Fishing Roulette is the second game jam project from the C.O.R.E Developer Group that started back in November of 2024. It originally was our submission for the "Crazy Web Game Jam 2024" hosted by Crazy Games and Game Jam Plus with the prompt for the jam being "everything is a remix".

Our internal goals for participating in the jam were two fold. One, keep our development skills sharp while experiment with new ideas. And two, getting our names out in the wider gaming sphere.

The initial brainstorming session for Fishing Roulette was not what any of us had expected. After doing some research on the kinds of products Crazy Games tends to publish we learned that the most successful games on their site tended to be:

• Immediately captivating
• Easy to understand and play
• Stylistically charming
• Incremental in progression
• Appealing to younger audiences 

With these metrics in mind our next step was analyzing what was currently popular with other indie titles, games such as "Liars Bar" and "Buckshot Roulette" were gaining a lot of attention at the time and informed a lot of the tone of our game. But this alone didn't give us a unique premise we could present as a 'remix' and so we kept looking for further inspiration. 

When one of our developers mentioned the recent success of the game "Web Fishing" and the universally understood genre of fishing games in general, the idea began to take form. We wanted to make something that appealed to the shock comedy to grab attention, while also remixing a traditional fishing tycoon game. With these inspirations the basic idea for "Fishing Roulette" was born.

The main tenant that our idea formed around was that classic euphemism 'like shooting fish in a barrel'; moreover what if shooting fish in a barrel was an incremental tycoon game?  What would that look like? Where does that take place? Who's facilitating this activity? What is the player working towards?

 By answering these questions we found the key visual themes for the game. The game would look like a top down first person shooter, it would take place in a swamp shanty town, it would be conducted by a legally brand distinct mounted bass, and the ultimate goal would be to own the whole swamp and eventually the main prize of the big bass it's self.

Here are some of our early concepting diagrams that informed our design:

The whole design session for Fishing Roulette felt like some kind of fever dream where it somehow managed to make a lot of sense being an amalgam of ideas from different genres that coalesced to the tune of bizarre comedy. It all seemed very true to the original prompt of 'everything is a remix'. It's important to note that this all took place in a matter of 2-3 hours and the fact that we hit the idea and unanimously agreed to it in such short order is a rarity in game development.

We went forth into the week long development process creating the assets and mechanics to bring our logically silly idea to life:

We sourced royalty free background music that captured the bluegrass tone and created the appropriate sound effects to compliment it. We designed our environment as the bayou fishing town we imagined from a variety of premade 3D kits on the Unity asset store. 

We created bespoke assets such as our target fish, the bass shop keeper and the revolver model. We programmed our game mechanics and functions to be visually stimulating, maintaining engagement with the user and rewarding all of their actions. 

We took care to design a straight forward and simple tutorial sequence that introduced the game mechanics in order of relevance.

Ultimately, we crafted our entire user experience to fit within the Crazy Games model for broadly appealing games focused on executing a simple idea to the best of our abilities.

At the end of the jam, the game had the comedic and functional value that we aimed to capture. As far as being a cute gag game was concerned we had hit the marks; however there were a lot of supplementary items that we did not have time to implement under the time constraint. We received some glowing feedback from Game Jam Plus that confirmed our vision was inline with what they were looking for and that we had executed it well enough for them to fully understand the idea.

While the idea and execution was sound, the main take away we got from this feedback was that a considerable degree of polish would be needed to make it a fully releasable product. This led directly into the second and much longer phase of development of Fishing Roulette that saw us adding many of the recommendations that would take the game from a game jam demo, to a professional product and portfolio piece. These included:

• Art for our UI
• more upgrades for long term playability
• settings for audio and certain visual effects
• more interactivity from the environment
• more rewards to mark significant progression 

As of writing this dev log all of these items have been developed and will soon be released in new versions of the game. Going forward we will likely continue to add extra features that contribute to the overall feeling of playing Fishing Roulette. Along with polish we have gone through the process of making an Android compatible version of the game; Many of our players have commented that "it has the qualities of a mobile game". We took that seriously and will eventually be releasing it as a standalone on Google Play. 

In the end, if there is one thing to learn from something like Fishing Roulette it's that the immersion one feels in a game comes from the cohesion of mechanics, audio, art and gameplay pacing. The general complexity of a game can add a lot of gameplay value and interest, but people have an easier time buying into a game when all of its features are supported by an overarching theme and tone. 

Not a single one of us at C.O.R.E Developers went into the game jam expecting to make something like Fishing Roulette but the process of designing for the Crazy Games platform pushed us to focus on the main idea and execute it as efficiently as possible. Much can be learned from doing a lot with a little and that is the lesson we took from this experience.

Thank you for taking interest in our game and its development process! Fishing roulette will be showing at Toronto Games Expo 2025 on March 29th & 30th at Table 40 in the Indie Developers Showcase. Check it out here:

https://www.torontogameexpo.ca/exhibitors?pgid=m8nctr6x-f5f270a8-946c-4852-95ac-...