Fishing Simulator Pro

FSP is a fishing game I’m building in Unreal Engine 5.8, mostly solo. It was a test with procedurally generated landscapes and real water physics. The whole thing runs off data: every number in the game (fish weights, bite chances, prices) lives in a spreadsheet, gets checked by a validator, and is then loaded into the engine. I wanted to see if I could rebuild RF4 with today’s new game engines.

Getting there took a few false starts as always. I tried three different Unreal setups in four days, and every one fell over at the same spot: wiring my data through someone else’s kit. I brute force my way through it all with Claude and GPT. The project owns its core systems, and store-bought kits are only allowed to make things look nice. The one exception is the fishing plugin, which still handles the actual fight, because the feel was already right.

I run it like a small studio with strict habits. Code isn’t “done” until it builds. Balance gets tuned from real play numbers, not “by vibes”. Every change gets a second pair of eyes and has to come with proof. One example: players were reacting in 424 ms on average, so the hook window went from 500 to 1,000 ms without touching a line of engine code.

Specs