Designing Fishing (Part 1 - Animations)

If anyone ever tells you that you will not use Math much in your "real life", just point them to Game Dev where everything is Math😅. That is where I found myself this week as I started working on the game's fishing system. I knew I wanted the system to be very dynamic, with different lures, lots of fish and treasure to catch and a minigame (other than just waiting for a bobber to move). But before I could jump into those fun gameplay elements I needed to create the animations.

Right away I knew I wanted the casting distance to be dynamic later on, so the fishing line needed to be dynamic. The game is built in Unity, so I used a line renderer and a script I found in a rope bridge tutorial (shoutout to Jasony for the great tutorial).

After that came a lot of Math to work out the reflections for both the bobber and the fishing line. Moonhaven uses sprites flipped on the Y axis combined with a shader to create the reflections in the water. Here the tricky part was properly calculating the position for the bobber and fishing line when flipped due to them dynamically moving so much.

Here is the result: