LD57 - Slappy's Reef

HAH immediate facepalm, the slapping noises when he walks for which he was named got overridden when I updated the animation, damn, what a shame, now you can only hear his slappy footsteps when he jumps!

my type of game, realy like it

Really good game! Fun concept, hard to get fish though ;( most likely a skill issue. Awesome job!

Wow! Great environment and very satisfying to dive and do tricks! The fish were pretty fast and hard to catch, but overall really enjoyed this :)

Randomly clicked on an LD game to do my first rating, and low-key hit the jackpot, what a vibe! Honestly first impressions with the running and diving were very strong. I'd like to see some more indicators about when you can do tricks and maybe some over the top particle effects to go alongside hitting sick tricks. Well done!

This is a great entry, well done. Everything audiovisualy clicks together and the mechanic is simple but effective. A bit more in game feedback could go a long way though. Well done and congratulations on your entry! (Note, I had to turn on hardware acceleration in google chrome, so for people playing this and the game is lagging incredibly, either change browser or turn on hardware acceleration ;) )

Really loved the 2000s vibe, and idea. and would be awesome to have some more serious or more game goals.

Thanks everyone I'm glad it clicks with people 😄

@javasaurus yes, there is quite a lot of underwater clutter, and the fish in particular are using a godot's Multi-Mesh Instance, which I don't expect will work (or at least not performantly) without hardware acceleration as it's specifically a gpu feature, the particles are also gpu particle systems, which I expect work similarly under the hood.

I'm glad it could work after all though, I was worried come submission time that I might have had too much graphics stuff to work well in browser

Love the vibe! Really fun to play ! An run perfectly in the browser! Nice job!

I had some slowdown in my browser (Chrome) especially when I first dove, but it sorted itself out and was pretty smooth later on. Really great work with the graphics, it looks really nice. I like your out-of-bounds invisible wall indicator as well, it looks professional. The gameplay and buoyancy mechanics felt really solid once I knew what I was doing. I ended up getting 680 as my score, but will give it another go!

Felt like some cpu particles on that initial submersion, 'coz Godot always struggles with that in browser (from experience) 😆 The music, like the main character, slapped. While I found the keyboard controls a bit tough, I'm sure if I played for more than a round or two I'd get the hang of it. Well executed for a Compo, great job!

Great action! The sense of speed feels cool, and the good animations enhance the effect.

Such a great feeling game, also very nice audio filter for underwater! I'd love to have more control and deeper water. Regardless looks and feels 💯

Really polished game with alot of juicy effects and great visuals. I didn't really know what I was supposed to do but felt rewarding just jumping around and diving, catching random fish. Great job!

Awesome game, love the look and feel. Kinda skill issue probably but it is kind of hard straight up diving for fish. Though it remains one of the best games I've played this jam so far, amazing job!

Really fun and polished mecahnics with the diving. The music and sfx are really nice too!

Such cool vibes! Really nice presentation. A little bit of framerate jank, but overall really fun. I'm not sure exactly what I was supposed to be doing but just mashing buttons randomly felt fun. I think that's the definition of success :D Really wanted to go see the platform in the distance hahaha. Super pleasant experience. Thanks!

Thanks everyone for playing, I'm glad people enjoy the vibes and feel!

Given I've been playtesting it a lot, here are tips for getting longer better games: you catch fish quickly to get a multiplier going, then catch big fish by doing deep dives. There are far more small fish near the surface than big fish in the deep, so to get the multiplier and crank your time up, shallow dives with a quick underwater boost (jump while underwater) will help you cover distance through the crowds and grab a fish. You also score the fish the moment you dive, so if you think you can get another fish quickly, dive as soon as you leave the water to minimize the time wasted in the air. Running on the water and diving can get you a very quick shallow dive too.

WOW the movement of this felt amazing. The fishes were kinda hard to see and catch, maybe with bigger ones it would be a bit clearer, but I still could spend the rest of my life just jumping and diving here. Congrats!

Great stuff!

Loved it! A really fun and engaging game. I'd love to se it expanded :)

It took quite a while to load, But it's good! I hope you will try my little frog cube(:D

Some after-play:
The rotation of the camera follows a little slowly, the underwater is a little hard to see, and the music is fun

Great entry and interpretation of the theme!

The world has such a groovy feel, beautiful modeling, and the animations and feedback feel great!

Well done!

A bit of crit:

It took me a while to understand the goal, the fish seemed like visual props to me so I thought the goal was to go through the white circles in the water. The fish catching mechanic itself was a bit quirky too, but I can easily see how it could be better if you had more time to put into it!

The models are amazing, the controls are great, the audio is fantastic, and game feel amazing. The feedback is great. The camera following is perfect.

Very fun to play! Diving and jumping are very satisfying. I would say that overall, the movement is just super well made, so, great job there! When reading through comments, I am glad that I wasn't the only one who wanted to visit the platform in the background. No such luck! The wall limit looks great!
My browser kinda struggled with this game a little bit, especially during the first jump, then then it got back on track and ran alright, except for some slight audio tearing. All in all, I would say great job with this one!

Геймплей интересный и не надоедает, все сразу понятно и работает так как надо, восхищаюсь!!!
Игра ничем не перегружена, минималистичный стиль хорошо вписывается и музыка тоже не надоедает со временем. Однозначно 1000/10, бро, скорее всего даже оставлю вкладку в закладках и буду периодически возращаться чтобы убить время😈

Again thank you so much everyone for playing! I am listening to the criticism for after jam development, I really appreciate it all!

@otsvar thankyou! If it interests you I've not long made a blog post about furthering development, if you think you might revisit the game in future, I'll be looking at improving it over the next few weeks to apply polish where time wouldn't initially allow 😄

The post-jam blog post is here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/ld57-slappys-reef/slappys-reef-the-post-jam-plan

So you totally nailed a really cool style with this. I mean it when I say this is just a really cool game.

The visuals look fantastic. Love the main guy but the water looks GREAT. Super refreshing in the same way as Mario Sunshine :) You did really well with the sound too. I like the music, the water sounds nice, it all comes together super well.

This is also a really neat type of gameplay that I can't imagine anyone else is going for. This feels like tony hawk. SUPER cool with the dive/jump leading to different tricks and such. Love the water walking. This is just a solid basis for a really fun game.

That said, I really don't think the fish collecting stuff is fitting here. The fish are pretty tiny, quite hard to see especially from a distance, and often collecting them is accidental. This is less of an issue with the idea on its own, and moreso because you put it in a game where you have me flying around doing tricks and having fun. It's unwieldy and quite difficult to intentionally go for fish and do what I'm supposed to.

If you continue to work on this game, I hope you try taking this sick control scheme into a bunch of game modes. Make a racing mode, a "trick-off", there's a lot of simple stuff you can combine it with because the bones of the movement is awesome.

I think it just in this case happened to clash with the core fish catching objective. Maybe if the fish were bigger, less numerous, and had a larger "hitbox" it would have felt better. But it also may be a skill issue

All in all great stuff. I don't mean it any way backhandedly when I say "phenomenal potential". Super stylish, solid in many aspects, and a really solid foundation. Just the core objectives were not clicking with me. Regardless, I had a lot of fun, especially when I ignored the points :). Great job

@swooty Cheers, I appreciate the feedback greatly! I know where I went wrong at least, I made diving first, then needed a reason to dive, made it fish, then the entire time I was developing I knew I had to grab fish on the playtests, and I knew how because I'd made it.

I have plans for future development and part of it is expanding the movement, and overhauling the underwater movement and fish, to make it so instead of the fish retracting from the juicey movement, they add to it, I'm thinking expansion of the surface running too to allow for momentum building and a more fish catching friendly torpedo dive, I want to lean into that tony-hawks feel, where your speed and tricks help you score, so the way you are incentivised to play is the funnest way!

Honestly brilliantly helpful feedback, I hadn't thought to compare it to tony hawks, but the idea recontextualizes the design goals in a great way for future development, thank you very much!

@scott-r-howell Awesome, I'm glad :) Exciting that you'll continue to develop this

Now that I think about it, I have a suggestion. Instead of collecting fish by touching them, you should instead do it by performing tricks next to them. Each trick has a larger hitbox that "collects" all nearby fish, who then follow you around because they're so taken by your skills :)

Something like this would be a good way to lean into the whole trick thing, while also complementing the fish mechanics. Makes the player want to land their tricks next to a bunch of fish, and you could have bonuses for multiple fish in a single trick. This also gives reason to chain tricks together for larger and more powerful finishes

Pretty sick environment, animation and feedback. Amazing that you can pull this off in two days, well done! My suggestion would be a different game mode, as others have pointed out the fish catching right now is more coincidental than something I am actively trying to do, maybe something that rewards players more for doing those sick movements that you clearly put a lot of effort into, or just tying fish catching with the control more. In any case I really dig the groove and enjoyed doing those tricks and dives a lot. Great job!

Game froze for a bit at the very start, but was smooth after! I enjoyed discovering the different types of dives and decisions each dive made. (Didn't catch a fish right away-> Hold dive to try to chase one VS pop out right away so the next dive is deep instead of risking being shallow and needing to spend a JUMP to dive again). I also appreciate the audio alert when performing a "perfect dive" since I would not have figured out I had done one without it. Graphics were very cool. Thanks for sharing! (PS, played on controller).

Wow this is really impressive, especially for a compo game! Well done! As other users have noted, also experienced a few hiccups when first diving/loading, but it went away faster. The UI also didn't scale very well to a 13" macbook. But outside those nitpicks, the overall game was great and super cohesive! The well put together art style and world complete with the effects for going underwater, solid animations, and decent sound lead to a really enjoyable experience. Everything to do with diving also felt super satisfying and flowed really well, from the animations to the natural buoyancy. Great job!

A green freestyling trick fish with a double mohawk and sunglasses called Slappy is a cool character design imo lol. Was fun to play and 3D graphics are always nice to see in game jams and it ran pretty good in the Ludum Dare embed some how, top marks!

It's a nice arcade vibed game. Animations are really nice. I wished you included a windows built, I would've loved to see those animations smoother!

@whateverdat Hey glad you liked it, there is a Windows build on the GitHub as a release 👍

Very good game, you should consider adding camera control to the game.

Diving and tricking feel amazing, nice work!

Awesome game! Graphics and sound very cool)

The jumping and diving controls were fun, and I also like that performing tricks rewards the player. The only issue I had with the controls is the limited ability to turn, especially near the map edges. Unfortunately I ran into performance issues, and the game was laggy and choppy and the music was cut off. Maybe consider building for Windows or Linux or Android (you can easily connect a controller to a phone nowadays)? Otherwise, good work!

Really fun game, wish you had more control over your swimming, but it's really fun to swim around, reminds me of majora's mask swimming!

Like realization of diving. But, unfortunately, sounds of steps don't work accurately in a web (sounds like a noise).

really good game art amd mood!!!I spent a lot of time on this game diving~~~~~I really wish for more content to play,or more stuff under the water to get ~~~the deving feels so good~~~