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.
text: "135" || args.state.threat_level # Le sigh...