A fork from the current version of the fishing game.
Cuts out any part of the engine not related to fishing, as that engine (and the fishing log) is a pretty solid module. So a lot simpler obviously until I expand the scope.
Areas are linked together and there's a transport cost associated with switching locations.
The overall goal is to catch specific fish and bring them back to your aquarium.
Scope expansion
Procgens with the actual time -- like market prices will change, the fishing rod rotation will change depending on the day. (it allows you to buy current day + the last 5 or whatever N days). Uses the existing dow system (minnowday, etc). Each day the aquarium requirements rotate as well. This encourages playing over a longer span of time.
The real time of day dictates the time of day in the game as well, however it's 1/4 or 1/3 as long as a real day so players can work around IRL schedules. Fish have different preferences for different times of day.
A weather system dependent on both the day/hour and the location. Again, shifts things around. You'll be able to see a forecast of these conditions.
Fish info will tell you their TOD and weather preferences.
An mmo format for player location and aquarium construction. Aquariums all exist in the same spot and players can customize their appearance via basic pathing and css (and some fixed number of rooms). Also like fixed "shops". Players can also exchange items, money, etc. Pouch goes down a few levels to the Room, except for aquarium town, which is all one room. Some kind of graffiti system as well. I think this format makes a certain amount of sense for Merchant and Courier as well.
Some UX stuff, like bait buying should be saner -- should be for the other engine too honestly.
The world is a collection of regions whose layout is procgen. Every week one area disappears forever and a new area is constructed from whole cloth. The areas are a collection of towns and fishing spots linked together by some arcane transport network based on the ones in Shatterloop/Merchant/presumably courier if I do more work there before this project comes to fruition.
Your daily fish contracts tell you only the region where it's located, not where it is specifically or how to catch it. To get this kind of information you have to ask around in towns and trade a form of information currency for the information you seek. This can be obtained by doing local quests (catch X local fish or whatever) or mapping out the fish in certain sublocs. So there's some definite grinding involved and more of a solid gameplay loop other than the fish contracts, which are the main goal.
Bait, fishing rods and moving around a region take money, which can be acquired by catching and selling fish. Fish values change somewhat but some are more valuable than others (and comparatively harder to catch and within more narrow ranges of depth).
Getting information on a particular fish (such as the contract ones, but maybe also particularly hard to locate ones in the context of fully exploring areas or ones that are valuable on the market) requires finding the right NPC for that category of information, or maybe they're based on a certain fish tag or something. Not sure of the skew yet. In any case in order to find that NPC you have to follow clues set by other NPCs, in a shatterloopian way. Along the way you can maybe find highly valuable quests to improve the grind. And of course you're also exploring a large procgen space.
The actual end goal is catching the fish in contracts. Doing this (especially in streaks) gives you a third kind of currency which you can spend on the aquarium town to have bigger areas or compete for more prime real estate or even change room descriptions or w/e. The social sphere of this game is probably the most interesting part of it.
