In this platformer you find yourself stranded in a hostile abstract world. You have to fight your way through hellish monsters by utilizing the power of sound artifacts you can find. You also have to dodge deadly traps and make difficult jumps to finally find your way out.
The game delivers a meticulously handcrafted artstyle and a beautiful original soundtrack. Jump mechanics here have a lot of momentum and reduced air control so you need to be careful at which speed you make your jump to not over- or undershoot a ledge.
You control the character via "a", "d" and "space" and shoot with "1" and "2".
All the game assets are made by us. The game runs on our self-developed "RawSalmonEngine" written in C++. - Artwork and Music is by @moonlighthiker - Programming and Level Design is by @vectorwolf
The game currently runs at a fixed 1920x1080 resolution with no other options present.
Really nice work! I love the artstyle and music a lot :D One issue I had was the jumping feels a bit too heavy, not sure if this was intentional or not but everything else was great!
I think it's really cool that you've written your own engine, but the controls could use some work here. It feels like there's some input delay (maybe a few hundred ms) that makes it feel pretty sluggish. It could also just be that the player takes a while to speed up/slow down.
@cybikitty I'm really really happy to hear that you liked our game, that means a lot to us :heart:. The heavy jump mechanic was indeed intentional. The game was way too easy to beat with "lighter" jump controls including more air control. I wanted it to be relatively difficult while not being too unfair. Also I think the "less agile" feel fits well with the dark atmosphere of the game. But I understand you, it feels a bit "unintuitive" because we're used to "mario like" controls. :cat:
@radgegames Unfortunately we didn't have time to apply the last layer of polish, we were just too exhausted. :sleeping: But bear in mind this is a game jam and such animations can take a really long time. Nevertheless, thanks for the comment. :smiley_cat:
@siarhei-pilat Jeah. Double clicking "Salmon.exe" should actually just work. If you downloaded the 64bit version, maybe try the 32bit version and vice versa.
@siarhei-pilat Only guess left is that you maybe moved the executable out of its folder or something during unpacking went wrong. Or it's something completely different :shrug: . If you get the error *"Error: No actor called PLAYER found!"* that means that at least the initialization of the map is working. I tested the engine on quite a load of machines where it ran well, but when developing a multi platform app from scratch, theres always room for some dubious errors :smile:
@nathaniel-jensen The error messages are harmless. I didn't work on suppressing or making them more user friendly because I thought nobody would see them anyway. What I didn't know was that the windows version automagically opens a window with all this output :angry:. Now everyone is worried about the console spamming *"Error: No actor called PLAYER found!"* although that's no issue, it does that while being in the menu all the time.
The problem with the visibility must stem from something completely different. Maybe SDL2, the lib I built upon, has problems properly detecting you screen resolution. Sorry!
@palemek Thank you for you really nice comment! It means a lot to us!
About the shoot button you are totally right. We chose the numbers because we planned to have up to seven different shots which you could toggle through, even combine and then shoot with the mouse or e. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time and could only implement two shots, but we forgot to map it back to a more convenient place.
- The name of the game is Salmon? hahaha. - The animations seem a bit broken and the hit boxes are weird. - The camera is weird, I can't see the floor so I just kept dying in the beginning because I couldn't see - Sound effects are really well remixed, good job here. - Press 1 to attack? That's a quite odd decision, but fine I will play along. - After a few deaths the game just decided to stop working and gives me a grey screen, then I need to close and open it again. ew. So there is a lot of minor details that could be polished to improve the game, but all of those points are MINOR. Overall the level design is really good and the game seem to have a lot of potential. Good job.
@danilo-freire I would love to include more build options. Mac is a bit problematic because although I recently found a nice cross-compiler project I still have no single apple device to test the code on. I'm currently working on a WebGL build via Emscripten but for that I have to manually compile all dependencies to webassembly, modify the main loop and set lots of strange compiler and linker flags. I tried it a week before this Ludum Dare but gave up after I was greeted by a grey screen with no error messages. I still would love to have a WebGL build, but man, I didn't think it would be that much work :smile:
@hcursino First of all, thank you for playing our game and letting me know your thoughts :slight_smile: maybe I can clear up some of the inconsistencies you experienced. - The name of the executable comes from that my engine on which the game runs is called "RawSalmonEngine". If you'd swap the data folder with other valid game files, you could play a Zelda clone for example without a single modification to the Salmon executable. - The (run) animation has its quirks because I coupled it with the movement speed to avoid the "spinning tires" problem when accelerating. I originally wanted to include a clean run->idle transition animation but that was cut in the development because we had to prioritize other more important stuff. - We also experimented with hitboxes cleanly matching all animation frames but because the map has its narrow locations and our character makes relatively big steps you could get stuck at a couple of places. So that unfortunately was pretty buggy and we then just matched up the hitbox with the idle position of the character for greater consistency and bug-free-ness. - Usually visibility problems stem from broken fullscreen or not having 1920x1080 resolution. But we intentionally included some "leaps of faith" in the game. Jeah, that drop position of the first map is a bit mean. If you sneak to the lowest point you can catch a glimpse of the patrolling monster and time your jump accordingly. We tried to get this "suspense feel" because after all it's a horror themed game, but it seems this comes at a cost (of occasional player frustration). - The unnusal attack button stems from our original gameplay concept. I responded to that same question a bit more up in the comments. - On that bug. I would love to see that one in the wild and squash it. What a pity my Logger isn't implemented yet so I unfortunately can't debug that problem remotely :slight_frown:
Again we really appreciate you feedback. When we maybe develop a post-jam version we now know on which bugs and quirks to work on :smile_cat:
I find the chara of the creature really scary but it is very cool and I like the animations! As the game is quite "dark" we easily identify the enemy and the player, which is a plus point ! I liked the game, but I had problems with the jump a few times !
One issue I had was the jumping feels a bit too heavy, not sure if this was intentional or not but everything else was great!