Today is most likely the last day of dev I'll have free to make any changes so I'll submit tomorrow. I'm really proud of the progress I've made with the game from start to finish and in general with my game development learning.
I got a massive amount of feedback from both online friends and friends in my personal life about what they thought of the game, how it felt and things they thought I could improve to make the gameplay experience much more enjoyable.
It was all extremely constructive, but the main gripe people had was how the movement felt unintuitive. They expected the W key to propel them forward in the direction that the mouse rotated them to or that they could point and click to move the fish where they wanted. A learning experience clearly, WASD movement has its place but its not here in this game.
I revamped the movement system to use mouse point and click and honestly it feels 100x better. Everything is more fluid.
More values were fine tuned to make the game feel more balanced but still a challenge.
I think it's in a good place for my first game jam submission.
Things I would have liked to add:
Maybe I can do that post Jam
Anyway, here's a picture of my trello board I've been using to track my work
Today I focused mostly on tidying up the little annoyances in the codebase, tweaking values and tuning things up a little...
I playtested it quite a bit too and noticed while I was happy and proud that "I did this", it wasn't overly gripping me. It needed something to give the player consequences to make them rush to grab the food before the other fish did.
As the fish eats, it gets bigger but then I thought the players fish will just get infinitely bigger and breaks the game. I decided to add a max scaling size as well as a scale degradation system.
Each frame, the scale of the fish reduces, so the player is constantly battling with their need to eat the fish food as well as the other fish.
As they grow in size, the fish will now "evolve" through the stages of colours, from a blue fish, to green, to yellow, to red to black (The Final Form). The black fish rules the seas and you feel pretty powerful when you're in the blackfish form.
My second playtest build is available to play on itch.io
Never got as much time as I would have liked to today and I have a social event so looks like no late evening dev session with a glass of wine and a bowl of nachos.. shame.
I'm constantly surprised by things I think will be numerous entities or tens of lines of code that actually turn out to be single-liners or project configuration.
Lots learned in such a little space of time. We're getting there people!
I had one job in mind for today, which was getting some NPC fish AI done so I set up a state machine to get them from WANDER, CHASE, FLEE or EAT_FOOD states. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
It's all about who the bigger fish is so If I chase an NPC fish when my player fish is bigger, they will flee, otherwise they will chase me. When we're not all chasing each other in the ocean, we're just looking around for food which makes us bigger so we can chase each other again later!
I might have added a temporary title screen too! First time doing scene transitions, it was a lot simpler than I thought.. Praise be to the YouTubes!
Been looking forward to this jam, especially since it's my first one since embarking on my indie game dev journey! Really happy with the progress I've made today creating the ocean map, sprites for my fish and implementing their movement.
I thought I'd be content getting the ocean and some movement coded but ended up finding time for the basic NPC or enemy, the food "powerups" and a spawner, so really really pleased.
I decided to go with a game where the player is in a battle for the survival of the fittest and has to eat more than all the other fishies (Maybe even the fishies themselves)
