itch.io

Paid game jams are definitely not a great way to earn money, even if you're really good. I mean, look at some of the games that got submitted to this unpaid jam by single person teams - if there's actual money on the line, you're gonna see stuff on the level of Tears of the Kingdom getting submitted by trained professionals (even discounting the possibility of cheating). I love free jams because there really isn't any competition. I don't begrudge the games in "first place" because we're all just out here making games!

For a peek behind the curtain, every fish spawn decreases the delay for the next spawn. So technically yes, it does get exponentially harder (the faster it spawns, the faster the decrease happens, etc) but it's capped after 50 spawns. If I had managed to add more complex fish, I would definitely have worked in a different difficulty scaling thing. But I really appreciate you playing and the kind words!!

I would have really, really liked to have been able to look left and right with the mouse. It just felt very restrictive and difficult to aim without that, which compounded the issue of the hoops feeling like they took forever to get to- I might suggest lowering the number of hoops required for things. The audio and soundtrack had a nice zen feel to them, which matched the feel of the gameplay well. I liked the model of Myte as well!

Like the others, I also couldn't progress, but I do really like the visuals. Having each enemy fish be named was a fun detail and definitely made me want to be the biggest fish!

I managed a score of 226 after a couple of tries. The audio, visuals and floaty controls all work together to provide a sort of silly ambiance that feels fun. Great job!

Definitely challenging (in a good way!), and a fair bit of fun. The urchin shots homing in was a nice touch. Even though there were only two enemy types, the speed and visual variations made it feel like I was progressing regardless. My only suggestion would be a start screen just because it was like a panic moment when the game just boom started, haha. 

Thanks! I had a feeling that points would be a big hit, haha :) I experimented with making the bubbles more guaranteed but I couldn't find a way I liked before the end of the jam. Thanks again for playing!

Honestly I'm in it for the trophy. It's a unique one of a kind ORIGINAL PossiblyAxolotl original. How can you compete with that?

I'm glad you liked it!! You're totally allowed to upload game footage, but you have to show it to me, haha. Invincibility and blocking are great ideas - I might just have to revisit this after the jam, and I'll be sure to keep that in mind!

Thank you! Yeah that seems to be a recurring issue. I didn't have time to put together a proper tutorial, but next time I'll be more aware of stuff like that. :)

I haven't done any game jams in a long time, but my girlfriend bugged me enough to join this one that I finally decided to give it a shot. And wow, was it fun! Everyone was super nice, the community is excellent, and there are SO MANY AMAZING GAMES!!! I had a ton of fun playing as many as I could (and I'm gonna keep playing more of them) because I just love the theme so much. I'm glad it popped off the way that it did - over 500 projects with even more participants. Congrats to everyone who submitted, and even if you didn't manage to get there in time, I'm still proud of you for trying :) I saw a ton of first-time jammers as well, and I gotta say, I look forward to seeing all of you in future jams!!

Making JFHFX (my jam game) was a real roller coaster. I was in a general slump creatively, so when I was staring at that blank page trying to come up with what I wanted to make, it felt like I'd been asked to throw a boulder across the Atlantic. Around the same time, though, I rediscovered the musical stylings of Hideki Naganuma, best known for his work on the Jet Set Radio games. Listening to those joy-filled tracks made me realize that the thing I was missing was... energy! What we bring into our lives is what we get out of them, and I hadn't been doing anything that brought excitement to me as a person. So what was a gamedev to do? I wanted to make something intense, that would get my neurons dancing and my fingers tapping. I needed to make something stylish and funky like the Naganuma I was listening to.

Now, it's not all that easy, and roller coasters don't only have one twist. It was tough to shake off the rust, and between that and life's obligations, I only ended up using about three evenings out of the whole week given. The first two were at the start of the jam, and truth be told, I nearly gave up after I realized all I still had to do... but then, boom, Sunday night, I found my resolve and banged out the start screen, game over functionality, points system, and lives system in the space of three hours. And it was totally worth it! 

Once the voting period is over, I want to keep working on JFHFX and get it to the place I envisioned when I started coding. That, and I want to participate in more jams!!!! I totally forgot how good they are for getting your butt in gear. Thanks again to PossiblyAxolotl and to everyone who submitted, voted, commented, anything during this jam! 

GREAT vibes here! Felt almost like SCP meets Cooking Mama. While I wasn't sure how to actually deliver things, I liked the concepts on display. Great work with the cutting tech as well. I found the placement kind of finicky/imprecise, and I didn't get much feedback as to the proper order of things - was I supposed to scan the fish before or after I ground it up? Was there another step after grinding? etc., I'm sure that would have been polished with more time. Love what you have here as it is.

I really like what's going on in this game, and it's got a lot going on. It's got a fun and silly energy to it that made me smile when I first loaded in to the yacht. The platforming was a little tough, and I also had the infinite death checkpoint in the tutorial, but it was engaging enough. The animations were charming and the sound design was spot-on. I would suggest a little more in-air control for the platforming if you're going to have precision jumps like some of the ones you had, though!

Give me back my cakes!!! I really liked this, the shooting and movement felt good, the enemies were interesting, and there were some mechanics that I felt like I could master with practice. The boss whooped me, so I can't say anything past that, but that's on my skill and not the game, haha. I think my only complaint is that it felt kind of bad to get health cakes while at full health and low energy - but if that's part of the game, then that's fine. A+ from me.

A cute and fun little game, no bugs that I experienced! The control scheme was a little unusual, since A/D didn't actually correspond to left and right - I noticed if you rotated yourself upside down with W/S, it would invert. I ended up just steering with W/S fully because it worked more reliably. Great art assets though, and I love the main character!!

While it definitely is buggy, the art and music put together make it a fun experience overall. Using the jump button as a boost underwater is a great and intuitive idea for a contextual button command. The leg-fish animation was a real highlight to me as well!

I like the art! I couldn't quite tell if hitting the hooks was working, though. Keep at it!

Getting compared to Alien Hominid is the highest praise I could ever receive, thank you so much lmao

This definitely doesn't feel like a game jam game, this is a whole entire regular game! I really liked the action queue system, it felt very inventive and made every turn feel like a puzzle instead of just clicking attack over and over. Definitely very hard - my run ended a few fights after the second boss - but that made it interesting. I also liked the characters involved! My only issue was that the action queue of the enemies didn't always progress like I expected, though I'm not sure if that's a bug or I just didn't understand the way it worked. Amazing job all around.

Adorable graphics and perfect audio for the tone. Big props for making both a cozy/practice mode and a timed score attack mode. Knocking the boats together is satisfying and it feels great to un-hook (ey, there it is) your fish friends and turn it around on the fishermen. My only complaint is that I wish I could have also weaponized the turtles. :)

Aww, this is so delightful! The art style is super cohesive and cute, and I love how it lends itself to the bubbly feeling of the gameplay. The sounds/voice lines are well executed and playful. I had a little trouble orienting myself to the concept of 3D rotation in an ostensibly 2D space, but that might have just been a skill issue. One really specific thing I liked was that you had particles in the higher area of the sky to give it a sense of movement even while there was nothing else to reference!

I really dig this! You nailed the core gameplay loop of a cozy farming game for sure. The move speed was appropriately fast for the map size, but I agree that the map was too big mostly because I kept getting lost. Having unique landmarks to reference might have helped with that. A very gorgeous game though - props to your sister's watercolor skills. This has some real legs! (Unlike fish, but my point stands)

A fun little puzzle game, for sure. While I enjoyed the primary concept of the map being cleared and the colors changing, I wasn't a big fan of the camera rotating - it was disorienting in an uncomfortable way. If it was locked to the four cardinal directions, it might be less off-putting. The sprite art was spot-on, though.

Thanks! I was really trying to break out of the mold of typical fishing games with this one. 

Well. Goddamn. Not only was the whole, you know, really crazy and interesting, the fishing itself is polished and responsive. I don't know what to say about this other than easy 5 stars across the board and that I also love that you have the ability to create games. 

That's the level of quality I aspire to!

I wasn't quite sure what my objective was other than not getting spotted. I didn't need to leave the hiding spot to do anything, so I never needed to move. I saw a "food" asset in the folders, so the case may have been that I would have needed to get food to survive? If so, that would be a great place to start. 

A solid start, for sure! There's a good variety of enemies on display, and the gray charger ones caught me off guard. I couldn't tell if the damage upgrade was doing anything, since most enemies died in one hit and the red ones seemed to just always take two hits no matter my damage. One thing I would have liked to see would be the player's current XP needed to level up. Other than that, it looks good! Great job on your first game jam submission.

A well-executed clicker game. One thing I had fun with, and I'm not sure if it was intentional or not, was when fish overlapped and you could "get away with" multi-clicking on them. It made certain fish stronger, like the ocean sunfish, because they would overlap more often. Also, including an ocean sunfish gets an automatic five stars from me. 

A fun take on the Overcooked genre for sure! I liked the physics interactions making things more complicated. I'm not sure how in love I was with the random fish mechanic - certain fish were already useless when I was trying to pull a specific one, so adding ones that were explicitly unusable made it a lot harder. I had a lot of fun trying to survive as long as possible, though, and I liked the sound design. Well done!

Neat idea going on here. I like the idea of trying to string together powerups, that's really cool. I would have liked the ability to zoom out and see the whole board at once, as I couldn't get a feel for what trajectory I needed at the current camera zoom. Solid game, and I enjoyed the art as well.

The art is really good! The click to aim and move system works well, but I might suggest a different input for dashing. It's intuitive, but it felt a little clunky to do while trying to maneuver around. I also didn't figure out how to beat the pufferfish, but that may just be a skill issue. Good work, in any case!

Wow, wow, WOW! I could easily see myself playing this on my Gameboy Advance as a kid. The sprites are vibrant and clear, the controls are simple yet comprehensive, and there's enough gameplay nuance that I tried quite a few times before winning. There's also a lot of love in this, with the different gamemodes and detail work. Excellent job, five stars across the board.

Looks like you need to upload the associated .pck file for this to work.

The audio is definitely the star here. Loved the unique spawn sound cues to keep your eyes peeled for certain things. Like the other commenter, I wasn't able to get back to the shop to spend my hard-earned human quid, but I did still visit the shop and got a kick out of the voice line for not having money. :)

Great sprites, and the movement felt good from what I could tell. I really liked the axolotl. :)

Ooh, I love the ascii art style! Very old-school, both in art and design. I'd definitely love to see this expanded. I wasn't sure if there was something I was missing in the combat, but I never died and ate food fairly frequently, so I hope that was the intention. 

Thank you, I'm glad you liked them! :)

I KNEW gamers would like points. I'm a genius.