First of all, I’m sorry for the lack of updates in March! I spent the month eating painkillers almost daily so it’s a bit of a blur, and I honestly don’t really even remember what happened that month. I did still work on Fish Hook on my weekly schedule but a lot of it was working on background edits and doing research. In turn I spent my April working on application papers and the work sucked out all my energy to write, but I did finally return back to Fish Hook’s second draft writing! I’m skipping prologue and starting from chapter 1 because I like to leave prologue and ending, heh. I also changed the story structure a little bit and divided one section into two chapters instead of one, which doesn’t mean much to the player because there is no real chapter system in it, but it helps keep things clearer for me.
I also have one major update and it’s about my working station. Some may already know this but I have been struggling with very intense physical pain for years now that becomes pretty unbearable when I’m typing on my computer, so writing had just kind of become this thing I associated with a lot of pain and it didn’t feel appealing. I have since worked hard on trying to figure out the source of the pain and while I’m still not entirely sure of the root cause, I have been able to make some adjustments that have made the writing process way less painful! I hope that with these changes I can work on Fish Hook even outside of my weekly writing meetings 🙏 I’ll just need to learn out of associating writing with pain.
For May I’m hoping to finish writing the second draft of at least chapter 1, and I would like to post some art too 🙂 …
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 👍…
