Can patience be the mechanic?

Clicking anywhere gives a fragment. Only staying in one place makes something whole. The player has to choose to return to the same spot, again and again, which is also how memory works.

A child catches a fish by the sea and hides it in his belly. The fish learns to breathe on land, and the child slowly can’t.

The story is ten short lines, in Chinese and English. Each time a finished fish is clicked, the next line appears, in order.

The last lines turn the story around. The boy is the one in the water now, looking up, and the fish sits with his mother.

1. 01

   Scattered

   Early clicks leave fragments everywhere. The screen looks like a half-remembered childhood.

2. 02

   Holding still

   The player learns to stay in one place, and the first fish appears. The story begins.

3. 03

   Reversal

   The last lines arrive: the boy in the tank, the fish with his mother. The fragments on screen now read as everything he lost.

Patience became visible. The screen fills with fragments from every time the player wandered, and only a few whole fish. The feeling that came out of it is the slowness of remembering.

story[]

Ten [Chinese, English] pairs, read with storyIndex.

Blob

Soft, noise-shaped background forms that drift slowly.

FishPart

The fragment left by a click that didn’t complete a fish.

CompleteFish

A finished fish, with isClicked() to tell the story.

mousePressed()

Checks fish first, then keeps the last six clicks and tests whether they all fall in one place.

function mousePressed() {
  // clicking a finished fish tells the next line of the story
  for (let f of completeFishes) {
    if (f.isClicked(mouseX, mouseY)) {
      let [cn, en] = storyIndex < story.length
        ? story[storyIndex++]
        : random(story);
      currentText = cn + "\n" + en;
      return;
    }
  }

  // remember the last six clicks
  clickHistory.push(createVector(mouseX, mouseY));
  if (clickHistory.length > 6) clickHistory.shift();

  // six clicks within 30 px of each other become a fish
  if (clickHistory.length === 6) {
    let consistent = clickHistory.every(v =>
      dist(v.x, v.y, clickHistory[0].x, clickHistory[0].y) < 30);
    if (consistent) {
      completeFishes.push(new CompleteFish(mouseX, mouseY));
      clickHistory = [];
      return;
    }
  }

  // otherwise, only a fragment is left behind
  fishParts.push(new FishPart(mouseX, mouseY));
}

Lightly condensed from the original for reading. The whole mechanic is a six-item memory of where the player clicked.

Full source on OpenProcessing ↗The embedded sketch above also has a Code tab with the complete source.

See the method behind the series →