Assuming you're taking the fish position and adding to it to tell the fish food where to move to, I have had some luck with moving that calculation to it's own event before the actual move event. However it still acts up from time to time!
Retrocade Media
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I've been really enjoying Pocket Aquarium on my gameboy, here are some things I've run into:
- The simon says style mini game belonging to the clownfish where you copy what the fish do takes much longer than the other games and I found it to be a bit boring. I believe it would feel a bit better if the whole game was sped up just a bit so you're not waiting so long to see the pattern you need to reproduce.
- If you are in the supply menu of the shop, pressing the back button doesn't always go back, and the back button in the menu also doesn't always going back, you just kind of have to click around until it seems to randomly kick you to the first menu.
- The Blue Tang hide and seek mini-game sometimes pops up the wrong(?) text or the same text as before, then if you click there it says you've gotten it wrong. I honestly am not sure if this one is a skill issue but I struggle a lot with the hide and seek game.
- Occasionally when feeding your fish the feed flies upwards off screen rather than staying in place and moving just a bit down over each fish. This I believe is actually an issue with gameboy studio, as I have had similar issues in my own projects with the sign of a direction being flipped and objects moving in the wrong direction semi-randomly
Otherwise I'm having a lot of fun booting this game up and playing a bit at a time! I love a good cosy game!
This was really amazing! I got 2 of the endings, I think good and ok, although it looks like theres a qr code spot based on the post credits in the final area that idk how to access. I tried but idk if I'll ever find the second tape lol. I got really immersed in this one, broke out a scratch pad and was taking notes and everything. Really really well done, super cool game. I also wonder if theres a secret oatmeal cookie hiding somewhere...
Edit: forgot to mention how much I enjoyed the meta-game stuff! Did you invent Hypertech or is that a real person?
Edit 2: Got 100%, 5 star game, it's the most immersed I've been in a game in a long time, great experience!
This is a fun game and I like the concept!
Overall it suffers from lack of clarity. Why am I losing lives if the pieces aren't ever actually attacking me? I understand that I'm in danger, but an animation to show them attacking or a more clear explanation of how losing health works would be great. There's also just a lot of stuff on the screen at once in the shop. Balatro separates the Blind selection from the shop for a reason, it gives the player a clear understanding of what choice they're meant to be making at that time. There are 2 types of things to purchase in the shop, but everything is very close to each other in the center because the deck UI is still on screen. Also, selecting a blind doesn't serve any purpose without the ability to skip a blind, it may be worth it to remove blind selection altogether and replace it with a Next button. Each food item should also have a specific food tied to the description, it was very confusing seeing 2 different foods in the shop that do the same thing. Only being able to play 2 cards is told to the player but is never shown during gameplay, and their is no live score total, just your current score and the multiplier, but I can't actually see what that score is at a glance. Some transparency on how much a move is about to score would be nice too.
If you take anything away from this: there is too much information on the shop screen, and it makes it difficult to understand the important information. Personally, I would give the Blind selection a separate screen after the shop or remove it entirely, and I would remove the hand section on the right, but maintain the run information and current foods/artifacts. Also, a new run should probably start either straight into the first blind or give the blind selection screen without the shop, as we don't have enough money to buy anything.
That was a lot of feedback and it was mostly negative, I know. I want to end off by saying that I did enjoy playing this! There is a lot of really good juice here, I especially like the way the chess board forms at the start of a match, how the cards come in to your hand, and all of the sound effects for performing actions. The style of the game is great, and this being a jam entry is SUPER impressive. It is very common for jam entries to suffer from these types of conveyance issues, and I think the underlying game here is fun and quite interesting. I hope this feedback is useful as you develop the game further, and that this didn't come across as too harsh!
This was really fun! It took me around an hour and a half across 2 play sessions to beat. Felt brutal to game over the first time but maintaining your stats between runs made the game a lot more forgiving. There's a game kinda like this in UFO 50, which I recently played. After playing it I also thought about how neat it would be to have a dungeon crawler but with a gun. Glad to see someone else execute on it, and it turned out great!
Thank you for the video, it was a treat to watch! You would really enjoy my previous jam project, The Adventures of Mouthman!
https://retrocademedia.itch.io/mouth-man
I am a programmer/ game designer working in Godot. I can do pixel art and throw together 3D models but I'd prefer not to! Looking to assemble a full team of people! If you're interested reply here or contact me on discord, chances are you're already in the Pursuing Pixels discord so you can find me easily. Not certain about making a 3D game or not but if you can 3D model and we decide to go 2D we can always pre-render assets or mix mediums.
Want to know how I work under pressure?
For an example of my previous 3D work check out The Adventures of Mouthman, made in a week. For an example of my 2D work check out Present Panic, also made in a week!
"how did you manage to make this in a single week?!"
1) I had a team with an amazing pixel artist and sound designer helping take care of a lot of the work
2) Staying up very very late and waking up early multiple days in a row AKA crunch mode. Don't do this one btw, I'm very proud of the end result but destroying my sleep schedule was probably not worth it.
3) Make games for many years before attempting a game of this scope during a jam!
4) DON'T ATTEMPT A GAME OF THIS SCOPE DURING A JAM WHEN YOU'RE THE ONLY PROGRAMMER SERIOUSLY WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME THIS WAS A RIDICULOUS IDEA IT'S A MIRACLE THE GAME CAME TOGETHER
Anyway thank you for all of your praise, I'm very glad you enjoyed the game!
This game plays great, and has the potential to become a really addicting arcade game. However, and I know you've heard this already many times, without some music and sound effects, the very compelling game loop falls a little bit flat. I would love to see this game turned into a full game at some point, as it otherwise has a lot of potential











