The protagonist comments on what you do

Warning

Rod and Reef hasn’t been released yet, and videos or GIFs of this system can’t be shown until it launches.

In Rod and Reef, X, the protagonist, talks to himself while you play. If you’ve been waiting a while for a bite he gets impatient, if a fish gets away he has something to say about it, and if you stand still on the dock for too long he starts thinking about his uncle. There are 73 lines recorded by a voice actor, with subtitles that appear word by word in time with the voice.

How it works

• Every line is written for a moment: casting, waiting, losing a fish, landing a legendary one, taking the helm, walking to an errand or handing a quest to each character.
• He doesn’t talk all the time. Things that happen often rarely get a comment, and things that happen rarely almost always do.
• He doesn’t repeat himself. Lines are dealt from a shuffled deck, so you hear all of a moment’s lines before any comes back, and the same line takes a good while to play again.
• He knows when to be quiet: he won’t talk over a cutscene, a character, an open menu or your voice chat.
• Some lines only make sense under certain conditions (at night, with bait on the hook, or after a certain point in the story) and only play then.
• If you’d rather have silence, you can turn him off in the settings.

Under the hood

To know what you’re doing, the game has a state machine that gathers what fishing, the boat, dialogues and cutscenes know. Menus and other systems use it too, to know when not to interrupt. The technical details, including the math behind the deck and the probabilities, are in the portfolio version.