Post-Mortem: The Fishing

Hello everyone !

We were very happy to participate for this Ludum Dare where the theme was very interesting.
We were a bit sceptical at the beginning when the theme was announced because of the many possibilities we could find combining two genre.
We had so many ideas and proceeded by elimination to find something that would be cool to make and to play.
That's how The Fishing was born (thank you The Shining).

The idea

For that game we wanted to play the little worm that the fisherman throws to catch some fishes.
So once he throw the worm, you take control of him and explore the depth of this...lake...sea...whatever, lets call it "the shining water" and well, you want to break free.
So all along the adventure, your quest is to get rid of that rod (and optionally gather all gems for fun only).

The level

When creating the level, we wanted at first to make a "level 1 - level 2 etc..." but interestingly, the tool we used to create them was too slow and tedious to handle (each tile corner needed to be placed by hand, sides too etc.)
So we decided to make one and only level where you just go deeper and deeper. And that turned exceptionally well ! I mean we were happy with it :)
Unfortunately, we didn't acknowledge that there was a built-in tilemap tool in unity. And therefore it would have saved us so much time if we did know that.
The free asset was perfect and handy, but placing them each one of them manually took a long time to do. And the more we put blocks, the more my pc started to melt, you get the picture.

So you have a safe zone at the top of the level, and more you go deeper, more it becoms darker and more tense. That is how we wanted this to happen, and we were happy of the result.

The sprites

I did 6 different fishes in pixel art, each of them have a swimming animation and a frame where they have the mouth open.
We wanted to give each fish a different behavior to surprise you during the game, only the shark and the purple fish have the same behaviour.
- the purple fish: When you enter his vinicity he pauses, open his mouth and start to follow you until he reaches you
- the Shark: Same behavior as the purple fish
- the nose fish: This fish stops, open his mouth and speed to the last position you were
- Baloon fish: This fish is the least scarier and he just "puffs" when you get too close to him
- Skull fish: This one doesn't pause, he goes in a limited straight line very fast. If you are too close you are good to start again
- Lantern fish: It actually open his mouth but doesn't mouth, he waits until you pass above him... and strike like a thunder ! (We are very proud of this one)

Things that didn't get in the game on time

- Well, we wanted to make a fishing game / adventure game. And when you get caught by a fish, we wanted to focus the camera on top of the fisherman and activate a playable fishing game where you battle against the fish. If you succeed at catching the fish, the fisherman wins and he throws back a new worw (the fish doesn't exists anymore during the game)
- We also wanted to make it easier for the player to not start all over again when you get caught because it is at the moment really punishing you
- Sprites were inconsistent and I need to work on pixel art more to make them more appealing and consistent. You can see the fisherman, trees, plants, fishes don't have the same resolution and is not very pretty to see.
This is something we should definitely work on.
- Different endings, when you gather all gems, when you capture all fishes and when you reach the anchor (but this one is implemented already)
- Make it more scary !!!!!!! (of course)

Conclusion

It was a great weekend and we are very happy to have participated. In its current state, our game is the original gam jam version. We didn't do a post-jam one because we try as much as we can to make it bug-free and we are very satisfied with what we came up.
We had a lot of fun making it, we had a lot of fun playing your games too. This is our first ludum dare (we are 2) and we would be very pleased to participate as much as we can :)
And hopefully see you all around too (with newcomers!)

Thank you for this wonderful Jam.

Have a nice day !