Email Fishing: A Tower Defense Fishing Simulator by Johnny Turbo
For LD 41, I decided to combine the two vastly different genres of Tower Defense and Fishing Simulation. The result? A game where you play as a manager of a local Mom and Pop spam filtration center called C-SPAM. Your job is to assist your employees with catching messages and determining if they should be delivered or thrown out!
After you play, feel free to take a look at my postmortem, where I take a deep dive into my thought process for creating this game, some of the other ideas I had for this jam, what went right during development, what went wrong, and everything in between! Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/h7akfjJv3cw
| HTML5 (web) | https://johnnyturbo.itch.io/email-fishing |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/email-fishing-a-tower-defense-fishing-simulator |
Ratings
| Overall | 503th | 3.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 477th | 3.048⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 353th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 309th | 3.667⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 629th | 2.452⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 67th | 3.69⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 428th | 2.875⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
if I didn't miss something this one is way harder than "turbo laser arcade" expecially because you may doublecatch the same good email.
It seams that it could also be a sort of Tower Defense Paper Please.
Love the idea! I don't really have any suggestions, because I think it would defeat the original purpose of your game. Obviously if you were to expand on it you would have better graphics, but other than that, I don't know.
Nice work!

@folex70 Thanks for playing!
@Jack Hipson I agree, that is the one feature I would have liked to add in the most. I think it could add a bit more complexity to the game because you would need to read through the message and decide if it is spam or not.
@kromeboy Yes for this one I wanted to make something a bit familiar to me so a tower defense game felt like the right choice at the time! Yes this one is a bit tougher because you need to make split second actions instead of just placing a tower and letting it do its thing like in Turbo Laser Arcade. A TD Papers Please could be really interesting!
@Colin Misbach Thanks for the positive feedback, glad you enjoyed playing!
@Anonymous Glad you liked the concept! The one thing I would like to add in is more variety in the email messages, because it would force the player to think about the decision of spam or not. It does get tough quickly!
@Ripter Yes, it does get really crazy towards the end! I probably didn't make it clear enough in the tutorial but you need to click on the fisherman within a very small window of time in order to catch the email. This is especially challenging when you have a few fisherman spread apart on the map.
@LMB Thanks for playing, glad you had fun! LOL I definitely know about being flooded with emails! 🙃
@Chaseplays Great, glad you liked it!! I really wish I had more variety in the email messages, would have made for a much more interesting game, I think. Yes this game ramps up in difficulty very quickly, it was sort of intentional because I wanted to force shorter play sessions because I knew there wasn't a whole lot of variety in the email messages.
@LeviDSmith Fair enough, thanks for playing!
Good entry!
@Bonelazy Glad you liked it! I was going for something that was really weird and off the wall :D
@Beebo-Studios Great to hear it made you laugh! I really wanted to make a funny game for this jam, I feel like the topic lent itself very well to humor. The one thing I wish I could add in is more variety in messages, I feel like that could have added a really interesting element to the game. I think the real time decision making would make the game waaayyy too difficult LOL!
@Veilastrum Thank you! I was definitely trying to make something unique and humorous, glad you saw it that way. Yes, it does ramp up very quickly in difficulty, would be interesting to see how it would play with better balancing....
@tastelikecoke Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!!