Hooked!

A VR fishing adventure

Cast your line into the crystal tides in an immersive VR experience. Hooked! is a relaxing game about reeling in fish and other treasures, occasionally moving to new locations to catch different types of fish and build up their catalogue.

Hooked! Was a University made for a class on immersive environments by me and two others. We wanted to make something that was accessible to those who weren’t used to VR, so made something more focused on immersing the player in the world and providing a variety of interactions, rather than fast-paced action. Working in VR provided a laundry list of limitations and requirements. For us, one of our primary concerns was motion sickness (especially with the nautical themes) and so we put effort into designing the play-space to involve minimal player movement, and used teleportation for both player movement and boat movement. To tie this into the theme the player can move the boat by grabbing and dragging a model boat around a map.

We wanted to encourage player exploration in this game. We did this in two ways:

1. The game is filled with unique locations and sights. Our artist for this project was the incredible Jasmine Perry, who insisted on producing a near unlimited supply of fish, islands and other objects. As well as fish the player can reel in Crates which they can bust open to find strange treasures of the deep. We even included a polaroid camera so players could capture photographs of their travels and catches.
2. Inside the cabin are a series of boards with silhouetted fish that the player can catch in each area. When you catch a new fish it is shown on the board, and a player who catches all the fish in an area receives a small trophy representing that area’s sea-life. This serves to provide a more tangible goal to some players, without actually telling them where to go or how to play.

Ultimately, we are quite happy with how this game turned out, especially as our first time working in VR. My only real regret is that I could have put more time into the tutorial system. As it currently exists there is just a radio which provides tips and advice, however many players missed it. Within the time constraints there was only so much I could do, but I should have prioritised it over some of the other systems.

Some additional notes:

• Hooked! is a working title which we never got around to changing.
• Initially there was a more complex fishing system planned, with different bait luring different fish, and a struggle to catch them. However, we decided to focus more on the calm relaxing collect-a-thon gameplay.
• The “Ancient Treasures” that can be found in crates include: a doubloon, a ruby, a spoon, a spring mounted model boat and a 20-sided dice
• Jasmine also made a collection of paintings to fish up. However, to avoid overcomplicating the game we instead simply hung them around the cabin.
• In playtests we found that left-handed players would grab the rod with their left hand and then struggle to reach the reel when bringing in fish. To solve this we made the rod flip when grabbed by the left hand.
• In the earliest plans the player was catching fish to feed to a great Lovecraftian horror. This was changed.