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 👍