Astern

Between the end of March and the start of May 2026, I took part in the Gone Fishing Game Jam. I was the programmer in a team of three, working alongside gluc0se on 2D art and irripoz on music and sound design.

The game we made was a 2.5D fishing game where the player controls a boat, catches fish, avoids hazards, and trades their haul for upgrades that improve mobility, fishing, and defense.

I used the jam as an opportunity to explore the Paper2D plugin for Unreal Engine. Rendering 2D sprites in a 3D world worked well for this project, and the Paper workflow felt straightforward to use. I’ll consider using it again for future 2D or 2.5D projects.

For the water surface, I used the Prismatiscape plugin. I had to update it to be compatible with Unreal Engine 5.7, but the required changes were minor. The resulting water surface looked good and interacted well with the boat and other objects in the world.

This was not a ranked jam, so I do not have placement metrics to share. Even so, I was pleased with the final result and with how much useful experimentation I managed to fit into a relatively small project.

Itch.io page for Astern

Thanks to my teammates gluc0se and irripoz for their work on art and music/sound design.