Hello everyone. It's been two weeks since the servers opened, so it's time for a look back: some numbers, some honesty and a couple of screenshots I really like.

A wild rollercoaster

In the last post I wrote that I'd like to start "a small test". It did not stay small.

I never could have imagined that over 500 of you would be playing at the same time. The record so far is 520 players online at once, set on Monday evening, November 9. More than 6,600 accounts have been created, and on the busiest day over 2,600 different players logged in. The Discord has grown to 3,400 members.

For a game that was dead for years, brought back by one person in the evenings, that's hard to wrap my head around.

The honest part

It has also been really stressful. A lot more than I expected.

Most of the day, and every night when I go to sleep, the same questions run through my head. Is the server still online? Is someone trying to hack it right now? Is someone spamming racism in the chat while the moderators are asleep? And was that a Discord notification just now? I should probably check what it's about. Just this once...

And then there were the disconnects. For most of these two weeks, some of you kept getting dropped from the game, I didn't know why, and you were getting mad about it. That one stung. But I've come to see it differently: nobody gets mad about a game they don't care about. You were mad because you were in the middle of something you were enjoying. I'll take that over silence any day. And as of the latest releases, it's fixed: when your connection drops, the game now picks your session back up by itself.

Running a live game turns out to be a very different job from building one. A company would have a whole team taking turns watching the servers. Here it's just me, next to a full-time job, and I'm still learning where the off switch is.

I'm not writing this to complain. I chose this and I'd choose it again. But I'd rather tell you how it actually is than pretend it's been two weeks of pure fun. Last time things got too heavy I went quiet for a year, and I don't want to repeat that. So if I'm slow to answer, or a fix takes a day longer than you'd like, it's because I'm trying to do this in a way I can keep up.

I'm not alone in keeping it running, though. A team of 14 volunteer moderators has gone through more than 1,000 player reports in two weeks. Thank you. I honestly don't know where the game would be without you.

The fun part

And then there are moments that make all of it worth it.

One evening, players gathered on Pinheira Beach and, without anyone organizing it, started sorting themselves into teams by color:

Green holds the pier, blue "dominates the beach", pink is forming a line and a few people are starting their own team.

Or the night from Sunday to Monday, when more than a hundred people lined up in front of the Fish Market and waited for it to open:

"hey m'amm can i cut the line?"

Nobody told anyone to line up. You just did. I love this community.

Two weeks in numbers

I went through the database and the server metrics. Everything below is as of Thursday evening, November 12.

Fishing

• 5,887,259 fish caught. That's almost 400,000 a day, or more than four every second, around the clock.
• 421 of the 615 species in the game have been caught at least once, so there's still plenty left to discover.
• Laid end to end, all those fish would stretch about 1,600 km. That's further than from Prague to Barcelona.
• The most caught fish is the Sardinella (475,485 of them), closely followed by the Blue Striped Grunt and the Brook Trout.
• The biggest catch so far is a 424 cm Kaluga Sturgeon from Aquayama, just ahead of a 422 cm Atlantic Bluefin Tuna.
• Shiny fish were switched on this week. So far, exactly 4 have been caught.
• The busiest spot is Pinheira Beach with 1.5 million catches. At one point there were 204 of you on that beach at the same time.

Players

• Over 80,000 hours played in total. That's more than 9 years of fishing in 2 weeks.
• 843,000 chat messages and 188,000 private messages.
• Almost 30,000 friendships, 107 clubs with 1,443 members and 12,190 trades.
• 13,784 decorations placed in your houses, and 884 tournament trophies handed out.
• The highest level player is already level 120. I don't know when you sleep.

Economy

• You've earned 102 million fishbucks and already spent 92 million of them.
• 60 million of that came from selling fish at the Fish Market, in more than half a million sales.
• The biggest expense is energy: 28 million fishbucks. Bait comes second with 22 million, and 17 million of that went on worms alone.
• Rex has had a busy two weeks too: 4,448 fish bred successfully, and 2,135 attempts that didn't go so well.

What I've been fixing

Since launch there have been over 100 changes to the server and 7 client releases (2.1 to 2.7). Some of the bigger ones:

• The disconnects. If your connection drops, the game now resumes your session automatically instead of throwing you out. If you still get kicked, make sure you're on the latest client.
• Palm Island fruits and fruit drinks, the Lucky Raft, collections, server events and A LOT of balancing.
• Anti-cheat and trade protections, because of course people tried.

What's next?

More of the same: making the server more stable and filling in the parts of the game that are still missing. And hopefully learning to check Discord a little less often before bed.

If you run into a bug, the Discord is the best place to report it. If you see someone breaking the rules, please use the in-game report, it goes straight to the moderators.

Thank you for playing, for lining up politely in front of a virtual fish market at midnight, and for being patient with me.

See you on the beach. 🎣

Hello everyone. It's been over a year since the last post, so let me start with the honest part.

Where I've been

In the last post I said I was aiming for something playable by the end of 2025, and that if I missed that, I'd open-source the project. I missed it, and I didn't open-source it either. Then I went quiet. I'm sorry about that.

What happened is pretty ordinary: school got heavy, then I started working full-time, and somewhere along the way I burnt out. Fishao was the thing I wanted to be working on, but I didn't have anything left at the end of the day. I should have at least said so here instead of letting the blog sit untouched.

A few weeks ago, I finally got back into it. And I came back with a different plan.

A change of plan

Rewriting the entire game and engine from scratch, as a solo developer with a full-time job, was too big. I knew it was ambitious when I started, but I underestimated how far away the finish line really was.

So instead of rebuilding everything, I went back to the original. I recompiled the original Flash game client for AIR, Flash's desktop sibling which, unlike the Flash Player, is still maintained and patched today. That means the real game, as you remember it, can run again without downloading a (fishy - pun intended) browser which might expose players to one of the many unaddressed serious vulnerabilities still present in Adobe Flash. The catch is that this makes the game desktop-first for now (Windows and Mac). The browser version isn't off the table, it's just not where I'm starting. Well... mostly. More on that at the end.

Here's a first look at it running against the new server:

The other half of the puzzle is the server. The original servers are long gone, so I've been writing a new, compatible server from scratch that speaks the same language as the original client. Here's where that stands right now:

Server progress, split by area of the game

Green means implemented for real, yellow means partially working, and purple means a placeholder that returns something believable so the client doesn't break. Boats, trading, houses & the economy, and social features are pretty much done, and fishing is almost there.

The grey parts look scarier than they are. The original game talked to its servers in a lot of ways, and many of those requests are no longer used or simply aren't needed for a fan server, so most of what's left over won't need to be built at all.

Because the client is the original game, almost everything you see is exactly how it was. The work now is making the server behave the way the client expects.

On open-sourcing

Since I promised it last time, I want to address it directly. With this new approach, the client is the original game, and its code and assets belong to GamoVation, so it isn't mine to publish. I'll share more about what can be released once things are further along.

One more thing...

There's something else I've been working on quietly. I'm not going to say much about it yet, so I'll just leave this here:

Left: a modern browser. Right: the original client. Same server, two different players on two different platforms.

Make of that what you will.

What's next?

The server is getting close to the point where it's worth putting in front of real players. I'd like to start a small test soon, possibly as early as next month.

But I've given you dates before and missed them, so I'm not going to ask you to trust a date again. Instead: when there's something you can actually play, newsletter subscribers will be the first to hear about it, and not a moment before. (Speaking of which, there are now over 20,000 of you on the list. That number still doesn't feel real.)

One thing you can help with: since the original servers are gone, a lot of the game's behaviour has to be rebuilt from memory. If you played a lot back in the day and know the game mechanics inside out (how fishing, quests, tournaments, the economy, or anything else actually worked), I'd love to hear from you at hello@fishao.net. Details that seem small to you might be exactly what I'm missing.

Oh, and remember when I said there was no Discord yet? There is now. Come hang out with other players on the Fishao Discord.

Thank you for sticking around, even through the silence. It means more than you know.

Talk soon. For real this time. 🙈

Hello everyone!

Time for another update. Over the past few weeks, I've been sorting through hundreds of emails and Discord messages - thank you all for the incredible enthusiasm! 🙏

I've noticed that a lot of you are asking the same questions over and over (which makes total sense), so I thought I'd dedicate this post to answering the most common ones. Think of this as a first "FAQ-ish" entry.

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1. When will the game release?

This is easily the biggest question. The honest answer: I don't have a fixed date yet. I'm working as fast as I can while also balancing real life (job, university, and personal life). I know that I've mentioned many times that there will be a pre-alpha build before the end of 2025, but I was too optimistic about how quickly I could get there. This is theoretically my first time making a game, not to mention a whole game engine from scratch, so there are a lot of unknowns and unexpected challenges.

That said, I'm aiming to have something "playable" by the end of 2025. It won't be the full game (not even close), but more of a test. If I can't hit this goal, I will open source the project on GitHub so others can contribute with PRs and help move things along.

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2. Will it be playable in X region?

The website and game will be available worldwide. However, for the alpha, the servers will be located only in the EU (Frankfurt) region. This should satisfy about 70% of the current website traffic.

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3. Will old accounts and progress return?

No, old accounts and progress will not return. The original database was lost when the original game was taken down, and even if it still existed, there would be significant privacy and legal issues in reusing that data. Everyone will be starting fresh.

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4. Will this be browser-based or downloadable? What about mobile?

The remake runs on my custom engine, so it won't rely on Flash. My current plan is:

• Browser (Web): Yes, definitely. This will be the primary platform, and I'm trying to optimize for it as much as possible.
• PC/Mac client: Maybe. The game in its current state can also run as a standalone native desktop app, but this isn't a priority right now and might not happen.
• Mobile (iOS/Android): Also maybe, but this is a long way off. Shipping games to mobile app stores is a whole different ballgame, and I want to focus on getting the core game right first.

To summarize, the main focus is on a browser-based experience.

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5. Will the game be translated into other languages?

Yes. I should have the original game's translations, so translating the game into other languages should be possible. However, this will likely come later in development, after the core gameplay is solid.

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6. How can I help?

This is a bit tricky. I can't accept any donations or funding due to legal reasons, and I don't have the capacity to manage a large team of volunteers. For now, the best way to help is to spread the word about the project and share updates on social media. If you have specific skills (like programming in C++, art, or design) and want to contribute, feel free to reach out, but please understand that I may not be able to accommodate everyone.

In the later stages, if and when the game is open-sourced, contributions will be much easier to manage through platforms like GitHub.

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7. Will it be the same as the original, or is stuff changing?

I'm trying to stay as faithful to the original as possible, but there will inevitably be some changes and improvements. Here are a few examples:

• Performance: The new engine should run much better than Flash, especially on lower-end hardware.
• Gameplay: The core mechanics will be as close to the original as possible.
• In-game purchases: There will be no in-game purchases or microtransactions. The game will be completely free to play, with no pay-to-win elements.

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8. Is this project still alive?

Yes, I promise it is. Even when I disappear for a couple of weeks, I'm still coding behind the scenes. Blog posts take time to write, but rest assured: development hasn't stopped.

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9. Do you have a Discord or other community channels?

No, not yet. I mostly lurk on some original Discord servers and forums to see what people are saying.

I'm considering setting up a Discord server in the future, but for now, I'm focusing on development and blog updates. If you have suggestions for community platforms, feel free to share them.

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What's next?

The pre-alpha (if it ever comes 😆). It won't be fancy, but it'll be a huge step: proof that the core gameplay loop works outside of Flash. Once that's stable, we can layer in more content and polish. The hard stuff will be mostly over by then.

Thanks again for your patience and support. The best part of this whole project so far is seeing how much Fishao meant to so many people - it makes me want to get this right even more.

Stay tuned for the next update, cheers.

Hello everyone! It's been a while - I've gotten a bit caught up with life and other stuff, and there were also some internal issues preventing me from updating the site (which have luckily been resolved). But I'm back with some updates on the game development!

First off, I never imagined this project would attract so much attention. We've now surpassed 2000 newsletter subscribers, achieved an average search ranking of 1.8, and the website recently hit 10,000 unique visitors! It's amazing to see the community coming together around this, and I'm truly grateful for all your support.

I've also received hundreds of support emails in multiple languages - Czech, Spanish, English, Turkish, Italian, and more. While I can't respond to every single one, I make sure to read each message personally.

Enough about the numbers, let's talk about the game!

GUIs

GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) are a core part of every game, providing the interface through which players interact with the game world. My main goal over the past few weeks has been to create a responsive framework for the game's GUI and start porting all interfaces into my new game engine. This means no external GUI libraries will be used; everything is being built from the ground up to ensure seamless integration and top performance.

There are over 100 different GUIs in the original game, ranging in complexity from simple buttons to intricate menus and overlays. Each GUI element needs to be carefully designed and implemented to fit the new engine's architecture.

For now, I've implemented the vast majority of the simple static GUIs and am now moving on to the more intricate ones, like scrollable lists.

I've also implemented the main game HUD using this new framework.

Map Editing

Since none of the existing map editors (like Tiled) fit my specific needs, I decided to write my own custom map editor in C++. This editor allows me to create, save, and load game maps seamlessly and export them to a compact custom map format optimized for the engine. This should vastly simplify the process of map creation and editing, especially for large maps like Rio, which features an absurd number of animated sprites.

Preview of the editor on Pinheira Beach

Fishing

I've also started working on the fishing system. So far, I've implemented a custom script to extract fishing rods and import them into the game engine. Getting the rod positioning right turned out to be much trickier than I initially expected, but now the rods behave and appear correctly in-game.

The next major milestone is animating the fishing line rope along with the throw-in animations. I consider this one of the toughest parts of the game and a real challenge to get perfect. The original game relies on Verlet integration for the rope physics, and I plan to replicate that as faithfully as possible. Regarding the player throw-in animation, it's hard-coded directly into the movie clips - essentially how Flash operates: the movie script acts as an animation timeline, similar to After Effects. Translating that into the new engine will definitely be tricky.

Website Revamp

The website also got a small revamp and was migrated to the SvelteKit framework. This change makes the site feel faster and also allows me to write blog posts more easily using Markdown. The very first blog post was hard-coded in plain HTML (lol), but now all posts are server-side rendered from Markdown files, which streamlines content creation a lot. The deployment process is also much easier thanks to Fly.io.

What's Next?

Looking ahead, I'm considering open-sourcing the project some time soon to encourage community contributions and transparency. Also, I know there was a gap of almost two months between this and the last blog post - whoops! Hopefully, it won't take that long again. I'm aiming for more regular updates, so stay tuned for more frequent news and behind-the-scenes looks at the development.

There's a lot of exciting development ahead, and I can't wait to share more updates with you all.

Welcome to the first official dev blog! You've probably noticed that things look a bit familiar. That's because, much like the game itself, this website has been completely rebuilt from the ground up to serve as the new home for this project.

And that brings me to the big news: the entire game is being rewritten from scratch. This is a massive step, but a necessary one to create a stable, performant, and future-proof foundation for the game we all love.

Why the Rewrite?

As many of you know, the original version was built in Flash back in 2013. Technology has changed a lot since then, and Flash was officially deprecated in 2021. While emulation tools like Ruffle exist, they aren't capable of fully supporting the game in its original form. This technical hurdle was a major factor in the original game's shutdown and is the primary motivation for this ground-up rebuild.

My remake of Pinheira Beach - one of the original game maps

About Me & The Plan

I should probably introduce myself! I'm a university student, and this is a solo passion project I'm tackling in my spare time. It's a huge undertaking, but one I'm incredibly excited about.

So, what's the timeline? I'm aiming to have a very early release targeted for the end of the year. Please keep in mind that this initial release will be a "pre-alpha" version. This means it won't be a final game, will likely contain major bugs, and will primarily serve as a test of the core gameplay logic, focusing on fishing in select locations (pinheira beach, laketown). There will likely be no account system, progression or advanced fishing logic in this very early demo.

It's crucial to remember that these are just goals, not guarantees. As a student project, development will happen as my schedule allows. There's no promise of a release, but I'm committed to sharing the journey with you all. If the development ends at any point, I will make sure to communicate that clearly on this blog and open-source the code so others can continue the work.

What's Next?

I'll be updating this blog a few times a month to share progress, screenshots, and thoughts on development. Thank you for being here from the start. I can't wait to build this new foundation together! If you'd like to contact me, you can reach out via email at hello@fishao.net

This post was edited on 15/6/2025 to better reflect the timeline of the project and its goals.