Updates

Monthly update #2 – October 2025

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I’m still burdened by intense migraines and paperwork, but I’m glad I managed to write despite that!

  • This month I managed to hit the 25,000 words mark and now I have 4/10 chapters done, with the 5th chapter at roughly 70% completion! 🙂

  • I spent some time growing my music and sound effect collection, since I like to write while listening to music meant for each scene, and there are very specific sound effects I want to use and remix into things.

    This part used to be SO easy back when I was working on Sinfonia, but these days, thanks to generative AI, I have to vet every single track and composer individually to make sure I’m not tricked into using AI music. It genuinely makes me so upset that AI users won’t even disclose their use of it, since they all know we wouldn’t listen to them or use them if we knew. Perhaps the only positive side to this is that I have intentionally started looking up music that’s been uploaded a long time ago, like even in the 00s, and I think it’s been providing me with a very interesting library.

  • This is more of a research thing, but I watched a bunch of movies and anime OVAs partially as inspiration for Fish Hook 🙂 Would like to highlight The Lighthouse for its delightful madness, since it’s something I’m deliberately analysing and studying for Fish Hook inspiration spesifically. Very fun movie. Pattinson really was giving his all in his role and I love to see it.

  • I’ve been writing a character highlight post about Juri, but it still needs some ironing out. Should be out in November, hopefully alongside posts about Adrian and Lysander.

NaNoWriMo as an organisation/site no longer exists (and I think we can all agree this is a good thing), but I’m planning on writing in November anyway! I recently learned about NaNo 2.0 and I’m interested in participating in it, since I did miss that feeling of having some kind of larger community aspect involved.

Sorry this update ended up lacking in visuals, I didn’t have the energy to photograph and edit some of the traditional doodles I have drawn lately, and the digital ones are still big wips. Hopefully in the next update I have something visual to show, possibly even some UI suggestions. …

Updates

Monthly update #1 – September 2025

surulauluLeave a comment

I spent most of this month doing paperwork for IRL things and having a migraine, but I still managed to work on Fish Hook at least once every week 🙂

First, here is my rough roadmap for this project. I’m currently at the first working stage and prioritising the first draft of the script to get the ball rolling, but I like to work on other stuff alongside it as well. Sinfonia taught me that sprites and the art in general are my biggest anxiety point in game development, so this time I’m leaving them for later stages so that my art style doesn’t change three times between the writing of the script and actually putting the pieces together.

If you see a windows watermark: no you don’t.

For the actual progress of this month, I realised that majority of my script has been written during September! Friend and I have been having weekly remote writing sessions and it’s been really helpful in ensuring that I actually do sit down and write!

Currently at the time of writing this post the script has 13,131 words, and I’m comfortable stating that I have 30% of the script’s first draft written out so far. Technically I have more, it’s probably something closer to 40%, but it’s easier to state it like this. The actual game will likely not have chapters, so this is a system I’m only using to keep some kind of track of progress. These “chapters” are not equal in length either.

This month I also put up both the info site and this development blog, as well as a mirror on tumblr for reposting things here.

There is a slight chance that if I lock in and my health situation improves I’ll be able to finish the first draft of Fish Hook during October. My life is still in an incredible unstable and transitory state due to my graduation, health problems and the absolutely abysmal state of everything in Finland right now, but I’m praying and actually also begging on my knees that I get to have a peaceful and healing October. Please. I’m so tired. …

Devlog

Devlog #1 – First look & overview

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I actually wanted to dedicate this first post to all my main inspirations for the story, but then realised I speak so little of the game itself that I’m better off starting with an actual overview of what Fish Hook is and how it will play.

Fish Hook is a frame story, which means that there is a story inside the story, and these stories are divided into two distinct time periods. The present day sections are narrated by Juri as he listens to Adrian recount his tale of what happened to Lysander Burnett three years ago. This other story is narrated by Adrian, whose memories Juri is able to see as if he was physically present in them. As such, these sections feature present day Adrian as the narrator voice, while other dialogue is presented as flashback scenes where Adrian from the past is also represented. I promise it’s not as complicated as I make it sound to be, the visual novel advantage of using sound and visual images really helps with clarity here when it comes to the actual game.

There are also going to be choices throughout the game that will influence the amount of information you get, as well as the importance of them. I have a lot planned for it and I would love to share a photo of the choice notes and visual propositions I have made for it, but I feel like it’s something I’d rather have the players to discover themselves. Just know that even though the choices will not affect the ending, they will have a pretty massive role in how the game is going to be experienced 🙂

I have decided to classify the game as a horror game because that’s the closest it’ll get to the core of the story. I generally gravitate towards literary fiction as opposed to genre fiction, especially because these categories kind of straight up don’t exist in Finland, at least not in the way English-speaking communities use it. Cosmic horror isn’t necessarily the subgenre I’d confidently use but I suppose it might still be useful as an indicator of what kind of tone it will have, except that some core principles of cosmic horror sort of clash with my own more academic posthumanism angle that isn’t super keen on all its aspects and interpretations. But this will be a topic of a different post.

My initial plan was to turn Fish Hook into a pixel art game, but after drawing the website character portraits I realised this is the kind of visual look I want to feature in the game. I’m a little sad about it, but at the same time it will also make a lot of things like the UI editing much easier, and most importantly “feels” like the right choice. I’m going to come back to this post when in a year or two I’m working on the sprites and lamenting how much it sucks to edit non-pixel art sprites.

This is the first visual UI proposal I have made, back when I was still heavily considering the pixel art presentation.

It’s by no means the final version and will undoubtedly change a lot as the project advances, but I thought it would be nice to share it anyway. My main inspiration were old cigarette boxes, at least in terms of composition, and to a lesser degree PC-98 era visual novels with their decorative frames. Looking at this now, I definitely want to make it less cramped. I plan on returning back to UI brainstorming once I’m done with the first draft of the game script.

Thank you if you made it this far 🙂

Next time I will actually talk about the inspirations and context stuff related to the game, as well as elaborate a bit on what the mysterious “companion game” to Fish Hook is 👍…