Interactive systems
DC Fishing — commercial multiplayer game system
The situation.
Roleplay game servers run on custom systems built by independent developers. Server owners buy them, install them, and their players use them immediately — often hundreds at once.
If something is slow or exploitable, it gets found within days and removed.
What was built.
DC Fishing. A complete fishing system for FiveM roleplay servers.
A two-stage skill minigame — casting for accuracy and distance, then fighting the fish until it tires. Forty species across five water types and five rarity tiers. Player and server-hosted tournaments with live leaderboards, entry fees and prize pools. Daily quests. A logbook tracking biggest catches, level and progression.
Around 9,700 lines. Works across two frameworks, five inventory systems and two targeting systems, detected automatically.
How it went.
Three weeks. Thirty hours of human direction.
More human time than the compliance build needed, and for a reason. Nobody can specify what makes a fishing minigame feel right. The casting, the fight, the difficulty curve — someone has to play it, decide it’s wrong, and play it again.
The system built it. A person tuned it.
What it changed.
Sold commercially. Running on servers we’ve never seen, used by players who have every incentive to break it.
Catch validation, the economy and tournaments all run server-side. In a game with a player-driven economy, anything trusted to the player’s own machine gets exploited within days.
The compatibility layer matters as much as the features. Server owners run wildly different setups; the system detects what’s installed and adapts rather than demanding a particular configuration.
What we chose not to build.
Nothing. Everything in the original scope shipped.
That isn’t always the answer — the compliance build has four things we deliberately left out. This one didn’t need any.
Where it is now.
Live, sold under DeadCowsInMyCar, with ongoing support.