It’s an experimental text adventure in many ways: It doesn’t have an ending, for one thing. Plus it autosaves your progression! It’s experimental in some other ways too…
Here’s an alternate cover by Twitter friend @coolboy5650:
All those features—birdwatching, geocaching (or geocacheing, I’m not particular), canoeing, and weather—are things you can look forward to in Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing. Check it out, why don’t you, and let me know what you think!
Is there a way to download this so I can play on my machine?
edit: “Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing is designed to be played in short sessions over the course of multiple days.” Intriguing, let’s see if the moose is gone by tomorrow!
Yeah so I love this. I have already interacted with it in the recommended fashion by wandering around in the rain, naming a cat, looking at some dirt. Then closing my browser. I unironically look forward to revisiting and doing more of this sort of thing.
…and I kind of regret that description because fishing is the least of it. But people like fishing in video games for some reason so I hope it draws people in anyway.
Ah, I see it restarts in the cabin every day. That’s good. Anyway, I’m still having no luck with the actual fishing, and I suspect that I need to find some bait or at least a shovel to dig for worms. In the meantime, there’s plenty of birdwatching to do. (And the place where the birdwatching guide can be found is… interestingly chosen.)
Honestly, this sort of thing is exactly what I want from a text adventure. I wish there were more games like this.
If you get lost again, you can zip back to your cabin with RESTART (or by reloading the page).
Here’s something neat: It was raining at Jewel Pond on Saturday, and David Welbourn told me on Twitter that he hoped he’d find a hat somewhere. So I put a hat in the game! And everybody’s save data is working fine even after I updated the game!
This feature would probably be far too much of a headache to implement, but would it be possible to have either some kind of login, or a way to download/upload saves, so the same game can be played on different devices?
Should be able to dump it from console with JSON.stringify(localStorage), copy and email to yourself or something, then import on another console with something like:
var o = <what you copied>
for (var k in o) localStorage[k] = JSON.stringify(o[k])
Clunky, but at least you’ll have a backup that way!
Found the hat, and a shovel and a place to dig, but I think it needs to rain before I can dig!
That is a real screwy bug! I’ll look into it. Thanks!
UPDATE: The gazebo thing has been resolved. Also a lot of other little things have been fixed. But I’ve noticed that often I have to force my browser to re-cache the updated game, so look out for that!
Ryan, I hope you’re planning on writing up some article or blog post about the general mechanics and design principles of Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing. I’d like to see your “experimental” work be a model so other authors can craft their own visitable casual storyworlds. I, for one, have always wanted to craft a science-fiction universe loosely based on the Cosmic Encounter board game and allow the players to explore the worlds as they please towards different contradictory goals.
That’s an excellent idea! I decided to start out with the basics (autosaving a tiny linear game) with a blog post HERE, and I’ll try to do a followup with fancier mechanics later—although I’m sure one can extrapolate those fancier mechanics from the base case…
Well, I reached the introductory message that says:
Summary
This is going to be the last special introductory message. Thanks again for playing.
I don’t know what else there is to say.
If you have any specific questions or feedback, I hope you’ll contact me, via email (rcveeder@me.com) or Twitter (@rcveeder), so I can find out what you think.
Actually, you know what? If you’ve played for this long, you HAVE to contact me. You are obligated to let me know that you saw this message, so that I can know that a player like you actually exists. Okay? Please?
If you’re reading this and deciding to ignore my request, I will—Well, I’ll never find out, I guess. But if I somehow do find out, I will be very ticked off at you.
I feel like I have to note the fact here (that should suffice, since the author is in this thread). I don’t feel comfortable defying such strict orders.
As for the game itself, I’m still having fun, mainly because I know there’s something I need to find in order to make further progress, and I’m confident it’ll turn up eventually if I look under the right rock. I did find some very interesting reading material, which also serves as a clever way to keep the player coming back day after day.
Here’s the followup to the Basic Autosaving blog post. I plan to do one more post on autosaving techniques; let me know if you have any questions I should answer in it.
