I Made A Fishing Game Where YOU Are The Fish! - GMTK Game Jam 2023

hey everyone over the past weekend I participated in this year's gmtk game Jam this is my third time participating in the jam and previously in 2022 and 2020 I had a lot of fun making my entries so I was excited to participate once again this year the team was decided to be rolls reversed and I had just 48 hours to make a game with the steam so let's get right into how I did that so firstly I had to come up with an idea for this game to do so I began just jotting down notes and chatting with some friends about potential ideas the first idea I came up with was just a simple platformer where you control enemies instead of the player hence the real reversal there however almost immediately after noting this I realized how bland this idea is as it's the most basic one I could do afterwards I just started listing ideas like Pac-Man but you're the ghost or Frogger but you place cars or Flappy Bird but you're the pipe however I didn't just want to take an already existing game and make a fan game of it then not long after I jokingly mentioned iron lung but you're the fish and one of my friends immediately told me that I might be onto something with that idea and went on to mention a reverse fishing game this was legitimately the Catalyst for my entire game as afterwards we were able to come up with the mechanics quite easily for instance David mentioned playing as a giant octopus at the bottom of the ocean who Wants Revenge on the fishermen so it uses fish as bait to hook the fishermen on the surface and then drags on them down to the bottom to eat them this mechanic became pivotal to the game and I owe a big thanks to David for his contribution so with the main idea in mind I immediately began thinking of other games that I could draw inspiration from and I immediately thought of one of my favorite DS games the legendary Starfy this game has one of the most adorable art styles in any game which I thought was perfect to try and replicate for this jam and on top of this I remembered an old commercial where Starfy takes on a giant squid with a fisherman in his boat which was exactly the vibe I was aiming for with that I went ahead and began mocking up some concept art for the game and here's what I got firstly I just summarized what was mentioned before in terms of the plot and basic gameplay mechanics alongside this I drew up a couple images firstly an opening cutscene concept where basically the Fisher squid would talk about fishermen or whatever before the game actually starts then for the gameplay images I basically noted it'd be a vertically scrolling screen meaning you could move up and down easily and on top of that when the fish gets baited the tentacle would come up from the ground and destroy the boat so with this idea planned out let's get on to actually making the game to start making this game I actually went ahead and made the art first and foremost so I went ahead and designed a bunch of Sprites for the game the main goal of this art style was to make the outlines large enough to view but also make sure that the colors are simple and bright making everything look cute in a sense so with some basic art made I began programming the game and here's what the first build looked like you could basically swim around and have the camera follow you and if you press numpad 1 it would randomize the boat's location this is basically just a Dev key setup to make sure that the boat would stay within some certain boundaries next up I got the technical to work which was quite simple you can see here that once you get hooked onto the boat the tentacle comes flying up and once it collides with the top of the boat it gets destroyed next I had to come up with an idea to work as bait so I came up with the idea of a squid phone and Peter came up with the idea that the squid could be a gamer so with this I came up with a couple redesigns of the squid but with a gamer headset specifically the Razer Kraken because Kraken and the squid phone was sprayed it basically as a reference to the magic conch shell from SpongeBob so with that in the next build I implemented a little animation for when you called a squid and I added some more Aesthetics to the game including some bubbles seaweed and coral alongside this I actually wanted to overhaul the movement system right now you could move around with the arrow keys but this felt a little boring so I went ahead and made it so you can actually move by clicking and dragging your mouse along the screen this felt way better in terms of giving the game a more fishy feeling as you are swimming in the ocean rather than just gliding or walking alongside this in this build I made some mines that would later be turned into a hazard and made it so that if you touch the hook without a conch shell you'd be dragged off and it'd be game over plus to get another Cod shell you'd have to dive back to the bottom of the screen as they are more of a consumable item after this I worked on adding a bit more visual Flair to the game in this case I made it so that if you had a conch shell it would easen towards you and I added some movement particles for the fish as well then I changed up the squid Attack to actually come up and pull down the boat which made it look a hundred times cooler then after that I added a bit more visually to the game which in this case meant adding some more particle effects for things like collecting your conch shell and a proper sky with clouds and with that the main gameplay Loop was complete so next up I went ahead and worked on the opening cut scenes of the game as I was thinking of what the actual cutscene would contain I decided that I would make the dialogue and characters on the more funny side to add some charm to the game we already decided that the squid would be known as squid gamer which is obviously a reference to squid game and being a gamer but I also wanted a funny name for the fish so I came up with Finn diesel which is a reference to Mr bald head white shirt Family Man himself Mr Clean no obviously it's a reference to Vin Diesel like I mean come on so with the characters decided I quickly came up with some dialogue that fit the both of them specifically paying close attention to squid Gamers way of speech as I wanted to make him use gamer terms to add to his personality and with the dialogue created I simply just turned it into a cut scene with a bit of time and made it so that during certain parts of it squidgamer would hold out the enchanted conch shell and Finn diesel would swim in and out of the cutscene I also decided to hear that the game would be called baited as it's a double meaning perfect for not only representing things like fish bait but also the fishermen getting baited themselves finally to get this game wrapped up I created a title screen and high score system plus I made it so that in the actual game there would be a little countdown before the game begins giving it that classic arcade feel and with about 10 minutes to spare the game was complete so I went ahead and submitted the game with a Windows browser and Android build the browser and Android build have a few bugs which I believed are caused by it just being on a different platform but they are basically playable as far as I know if you want to play this game for yourselves there is of course a link in the description to the games.io page so go check it out and let me know your thoughts and maybe in the future I'll expand on this game some more and as always thanks for watching everyone and I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Jett Lee

Views: 44,012

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Id: wPmAvw4a_aY

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023