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Schooled
Swim around and provide cover for the Tiddlers. They are pretty timid and who can blame them. Big Fish and King Fishers and looking for a meal. Form a school and take the Tiddlers to good breeding ground. Happy fish produce young and maybe you can keep your numbers up!
Controls:
WASD - Movement
Space - Swim
Esc - Pause
Orange Fish have joined your school, Take them to the white weeds so they can Breed
White Fish have successfully found a place to spawn. New Fish will arrive soon
Big Fish eat Tiddlers and you - Avoid
King Fishers will dive any surface dwellers and eat them and you - Avoid
Solo project made in 36 hours as a Compo but late so a Jam
Really interesting game! I found a tad confusing what exactly I was meant to do to begin with, but it's a really atmospheric game, really sells being underwater, and the fish simulation is incredible. Great work!
@quanta-studios thanks. I was pleased with how it all came together. I didn't really have time to think about anything so I was pleased to get everything done on my list. Just. I got my scope right for a change!
Esoteric, weird, experimental, and chill. I really like this kind of out there presentation and concept. It's hard to define and give feedback on a game like this because it's just doing it's own thing, and I respect that a lot.
Great vibes, cute gameplay, love the cube bubbles. I should replay it sometime and try to max out my level :)
Love the mood in this game. A bit difficult to steer but you get the hang of it pretty quickly (except for the fact that the controls are inverted!!!). Also difficult to exactly intersect the small white fish. Maybe they should have a larger hit box. I also think the evolution stopped after level 1 for me. It kept saying 12 fishes to go but it never changed... Unforgiving that you just die and start over x_x
Still this might be my favorite game so far. Really nice music and sounds and the lighting as well.
The way you managed to make the game look this good, and the world feel so alive, with *a bunch of cubes* is incredible. The fluid animations on the fish and birds are lifelike. Very well done!
The aesthetic of this game is amazing and how everything is communicated with cubes and trails. It's maybe a bit punishing to be oneshot by anything especially with the controls. I kept crashing into the lakebed.
I really love the games music and visuals is also pretty good. The idea for the game is fun, and I did have a fun and relaxing time trying the game. I have tried to breed the fishes, but I did never seem to make it work. I did get some young fishes to swim with me, but I could not get them to stay at the school. But any way, I still think it was a pretty good game. Well done.
Thanks for submitting your game on the stream! Here’s the stream if you wanted to re-watch initial thoughts (timestamps in the description to jump to your game!) youtube link
great atmosphere, i loved the animation, and how the swimming was intuitive! the growing tails of the fish are magnificent! glad to have played that one! unfortunately i wasn't the best haha
dude you made a fricking simulation for a jam? that's so cool! I love the idea of this game and how you took the risk with an unusual concept like that, I love simulations so this was easily engaging for me, I had so much fun experimenting with strategies and found out that the best is to act like an actual fish lol and stay low and close to other fish.. my only issue with this game was the punishing restart, if you die no matter your progress you have to start all over, I wish I'd start from the current level instead but other than that this was innovative and entertaining
@ruruie yeah I know it's a bit punishing. I was thinking like a fish and how it would actually be. I know it's a bit rediculous but I wanted it to be both just cubes and ultra realistic at the same time. I might do a peaceful / nightmare difficulty moving forward
Hey buddy, it has been a while. Glad to see you're still active making games!
Every time you seem to step it up a notch, this game is so detailed! I love how fluid everything moves and responds, and all the details are great (the slowly moving weeds, the evolving fish tail, the fact that you make a jump when you reach the surface 😀). The music is very spacy, but also builds tension, I like it a lot!
All in all a great entry, I really enjoyed the experience!
Hello! Very interesting game. After playing for a bit, we have some feedback! As people have commented, the swimming mechanics worked very smooth and controls were good. Absolutely nothing to complain about that!
Firstly, we thought the instruction boxes were sort of irritatingly placed, and we don't think you would need the controls text box to be on the screen all the time. We also saw a flying fish above the water sometimes which was quite epic 😂
For the graphics the fish' trails are really cool, and the smaller fish are very cool looking! Also the smaller fish swimming around you move in a fascinating way and seem realistic and epic. It would have been cool to see a bit more detail on the textures and something to make it look even more like you are in the water. It was also really cool that the fish changed form and started to look better after evolving! 🐳 Audio was pretty decent, maybe some water sound effects could have been cool and make it more immersive? Music was pretty nice and made for a good mood 😎
Breeding points were quite easy to find since they were white, but maybe a little shader / animation / text above it could have been a nice addition, but it still worked well! 🙂 Also side note, it was cool that the plants in the water were moving a bit, small touches like that are very important!
Last note, level upping could have been a bit faster, now it took a super long time to level up and it maybe doesn't give for the most fun gaming experience.
But yeah here are our thoughts of the game. You did a great job and put up a nice game 👍 See you around!
Really cool entry, I'm actually amazed with how much of a great mood you can create with a few cubes and trails :D Honestly though, good job on the visuals, it's very engaging, and somehow, I found myself caring for these little cubes that were following me.
I was eaten before I could deliver the last 2 ones to get to level 3, and it got me a bit frustrated to start over again. But I can really see myself thinking about your entry in a few days and start a new game then.
I was wondering, how much of it is generated at runtime, like the weed, are they random? Same with the path the fish follow, and the AI of the bigger fish. I found it fascinating. Any chance you would give access to the code?
@rolly I was really happy with how it all felt. I went with cubes to save time, not really thinking it would be a good idea. It turned out to be much more of an asset than I thought. Got lucky there. I could send you the code I guess but it is all a bit of a mess. I think I can explain it well enough without it so if you really want it we can sort that.
So the weeds are spawned in at random at Start of each level. They are prefabs with a very simple code on each.
The fish don't follow a path think of them as little heat seeking missiles, except they seek cover instead. Every second or so they check for cover. Cover is any block on a weed, or the blocks of the player. It heads to the closest one. They have a wiggle rotation which is applied after they target the desired rotation so that creates the illusion of swimming and stops them heading directly to the cover they target. It's pretty heavy performance wise so I will have to look at refining that.
The big fish are pretty much the same as the little ones except they target the fish instead of the cover. If a fish is in the open they speed up and the chase is on. The fish are in cover if they are close to the cover they target.
Thats pretty much it. Currently simple but a tad expensive
Coming late to the party in a comment section is always a bit difficult. All the good criticism (both positive and negative) has been said in one form or the other already. You've cultivated some good 'quality over quantity' type feedback here!
Anyway. Saying (mostly) the same things in my own words will not hurt.
One thing that I didn't see a lot of in the preceding commentary, is people struggling with the controls: My fish ended up nearly embedded in the pond-floor a great number of times, because my aging brain apparently can't let go of the notion that 'W is forward'. (My ideal control-scheme, oddly enough, would probably be just 'the same, but with WASD replaced with the mouse'.)
I also had a little trouble picking up fish, but it helps a lot if you don't think of each as individual cases, but go towards a bunch of 'm.
In any case, when I could get it to work for me, yes ... the free-floating, expansive feeling you have when in the middle of the pond, traversing from a just 'depleted' spawn-ground to the next, dodging fish-cubes and cube-fishers is amazing. It would've been great on it's own already, but the music really gets you in the right mood.
Which brings me to another point; once you've brought at least one fish to the new spawn plant, it's best just to wait until they've bred, and then keep adding them to the same plant. (Or same with close-by plants, those are often more than enough.) So you've mostly only engaged with that previously mentioned 'wide' feeling when you're going to the next breeding grounds. (It was nice to have a small surface based one as a white one as well one time -- I think the smaller plants 'go out' earlier?)
I like the evolution mechanic, it's just the ribbon that ties everything together.
Cool simulation. Pretty cool being immersed underwater. Felt cozy. Unfortunately I was unable to play for very long due to really poor framerate issues. Also would have loved some more splashing sounds!
Great work!