Pocket Panfish

It's derby night on Lake Huron. Loony Larry, a loon in a fishing hat who lifts lunkers for a living, needs one of each of the 7 kinds of fish in the lake to win the big derby. Row along the lake, drop your line, and hook each fish by the head, while dodging sunken logs, snapping turtles and line-cutting gar.

By jaychugstein · MIT License · Arduboy FX / FX-C (uses the FX flash chip).

Play it in your browser: https://jaychugstein.github.io/Pocket-Panfish/ (works on phones too)

Controls

Button	What it does
Left / Right	Row along the lake
A or B (hold)	Let your line down. It stays down while you hold
Let go	Reel in
A or B (again, while reeling)	Drop it back down, to bob the lure
Up / Down	Sound on or off (sound screen)
A or B	Next screen · finish Larry's sentence
Right / Left	Fish again / back to the title (score screen)

A and B do the same thing.

How to fish

• A fish only bites if your lure touches its head. You can hook one on the way down or while you reel in.
• Hooked fish come up hanging by the mouth. Bigger ones reel in slower and tug Larry around.
• The top corner shows a species you still need, cycling through all the ones left.
• Land a species you already have and it costs you 100 points, your streak and a line.

The fish

Fish	Where	What gets it to bite
Pumpkinseed	Shallow	A lure sinking or rising slowly; dragging it sideways spooks them
Perch	Shallow, in small schools	Same as pumpkinseed
Largemouth bass	Mid water	A lure being dragged
Walleye	Deep	A lure going slowly up or down
Lake trout	Near the bottom	A lure left still nearby; fast and skittish
Catfish	On the bottom	A lure resting on the bottom
Northern pike	Hiding in the weeds	A lure dragged past; it lunges from a long way off

Watch out for

• Sunken logs: touch one and your line snags and snaps.
• Snapping turtles: they come for a lure left on the bottom and bite through the line.
• Longnose gar: shows up once you've landed 3 species. It steals fish you're reeling in, and if it takes your lure, its teeth cut right through your line.
• Pike and bass: they'll grab a little pumpkinseed or perch you're reeling in.
• Old boots: -100 points.

You start with 3 lines (up to 5). Spools of line sink down now and then: hook one for a line back. Lose all your line and the derby's over. Crawfish are worth 50 points, and a treasure chest is worth 2,000.

Scoring

• Each new species: its points (bigger fish are worth more), times your streak (up to x5), plus a bonus that grows with each one in a row.
• Win the derby: +500 for every line you have left, plus a speed bonus if you finish in under 5 minutes.
• Every catch shows its weight. The score screen shows your time, the weight of each fish, and your best score. Your best score and the heaviest fish of each species you've ever landed are saved on the FX chip. Beat one and it says RECORD!

Installing

The ready-made files are in release/:

• PocketPanfish.arduboy: the package for the Arduboy FX cart builders and tools (includes the game, its FX data, its 4 KB save block and the cart image).
• PocketPanfish.hex, PocketPanfish-fxdata.bin, PocketPanfish-fxsave.bin, title.png: the same files on their own.

Building it yourself

• Arduino IDE: open PocketPanfish/PocketPanfish.ino with the Arduboy2, ArduboyTones and ArduboyFX libraries installed, and upload. Then write PocketPanfish/fxdata/fxdata.bin to the FX chip (for example with the Arduboy FX upload tools) for development.
• Command line: build.sh builds build/PocketPanfish.hex with avr-gcc (set the library paths at the top).
• Art: the pictures are drawn by the Python scripts in art/. Run art.py, gord.py and gordtitle.py, then fxpack.py, which writes fxdata.h and the FX data.

The web player in docs/ uses Ardens by tiberiusbrown (see docs/ARDENS_LICENSE.txt).