A fishing game for Discord where every catch is a reaction test and the record book is never quite finished. I designed it and built it.
The idea
Every fishing bot on Discord works the same way. You type /fish and the bot rolls a dice. What comes back is a paragraph of text. There's no moment where you can be good at it, so there's nothing to feel.
Discord can't run twitchy action games, but it can time a button press on the server. That turned out to be enough. In Pixel Fishing, rarity is the reaction window:
- A common fish gives you three seconds.
- A legendary gives you 750 milliseconds.
The float goes under and for a second it's all on you.
The bite. The panel flips and you have until the window closes to hit Reel.
The catch, with a field note about the real fish.
What I built
The game runs on a Go bot I built around Discord's interactions: casting, the hookset, the economy, the maps and every picture it draws on the fly.
Prices aren't typed in by hand. They come out of an economy simulation, tuned so every deeper zone pays more than the one above it and is worth the trip. Getting to the bottom of the Philippine Trench takes about seven hours of active play.
The Philippines: five zones from the mangroves down to the trench, each unlocked with what you earn.
Real fish, drawn by hand
Every species is real, with its real weight range and a field note that's actually true, so every catch teaches you something. There are 30 of them in the Philippines, spread across five zones from the mangroves down to the Philippine Trench.
The record book: everything you've landed, and silhouettes of what you haven't.
Trophy cards, made for showing off in the channel with /show.