Great job finishing a game! Awesome to see what you can create picking up DragonRuby for the first time. I enjoyed the visuals and the simple gameplay even though it may be lacking in depth. When I initially played this game for the judging period, seeing the huge fish shadow made me gasp and I remember saying "Its the one!" out loud haha. Going into the Boss battle was icing on the cake. Also great job with the music and keeping it monophonic when the player crashes. Thanks for participating!
I had trouble figuring out what a fish vs. water ripples were.
The boss battle was a cool concept too. I never played the game this is inspired by, but it would be cool to see a more developed version of the game. Cool work!
Thanks for trying it out! The original inspired game was a super basic fishing game on NES. It had excellent music, and that was the thing I was most excited for in this jam (because it’s the only thing I have experience with!) It certainly didn’t have gimmicks like this game tries to. But it was the starting point to give me a seed to work with, and the right amount of inspiration to try to build something. How hard can it be! Things went off the rails really fast in a delightful way. I do plan to implement more of my original ideas later, and probably add real fishing in haha.
This is a cool game. And the visuals are great, for what they are. The level looks nice and is fun to explore. Yes, it's a bit difficult to discern between ripples and fish, but the ripples look super nice and as far as I can tell there is no penalty for trying to catch a ripple, which helps to make it not frustrating.
The "bossbattle" is a nice surprise, even if it's simple. And also, reading your reply to Colin's comment, those are cool ideas for a surprise at the end, your "score" being the threat level. Very creative.
I felt that way too. I ran out of time to remedy it, while I was focussing on trying to figure out how to power the battle scenes. I only felt like that was a problem when the "riff raff" in the sea was small, and fish looking. I thought the longer waves looked okay. The two ways I thought about resolving this were: Remove the smaller ocean riff raff, keeping only the bigger stuff, and adding a flash-in kind of animation to fish spawning. I was also considering making the fish more... fishlike, but with the resolution limitations, I think that would actually make them blend into the wave _more_. In some ways though, I actually felt that it was an interesting way of adding that "hard-to-find-fish" aspect. Sorry you thought perhaps the game didn't work.
> couldn't figure out what to do beyond button mash.
Yeah, unfortunately, I wasn't able to create the battle experience I hoped for. Button mashing is your only option. I had planned a second fish attack (the tail whack), and was going to allow ducking, and deflecting with your fishing rod. I had a really hard time getting the timing mechanics working (keeping separate, but not too much the animations, with the moment a hit should be checked, etc.). I think the battle would have been much more interesting if I could have gotten those things sorted out. All this said, I am proud of what I was able to build in, allowing for the fishboss to transition states, and accounting for the pre-emptive "He's about to attack! You should dodge or parry (if only you could!)!" This was my first game, so I had a lot to learn about animation timing and state management.
As a final followup along that theme: My ultimate goal in this game was not to have that fish boss be "the boss". I thought it was funny to have to "fight the fish", but my ultimate vision was actually to upset the lake enough to summon the kraken, or loch ness, or some other super awesome sea monster wrecking machine and have that be the ultimate showdown. Fun fact: Your score at first appears to be "I caught this many fish!" but it actually represents a "threat score" -- For the everyday fish, it goes up 1, but for the boss fish you saw, it doubles. You only see boss fish after you catch (threat of) 10, and I was hoping to send sea monsters at you after 100, with animations and clues in the water to help guide you to know "there's more to it".
Fun fact, you wouldn't actually realize that number represented a "threat to the lake" until you died. Except it's not that easy to die, as you get more OP each time you kill the (only) boss, and he doesn't get more OP himself.
Fun fact pt II: 20 minutes past the deadline of submitting the game, I noticed I still had hardcoded the death screen to say you had a threat score of 135 from when I was developing the scene. So, it's a hot mess anyway ;D haha.
text: "135" || args.state.threat_level # Le sigh...
Comments
Great job finishing a game! Awesome to see what you can create picking up DragonRuby for the first time. I enjoyed the visuals and the simple gameplay even though it may be lacking in depth. When I initially played this game for the judging period, seeing the huge fish shadow made me gasp and I remember saying "Its the one!" out loud haha. Going into the Boss battle was icing on the cake. Also great job with the music and keeping it monophonic when the player crashes. Thanks for participating!
Cute little game. I included it in my Nokia 3310 Jam 4 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :)
Thanks! That's super cool!
I tested the game.
So after 21 fishes fished, you have the boss. But I didnt figure out what to do. I can't avoid, only press space bar to attack.
Whelp, that’s all there is to do. I already talked a lot about it in other comments. Thanks for playing!
Cool visuals and animation.
I had trouble figuring out what a fish vs. water ripples were.
The boss battle was a cool concept too. I never played the game this is inspired by, but it would be cool to see a more developed version of the game. Cool work!
Thanks for trying it out! The original inspired game was a super basic fishing game on NES. It had excellent music, and that was the thing I was most excited for in this jam (because it’s the only thing I have experience with!) It certainly didn’t have gimmicks like this game tries to. But it was the starting point to give me a seed to work with, and the right amount of inspiration to try to build something. How hard can it be! Things went off the rails really fast in a delightful way. I do plan to implement more of my original ideas later, and probably add real fishing in haha.
This is a cool game. And the visuals are great, for what they are. The level looks nice and is fun to explore. Yes, it's a bit difficult to discern between ripples and fish, but the ripples look super nice and as far as I can tell there is no penalty for trying to catch a ripple, which helps to make it not frustrating.
The "bossbattle" is a nice surprise, even if it's simple. And also, reading your reply to Colin's comment, those are cool ideas for a surprise at the end, your "score" being the threat level. Very creative.
It's not clear what's fish and what's ripples, and without knowing what's fish it's easy to assume the game just doesn't work.
I did figure out eventually, but then I got to "the one" and couldn't figure out what to do beyond button mash.
Thanks for trying the game!
> It's not clear what's fish and what's ripples
I felt that way too. I ran out of time to remedy it, while I was focussing on trying to figure out how to power the battle scenes. I only felt like that was a problem when the "riff raff" in the sea was small, and fish looking. I thought the longer waves looked okay. The two ways I thought about resolving this were: Remove the smaller ocean riff raff, keeping only the bigger stuff, and adding a flash-in kind of animation to fish spawning. I was also considering making the fish more... fishlike, but with the resolution limitations, I think that would actually make them blend into the wave _more_. In some ways though, I actually felt that it was an interesting way of adding that "hard-to-find-fish" aspect. Sorry you thought perhaps the game didn't work.
> couldn't figure out what to do beyond button mash.
Yeah, unfortunately, I wasn't able to create the battle experience I hoped for. Button mashing is your only option. I had planned a second fish attack (the tail whack), and was going to allow ducking, and deflecting with your fishing rod. I had a really hard time getting the timing mechanics working (keeping separate, but not too much the animations, with the moment a hit should be checked, etc.). I think the battle would have been much more interesting if I could have gotten those things sorted out. All this said, I am proud of what I was able to build in, allowing for the fishboss to transition states, and accounting for the pre-emptive "He's about to attack! You should dodge or parry (if only you could!)!" This was my first game, so I had a lot to learn about animation timing and state management.
As a final followup along that theme: My ultimate goal in this game was not to have that fish boss be "the boss". I thought it was funny to have to "fight the fish", but my ultimate vision was actually to upset the lake enough to summon the kraken, or loch ness, or some other super awesome sea monster wrecking machine and have that be the ultimate showdown. Fun fact: Your score at first appears to be "I caught this many fish!" but it actually represents a "threat score" -- For the everyday fish, it goes up 1, but for the boss fish you saw, it doubles. You only see boss fish after you catch (threat of) 10, and I was hoping to send sea monsters at you after 100, with animations and clues in the water to help guide you to know "there's more to it".
Fun fact, you wouldn't actually realize that number represented a "threat to the lake" until you died. Except it's not that easy to die, as you get more OP each time you kill the (only) boss, and he doesn't get more OP himself.
Fun fact pt II: 20 minutes past the deadline of submitting the game, I noticed I still had hardcoded the death screen to say you had a threat score of 135 from when I was developing the scene. So, it's a hot mess anyway ;D haha.