I’m very much a proponent of “food not lawns” but I’m also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. I’ll excitedly encourage it but if people can’t or even just don’t want to then that’s FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like it’s as simple as “just grow your own food!” is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take
i watered my garden every single day it didn’t rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didn’t use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didn’t really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasn’t fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were so bitter. i didn’t harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat one–the slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.
then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.
your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.
i love gardening! it’s great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but it’s SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.
A game that is marketed as your standard fishing game and for the first 20 minutes or so you catch normal fish like bluegill and bass and what have you. But the further you go into the lake you start to catch fish with mutations and it gets more and more intense until you’re pulling in Eldritch horror monsters and sometimes severed human limbs. You realize you don’t recall how you got to this lake in the first place and the objective becomes to find your way back to shore. You have no real weapons but you can throw the creatures you’ve caught far away from the boat as a means to distract whatever is underneath you, bumping into the boat sometimes.
Additional items for the game.
A fishing pole with a radar that starts out with just beeps but later includes noises with hidden messages.
A GPS that displays texts and story elements.
You meet other boaters, all from various backgrounds, countries, and time periods. Some are friendly, others want to sacrifice you to the lake monsters.
You can also take the route of sacrificing others to the lake monster.
Or you can assemble a party and work to keep them safe.
The more fucked up looking the fish you catch, the closer you’re getting to a boss fight, which is usually running from something you can only see part of in the water.
????
And that’s my game idea.
More details.
It never stops being a fishing game. You are always fishing and searching for new areas where there is more activity in order to progress the story.
Depending on the choices you make and the amount of mutant fish you consume, you may start to mutate yourself. The fishing pole is part of your arm, you don’t notice it until later. If you consume mostly non-mutated fish and don’t sacrifice to the monsters you can keep the mutations to a minimum.
You can go full mutant and the boat becomes part of your body as well. This makes the monsters pay less attention to you, but you can no longer befriend or trade items with humans. You can still catch human remains and most of them are carrying items.
If you stay mostly human you can work to gather as many surviving humans as you find and assemble a fleet. The possibility of one of them turning on you always stands.
If you’re mutant you gain the ability to capsize yourself and view things under water. This is how you find ultimate monster.
If you’re human you can explore small abandoned docks and islands. These are where you find portals leading to different time periods and countries. You deliver members of your party to these. Only the person who originally belongs there can go through it.
Possible end game situations.
You find the portal leading back to your world, where you wake up on the river bank. You can catch normal fish before going home, making sure they are all free of mutations (they might not be.)
You join the monster, eventually overtaking it. You gain the ability to open time portals near water. You use lures to draw in humans.
I can’t think of anymore endings right now, I may have ruined the game with these new details so feel free to just enjoy the first part.
Terrible concept art. Mini game idea. Compete with members of your party to catch the most fucked up fish. Points awarded based on how many extra body parts it has and if it communicates telepathically with you.
Added my No-Romo posts to this because I feel they are the most important additions. (I am not a writer or game designer or really capable of making anything so this idea is just wishful thinking at best.)
Concept art if it was a more stylized, cute game. You would be able to customize your character and your boat. Sorry this became so big I’m tagging it with it’s working title “Lure” for now. I legit expect nothing at all to come from this, I just like to design and concept out things a bit.
The ultimate ending to the game would be to ignore all plot points and just keep fishing. Meet a person? Tell them you’re not interested in working with them. Feel like you’re getting close to a boss monster? Turn the boat a different direction. Just
keep catching and cataloging the fish until you run out of room in your
journal. After that the sky opens up and sucks you into it. You wake up exactly where the game started but the first page of your journal now says “YOU DID A REEL GOOD JOB!” And that’s the ending I would shoot for.
