Gone Phishing is an isometric fishing game that mixes the concept of phishing, a fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information, with the literal physical act of fishing. Compete against another team to craft advertisements as bait and fish for the people below.
Contributions
- Fish people spawning and object pooling
- Bait and fish desire comparisons and calculations
- Unity animator and state machine setup
- Lighting and scene setup
Gone Phishing was created at WPI's hackathon in 2020, on a team of five. In under thirty six hours, we collectively designed, programmed and created Gone Phishing. After an intense day and a half, the project was awarded the "Best Game Award" of the hackathon!
There were a few main systems at work in Gone Phishing: character animations, bait construction, player fishing and fish people spawning. While one team member 3D modeled the characters and environment, the rest of the team worked on a subsystem. My role was in spawning the fish people with randomized interests, and then applying the animations by creating a Unity animator to set up a state machine for the animations. Each fish would check its collider to see if a hook with bait collided with it. On collision, the fish would compare its own interests to the bait's interest. Depending on the similarity, there is a higher chance the fish will be hooked.
Working on Gone Phishing was a great experience with a team! The code was messy without a doubt, but the prototype worked! Later on, the team refactored a huge amount of code and added features, but unfortunately we lost momentum and never finished the second version. Still, I got the opportunity to refactor the fishing mechanic from the ground up, so I learned how useful it was to have a prototype project to illustrate the game's final goal.