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Thank you tea_mori!

Wonderful pixel art, and great characterization in a short time. Thank you!

Very cool ideas, love the aesthetic.

Wow this is great! I love building sims like this. Very cool.

This is a cool idea! I agree with Pirik where I couldn't understand where the customer was knocking from. But great atmosphere and lighting.

Thanks! Yea I hope to use the ideas from this sim to make a deeper one with more gameplay one day!

Thank you so much for playing! Very much appreciated 😁

Totally been there. Good luck with the new hobby!

No worries! I totally understand the concern, most bettas do have to live in very cramped and sub par conditions. Do you keep bettas then?

Thanks for playing my game! If you mean that it's bad for them, I think that depends. Harold lived in a big 5 gallon bowl with a heater. He had his water changed every 3 days and lived to be over 5 years old. I like to think we took pretty good care of him and had a good life. Though I certainly understand the concern for fish welfare.

This game is a jam! Love the hi-bit cute art style of the girlfriends. Also the city! Simple. Effective. Fun.

If I had one gripe it would be that the instructions cleary state you should be trying to protect your girlfriend from the rain, but to get the most points you need to get as many raindrops as possible, likely pushing you towards leaving your girlfriend.

This ludo-narrative dissonance had me questioning the games intentions, which quickly lead me down a path of discovery, reflection, and renewal. What if your girlfriend isn’t the other female sprite on screen.... what if the Earth is your girlfriend. This is clearly the intent of the gameplay, increasing your score is a classic motivating mechanic. It is expressed here as an integer, increasing in a y = mx relationship, where m is the number of raindrops hitting the player’s umbrella, and x is 1.

In this reading, we can recontextualize the earth, the rain, and the other human. Assuming a relationship is a positive and supportive one, the earth as the player’s girlfriend is now the Earth. We can think about our blocking raindrops not as preventing the ground from getting wet, but from our selfish choices as a species from damaging the globe’s ecosystems. By using the umbrella, we are encouraged to use our knowledge to take action to reduce our effects on the planet.

What then do we make of the other human? With a clear environmentalist message built, there doesn’t seem to be a need for another human character on screen. But this is where the author’s really define their work’s thesis.

“We should do this work of protecting the Earth, and taking responsibilities for our actions, even if it does not directly benefit humanity” - the developers seem to say.

This assertive stance on environmentalism is sure to ruffle a few feathers, but wrapped up a crisp, cute artstyle, it’s hard not to enjoy Out in the Rain.

With that in mind, I’m gonna have to give it my Game of the Year.

Wow this is great! A lot more depth (pun intended) than I was expecting for a game jam! One thing that might be helpful to include would be an abbreviated version of the controls on the pause menu. Overall this is wonderful though!

Loved exploring this game!

Really enjoyed this game, cool idea!

Thanks for playing! No you're correct, the clams do add more of a speed boost than the bubbles. But if you take the bubbles then the opponent won't be able to get them and use them as a speed boost. But good feedback, it was tricky getting the opponent to feel like a good fair race. Thank you!

Thank you for playing! I agree that the difficulty is probably a bit wonky and a more elastic speed on the shark would have been better. Still learning! Thank you for your feedback!

Dev Log 4

I've started to add the potatoes to the meat of my game. 

I've also allowed swappable player characters. It's only a sprite change, but allowing players some level of customization I think keeps players from getting bored too quickly and prevents things from becoming too repetitive. If I can figure out how to make this a reward for wining the first race then I think it will allow the game a little more staying power. Which,  in its current state, it could really use.

One issue I had run into was flipping the arrow buttons so that one pair face up and the others face down. If you rotate the X rotation to -180 (to flip it upside down) the buttons don't respond... For some reason Unity only accepts click ray casts on the "front" side of buttons? So weird. Scaling the Y value by -1 works though.

https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/120561/rotating-a-button-in-unity-ui...

Dev Log 4

Today I added  an improved menu screen with instructions on how to play. I think a lot of devs making their first games lose player perspective. It may be obvious to me what the game is, but it should probably be made clear to the player what the goals are and how the game works. 

I've also  got one full race done, as in, you can load into the game, win or lose a race and then return to the menu. Just a few more tweaks and hopefully it will be fun!

DevLog 3

* Added Clam, Bubble, and Light Shaft for speed boost
* Added Win State - end race
* Created several sections for Endless Runner version of the race
* Created a structured race to compare which version is more fun.
* Grabbed speed up power ups turn into bubbles and float away

I also fought with a parallax scrolling system for hours and weird bugs with child object. But now I have a foundation for building a better race!

And I also have a simple main menu created! Things are moving!

1. Hi there! What's your name? Want to introduce yourself?

Hi I'm Taylor. This is my first game jam and I do accessibility web development for a living.

2. Did you participate in the last jam we held? If so, what do you plan on doing better this time? If not, what's your reason for joining?

Nope this is my first Jam! I joined so I would finally finish a game in Unity.

3. What games are your favorites? Did any of them inspire you, or made you want to make your own?

I love games like Animal Crossing, The Sims, Pokemon, Stardew Valley. Those are all great games but I think too large of a scope for me to attempt at the moment. I'd love to work on a project with expressive features like those in the future.

4. Do you have experience with game development? What did you do/with what engine?

I've made a few web games before, and even wrote my own JavaScript game engine. But I'll be using Unity for this jam. I took a class in it and never really finished a game.

5. Tell us about something you're passionate about!

I like Hair Metal. Like Van Halen, Whitesnake, and Bon Jovi. But not Poison or Motley Crue. I still have taste.

6. What are your goals for this game jam?

Make some pixel art! Use Unity! Finish it!

7. Any advice to new jammers (if you're a veteran)?

N/A

8. If you're a returning jammer, what can the admins do to improve your jam experience?

N/A

This is super cute. I love it!

I lived in Melbs for a bit a few years ago. Really brings back the memories. Thanks for this! Such a good art style too!

Devlog 2

I spent more than a couple hours just trying to figure out how to clamp rotation  for a  2D sprite in Unity. For  my own sanity, the solution that ended up being most applicable to me was in the comments here: https://answers.unity.com/questions/169197/euler-angle-problems-with-rotation-li...

I've also added a bubble ring which acts as speed boost, currently it's the only way to out speed your opponent. I plan on adding a few more  speed increasers and a few speed decreasers.

Instead of developing the actual mechanics further, I decided to to work on a dialog system to add a little personality to the game.  This may be a too sassy of a trout.

Now to figure out why the trout doesn't go in between the front and back kelp sprites...

Love the art!

This is great. Great title and idea!

This is my first game jam and I am super stoked. I've made a number of small JavaScript games before and recently finished a class in Unity, but this will be my first major project in Unity. Since the theme was water and I already had a number of fish sprites for an unfinished game, I decided to adapt those and create a "Fish Racing Game". Like Mario Kart meets a 2D endless runner.

Here's a couple of those sprites: and they're all available for others to use as well.  https://www.piskelapp.com/user/6242968237244416/public

My friend and I also had a Jam Sesh to write some music. I think we have the race theme here:

https://soundcloud.com/marty-strauss/july-15-fish-racer

I'm a newbie at pixel art, but I have a couple of sprites for a game I never finished making. They're mostly fish, so I think it's a good fit for the suggested theme. You may have to sign up for a Piskel account to download them, but hey, still free!

https://www.piskelapp.com/user/6242968237244416/public