What's the Catch?
Time to put your fishing skills to the test and catch your very own exotic fish for your tank. Fill your tank with the rarest and best fish you can before the day comes to an end.
Overview
Time Frame: 2 Weeks
Date: February 2022
Team Size: 1
Team Members: Caitlyn Lenhoff (solo)
Role: Designer (Narrative, UX/UI, Gameplay)
Keywords: Tabletop, Roll-and-Write, Dice
Description:
What's the Catch is a single player roll-and-write style tabletop game where the player tries to maximize their points by getting the best possible fish in their tank. The fish you catch corresponds to the dice you roll. If you do not want a fish that you caught, you can also put it in the cooler which can later give you bonuses.
Duties / Personal Contributions:
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Designed the mechanics of the fishing via dice rolls
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Designed the narrative behind the game
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Designed the UI.
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Designed the rules for the game.
Process
Balancing The Fish Values
One problem that I ran into while designing the game was proper balance to the fish. The rarer ones seemed to have a good high value, but per square their value was actually much worse than the fish that were much easier to get and there was no point in trying to catch them.
Thus I spent a great deal of time trying to make the values worth using some of the larger fish, but also still leaving room for those who wanted to try to be more strategic with the lower value smaller fish.
Tank Size
Initially the take was so large that you could not even begin to fill half of it before the game ended and that frustrated some of my playtesters.
Thus, I limited the amount of squares in the tank by about a quarter.
The Cooler
I initially had the cooler so that you would have to put the actual fish into the cooler when you wanted to use the cooler, and any time you filled a row, you would get a bonus and clear that row. The problem was that the cooler was so small that this was often impossible due to the lack of fish shapes.
Thus, I scrapped that idea and instead allowed the players to signify that a fish was added to the cooler by using one square per fish and when you fill a row, you get the bonus for that row.
