What Voidfin is
Voidfin is a turn-based roguelike with the usual bones — a dungeon you explore a step at a time, permadeath, a dungeon grown fresh from a seed — but the point of going down isn't the monsters or the gold. It's the fish. Somewhere under the stone are pools of black water, and in them things worth catching. The dungeon is just the dangerous way you reach them.
So you descend. Hunger ticks with every step. The deeper you go the stranger and rarer the catch, but the water doesn't give a fish up easily — you read where it's drifting, put your hook at the right depth, strike the bite in time, and out-fight its runs. And then you have to get back out alive, because a fish in your hold isn't yours until you carry it up to the surface and bank it. Die on the climb and the deep keeps everything.
The catch is the point
That climb is the whole tension of the game: one more pool, or out while I still can? Everything you're carrying is provisional. What lasts is the bestiary — every species you've ever banked, logged forever, across deaths and sessions. The common fish fill it fast. The deep rarities are the real chase, and there's one down there the guidebook has no name for. There's a daily run, too: the same dungeon for everyone who plays that day, so you can compare what the dark gave you.
Stranger waters
A pool of water in a dungeon is already an odd thing. It's meant to be. Voidfin is built so the dungeon is only one place you fish — and the engine underneath is made to let the floor fall away beneath the genre. A few of the waters I'm turning over (no promises — this is a game that's still growing):
- A door that shouldn't be there. Some thresholds don't lead deeper — they lead out, somewhere the rules you'd just settled into stop applying, and the water is very cold and very far from home.
- A deep that remembers. Permadeath is sacred, but the bestiary already outlives the run — and a world can hold a grudge, a face, a debt that survives the angler who started it.
- Whatever surfaces next. The best idea is usually the one I haven't had yet, which is the whole reason to build a game in the open.
From the world of NetHook
Voidfin isn't a standalone curiosity — it shares a world with something larger I'm building, a game called NetHook. I'm not going to say much about that yet. Think of Voidfin as a first, small window onto a bigger deep. There'll be more to say later this year.
The devlog
I write up every step the game takes here — the design decisions, the dead ends, the things that felt wrong until they didn't. No finish line; just a living game and an honest record of building it.
New here? Alongside making games I've spent years teaching people to build them in C++ — start free with Learning C++ by Building Games or the Roguelikes in C++ with SDL3 series.