Evening Bite
The rod tells you everything. Nothing else will.
What it is
Fishing from a dock on a northern lake, from first light to nightfall. Hook a fish and the fight is a negotiation: hold the reel and you gain line, hold it too long and the line goes.
Walleye, smallmouth, pike, perch and muskie each live in their own water and their own light (the drop-off, the rocks, the weeds, the flats and the weed edges), and the catch log keeps each kind you have caught, the biggest of each, and where. A day runs from dawn to dark in about twelve minutes.
How to play
- CastTap; drag up to cast farther, sideways to aim
- Set the hookTap as the float goes under
- ReelHold
- Give lineLet go
On a desktop, the mouse works the same as a finger. Left and Right aim the cast, Space or Enter casts (hold it longer to cast farther), sets the hook and holds the reel, L opens the catch log, Escape closes it, and M mutes.
Tackle is earned
Tackle comes from fishing rather than from a shop: line that takes a harder pull, a rod that soaks up a surge longer, a reel that reels in faster, and bait that changes which fish come to you. No fish needs any of it.
What isn't settled yet
Whether the muskie is worth hunting. It follows the bait more often than it takes it, and most sessions never land one. That is deliberate, but it may simply read as absence.
Whether bait choice is noticed at all, since nothing on screen says which fish it brings, and whether the fish at the dock reads at a glance on a small screen: it hangs from the line, a dark shape against dark water at dusk.
Build Log
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Build 10
The last stretch of every fight felt dead: a median of fifteen and a half seconds between a fish coming within landing range and landing. The cause was geometry, not pacing. A fish could be reeled to 1.6 m, and from standing height the dock's own deck hides water nearer than about two metres, so the end of the fight happened out of sight. A fish now stays 2.7 m out, landing starts at 3.2 m, and a beaten fish surfaces for a beat first.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover art is a frame rendered by the game itself.
Evening Bite is original work by Launchway Games.