep pools, right. Bait - just bugs and such you find normally, different fish prefer different bait, I got it. Easy!

But the rhythm of the pull – now that’s interesting. Reeling is just a single button, but once you cast it, different sequences of taps attract different fish, and things are set on a simple musical rhythm. One fish will like a sequence of quarter notes, another a sequence of eighths – and this pattern is based off of the slow, easily-trackable tempo of the music that plays in the background. I actually picked up this mechanic without knowing it existed: I was reeling in casually and discovered it. Because the main fishing mechanism (the reeling) is relatively easy to master, and the actual process of fishing requires real player interaction, you don’t get bored doing it – and even waiting for a bite is an active process.

And to top it all off, the fish you get are actually extremely useful, restoring health and mana and such - outside of combat, I’m likely to give my characters fish to eat instead of using up healing potions. It’s a good mechanic for balancing the economy of the game as well.

As I’ve been given to understand it, the Breath of Fire series was known for having actually interesting fishing mechanics – I’d like to look at the earlier games and see if this pattern is actually a continuous one (and then I’ll cry a bit at how bad Breath of Fire V was - alas!).

Anyhow – that’s my idea there. Taking a mechanic that’s difficult, or something we don’t like in real life, and making it intuitive, active, and above all, FUN. What’re some other mechanics that are annoying and games have done poorly (and possibly well) and why? I’ma work on this one for a while.

[EDIT: Removed the part where I was talking smack about Animal Crossing’s fishing mechanic being crap, because I was talking about it with some friends and I found out I entirely misremembered how it worked and actually it was kind of neat, and similar to Breath of Fire IV in several respects, including reeling.  I’ma cease talking about it since the point has been made that my memory of it is not as solid as it was, so that’s enough of me there.]

One thing that makes me wonder a lot in games - especially RPGs - is if we as designers have lost sight on how to do simple things. Systems have a tendency to get really complex, and it seems a lot of times we’re more thinking of how to explain a convoluted, complex system rather than how to make it simpler and easier to use.

Been playing puzzle games like Tetris DS and Puzzle Quest lately, and have been particularly impressed with not just their base mechanic (which I realize is silly to say about Tetris, because everyone knows its mechanic by now - but sit and think of how preposterously elegant it is… there have been countless versions of it and permutations on that single base theme, but it remains instantly accessible to almost everyone. I have stories about how addicted my mom got to that game back in the day, but those are tales for another time), but with how different areas/types of the game change it. Puzzle Quest has multiple versions of its base system: the battles, the crafting, and the spell-learning (I don’t include sieges or mount training here, because they use the same battle mechanic, only timed for the latter, which is indeed an interesting variant but not a significant switch in gameplay) - each tweaks how you play the game slightly.

Tetris DS, however, has ENTIRELY different methods for how you play on each mode. I think it’s more to do with the fact that it has a simpler base mechanic than Puzzle Quest does (and actually, you spend so much of your time battling that when switching to the other modes, I find myself very much wishing I had the benefit of my spells: it’s the function you’re the most used to), and there’s a game mode that uses the base mechanic by itself - nothing is subtracted, only added. Another advantage is that pretty much everyone on the planet knows how the hell to play Tetris - it’s the job of the different mechanics to offer something new. The versus mode employs the classic “what I destroy gets sent to you” mechanic that I think has been around since the legendary illegal Tengen copy of Tetris for the NES (that supposedly had a bitchin’ two-player mode that I sadly never got to access personally), but the designers actually expanded the classic Nintendo properties theme of the game by adding in items . Oddly we’re familiar with the look of these items, but not what they do: mushrooms (which give a boost of speed in Mario Kart, which is basically where one can draw analogs from) speed up your opponent’s blocks, a turtle shell clears out the bottom two lines of your board, a star gives constant long pieces. Very basic “how would I win more / how would I screw my opponent up?” ideas, which are a compelling thought. Nifty as well is the “hold” button, which also works with the tendency of one to go “NO! Not THAT piece! I have nowhere to put it!” and the inherent nature of a well-organized board being screwed up by one single piece being awry. I’d say the benefit of this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that it’s a feature that one needs to get used to and understand fully in order to properly exploit, and that the player isn’t always best served by coming up with the biggest tower to get a Tetris with, but instead to build the fastest in order to get a Tetris first (and send blocks over to their opponent’s side). The other methods - Strategy, Catch, Push, and Puzzle - are all excellent and very varied permutations on this same theme (even the Touch Puzzle, which is what it sounds like, uses the tetronimos in place of simple ordered blocks).

I’m getting into way too great of detail here, but basically the idea of coming up with a solid, creative system - one that can be added to and tweaked to provide variations on the familiar (where the base mechanic is the game, but one’s goal changes). The skills in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus spring to mind: how you’d get a new skill at the end of every hub, but collecting “clues” rewarded you with new optional skills. At first they were stand-alone abilities, such as the mine-hat: but later, the player is awarded with power-ups for existing skills - a skill that made you invisible used to require you to stand still, but the power-up let you move while remaining unseen. There are a lot of different skills introduced in the Ratchet & Clank series (another favorite), and I’m compelled to play through them in order to see how they started out, and where they moved from there. (of course, in both games there are rewards for extensive exploration, and I’m curious about how one makes exploration compelling without assuming it just “will” be in and of itself)

Anyhow - running in mental circles at this point. Want to do some game research in the next while, get a sense of these things - maybe even attempt to run an experiment where I create something simple and interesting and fun, kick it around for a bit and see if it works. Look at its guts, poke around, see if it works and why it doesn’t. I’m not experienced with systems design, and I want to improve at it: after all, it used to be the heart and soul of what every designer did, back in the day… makes sense to get cozier with it.

This will be my random thought dump, probably circling around thoughts regarding stupid ideas for game development, assorted rants, possible pictures and/or dumb comics, and other things I don’t mind sharing with the world at large.

Be warned, humanity. I’m very weird.