Copyright © 2014 Bart Massey
2014-03-10

This is a very simple little fishing game that I wrote as a class demo with my Intro Programming in Python class in 2011.

Invoke the game with "python3 fishing.py". When it tells you to "Prepare to fish!", say "fisher" and your fisher name, for example "fisher Alice".

When the game tells you to "Fish!", you can hit return or say "cast" to cast, or you can say "quit" to quit. Your high score is tracked.

• When the user starts up the program, it reads commands from the user and then executes them.

• The available commands are:

          register <username>
              Register a new user named <username>.
              Usernames should include only letters,
              numbers, and the characters '-' and '_'.
          fish <username>
              Starts fishing as user <username>
          cast
              The current user tries to catch a fish,
              as detailed below.  The "cast" command
              refuses to work if there is no current
              fisher.
          scores
              List the user's score, then
              the scores of all registered users.
          quit
              Quit the program. The program should
              run the "scores" command on the way out.
          help
              List the fishing commands and their effects.
  

  If the user "ends input" (input() raises an EOFError) this is treated as a quit command. If the user enters an empty command (blank line) it is ignored. Otherwise, an error is given for any input that is not a valid command, and the user is allowed to continue fishing.

• When the "cast" command is issued, the program decides what is caught and how it is scored based on the following table:

  Fish	Chance	Score
  Nothing	20%	0
  Minnow	20%	10
  Bluegill	30%	30
  Bass	15%	100
  Trout	10%	200
  Salmon	4%	500
  Gold Boot	1%	5000

  The program responds to the cast command by showing what is caught, how much it is worth, and the user's current score.

• The program saves the scores on disk. The scores are loaded and saved using "shelving" of scores keyed by username. A shelf with the filename "fishing" is used. The score shelf file is always current.

• Each command is implemented as a separate function that is called from the main loop.

A testing command is included; it casts 10000 times and reports the percentages of fish caught. This convinced me my catch algorithm was working.

Future work:

• Add some other fish and adjust the probabilities. Be creative.

• Randomize the catch text to add interest. Make the catch text dependent on the type and score of the fish caught in interesting ways.

• Implement the achievement "Caught the Gold Boot", and any other achievements you can think of. My achievement idea: "'One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish': Caught a Salmon followed by two Bluegill". OFTFRFBF is completed only 9% of the time after you have caught a Salmon, and catching a Salmon is only 4%, making this achievement pretty unlikely.

Fishing is available under the "MIT License". Please see the file COPYING in this distribution for license details.