Hi everyone, I'm really new to game development and game jams, this is the first one in which I participate, but still I've decided to give it a shot. Never really cared about fishing games but when I saw the jam something just clicked and I had to try, so here we are.

I'm working on the game from a couple of days now and I'm slowly progressing so I'll document my progression here, hoping to have something playable when the jam ends.

Don't Fish My Friends

The basic Idea of the game is to put the player in the place of a smart fish that desperately wants to save his dumb friends from fall in humans hands. In order to do so he built a submarine thanks to which he can go really fast and capture his friends to take them in a safe place.

I'm not really an artist but I tried, this is the material I've put togeter until now:

The gameplay is really simple, navigate on the screen, take the fishes and bring them to the safe zone. I'll update as soon as I have time :)

Update#1

Today I've lost a lot of time doing the sea bed, well the seaweeds to be more precise. The Idea was to put everything in a huge sprite and animate all together. Turns out I'm not ready for such a scale so I had to take some steps back, and now I'm a little behind schedule.

Oh right, seaweeds, I hate them. The problem is that I can't animate them in a satisfying way, so I kept banging my head against them in a very unproductive way.

But the game is slowly coming along, I have a double upgrading system in mind, one for the player submarine and one for fishing area.

Upgrading the fishing area means that a greater number and variety of fishes will appear, allowing the player to make more points but at the same time this will attract more humans making the game harder. Meanwhile, upgrading the submarine will lower the difficulty. In order to do both this actions, the player must spend shells (the in-game currency), obtainable saving fishes.

This is what I've put togeter right now, still unsure if the fishing day should end after a timer or after the number of fishes spawned.

Will update again soon!

Update#2

It's been two prolific days from the coding side of things, the big part of the job is been done, and now I'm working to put all together and refine the details.

A lot of work still remains from the artistic side, the sea bottom still needs to be done, and all the menus and UI graphics need work. But I'm confident, there's still plenty of time and because I'm free this evening I'm hoping to make some nice steps toward completion. The thing that scare me is balancing, I want the game to be hard enogh to get players engaged but not frustrate them away.

I've made an addition to the gameplay, with the evolving of the fishing area new hazards will come from the depths of the sea, and not only from the humans.

Jellyfish

The Jellyfish will wander around thundering everyone that dares to touch it. Which could be really useful, because if the fishes get stunned, they'll stop, making your work easier. But on the other hand, if the one that gets stunned is you...

ZombieFish

Nobody knows from where this fish came, but it's here now, and it's hungry for brains!

You can save this fish and lose shells, or you can let it wander around and bite other fishes, the bitten fishes become zombie theirself and when you save them, they give you only one shell opposed the the normal amount.

Here are some others fishes I made in the meantime: