AbsurDock
What it is
AbsurDock is a co-op survival game about fishing up junk. It’s a risk management title of doom and despair disguised as a fishing game. You start stranded on a small island with a rod and and a bunch of handouts. Everything you’ll ever own comes out of the water, and whether anything comes out at all depends on how much you’re willing to bet.
How it plays
Fishing is a gamble, but you get to rig it. Once your hook is deep enough, your odds start shifting every moment, and you lock them in when you think you’ve caught a good one. Then come two wheels, category and rarity. Each has a needle you stop yourself and red-and-black failure slices waiting to eat the attempt. Cast bare and you’ll mostly catch nothing, which is realism. Bait tilts the wheels in your favor, but a failed catch takes every bait on the hook with it.
What comes out is yours to deal with. Eat it, burn it for fuel, crush it for value, feed it to the vending machine, build docks out of it, or put it back on the hook as bait for something better. Pushing the stakes is how you progress; knowing when to stop is how you keep progressing.
Around all that is a world that doesn’t care much about your plans: tides that shift your odds, anomalies drifting across the sea (some of them catchable), a lighthouse you shouldn’t get close to, and Foulhook, who is roughly as friendly as the name suggests. Play solo or with friends. Every catch and every loss gets announced to everyone, which does wonders to friendships.
Who it’s for
People who live for the second right before a gamble resolves, and friends who enjoy watching each other lose everything on one bad spin. If that’s you, join the free playtest once it’s out. Or, even better, leave a comment under your favorite youtuber’s video mentioning AbsurDock. An audience asking for something moves a creator far more than me pitching them directly, and i’ve already established i’m not great at indie marketing.
Where it’s going
The playtest is nearly done: a 17-step tutorial, two endings, and a fishing loop i’m finally happy with, after throwing out the old one. It’s heading to Steam in October, if my perfectionism allows it. After that, AbsurDock gets shelved, not abandoned. I’ll go prototype smaller concepts on itch for a while and come back to this one with real player feedback instead of working blind.