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Fish Wizard's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #71 | 3.964 | 3.964 |
| Fun | #95 | 3.571 | 3.571 |
| Overall | #102 | 3.700 | 3.700 |
| Fishiness(?) | #124 | 4.071 | 4.071 |
| Visuals | #128 | 3.643 | 3.643 |
| Audio | #138 | 3.250 | 3.250 |
Ranked from 28 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Notes (optional)
There's a web and downloadable exe. The exe has the colors we intended, but the web version should be playable as well.
Pre-existing assets (optional*)
Music was from a teammate from a prior game jam. He has since published it, we used it with permission and credited him (Matt Harvey)
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Comments
I love this fish wizard! His little hm sound when I couldn't do a spell was funny, and I loved the mechanic of being able to combine spells to make them stronger! Those starfish in the first level almost got me my wizard reflexes need some polishing for sure.
Amazing job!!
There are some really great concepts here in this fun little Hades-like! I would recommend doing a slower introduction of different fish spell types, rather than giving you a bunch at the start. That way, you can feel a sense of progression over time as you find new ones and experiment with combining them. But overall, great work!
I have played a few of these top-down shooters, and yours is probably the most creative. I liked it a lot, it's very nice looking too!
The only thing I noticed that felt a bit strange is that the bullets can cross the wall, but it's a very small thing.
Well done and congratulations to your team!
Now I can understand what you mean by “We had such similar ideas!”. I have to say that for the short time that we had to develop a game, I’m surprised at how much content is in your game. The fishing mini-game was a welcome surprise. The sounds and music are great and the pufferfish death animation is pretty darn creative :)
Very good and polished game ! Love the little mini game to catch a spell/fish. Good Job !
Really enjoyed fish-Hades! I'm not very good at these types of games so I didn't really understand the spell combining/rotating mechanic, but just by dodging enemy attacks and clicking I managed to go like six or seven levels deep before getting swarmed by starfish lol. Awesome game!
Super fun! Love the power ups and the ability to fish for more. Gameplay was very very fun!
Really fun and fast-paced Hades-survivor style game! I think I would have liked this as an auto-shooter(caster) game tho cus I was mostly just button-mashing to spam my spells immediately when they cooldown.
I love the fishing minigame! That was a really fun twist on the upgrade tree forula. I'd love a more expanded version of this with tons of special rare fish to look forward to!
I'm not sure if this was optimal but I found myself just sticking to three spells in total, since they refreshed quickly and there didn't seem to be a downside to a limited spell pool.
Since there weren't any rare fish to look for, the optimal play was to immediately hook the first or second fish before the screen got totally obscured by junk.
Love the way the fish names combine into funny compound words ^_^
So I had my 'minlckerel', 'mackckerel', and a super upgraded 'jellyon' and was pretty content with just immediately adding my new caught fish to them to keep upgrading forever. That's a really cool idea!
I'm up to over 200 gold and don't think there's any way for me to lose at this point, since I added mackerels to all my spells, I just get infinite shields so I'm pretty much invincible :D
Super fun concept! Excellent work!! The farting death sounds were funny too.
Haha, I do think you figured out the optimal strategy with the current way the fish combine! Adding some rare fish and making the fishing minigame not fill up with junk as quickly would make for a fun decision of 'how much do you want to push your luck to wait for a specific fish'.
I'm glad that you appreciated the fish names! I had a lot of fun seeing what weird results I could get while I was testing the combining system. I think one of my favorites was 'Jellynow', from the Jellyfish and the Minnow.
Thank you for the kind words!
interesting idea kinda diablo like fish mage, it could have an entire lore to all that fishness.
it was a bit confusing the direction the spells go which made it a bit harder to get used to .... having mouse control at the same time as arrows and space makes a bit hard to act quickly, as you have to move your hand from the arrows to the spacebar or from the mouse to the spacebar ...
there is a good game loop there and quite a lot of content and decent models.
Thanks! I would like to show more info when combining spells, possibly with a preview of what the result would be.
If you find it easier, you can also use WASD instead of the arrow keys. Though, I would also like to add an option for rebinding controls.
Great concept . Since I love rougelike/lite and got to 400 coins (I'm not sure if I could even be killed at this point) I will comment on some parts.
Random spell effect for the buttons feels weird in an action game. In turn based games it makes perfect sense, but in a game like this looking at you action bar is not ideal. Since the best strategy is just using 3 fishes and then feeding them others, I feel like assigning 3 fish to the buttons while keeping others in the bag would have been better than a random one.
Then given a choice for the next room, having the same one twice is kinda meaningless.
Fishing minigame was fun but difficulty ramp up very quickly and made it impossible to get ant fish at some point(I guess game wasn't intended to be played for so long or maybe intentional commentary.)
Graphics and music are nice, enemies are fun, great job on the random generator, loved the feeding fish system and just the core game loop. Great job!
I appreciate the feedback! The game balance is definitely something that we would have loved to have more time to adjust. I think the battles did not scale up in difficulty enough, and the fishing minigame scaled up too much!
That's an interesting suggestion for assigning fish to the buttons. We were thinking about ways to make the effects easier to identify, but adding the ability to choose which ones to have active is a good thing to consider.
Thanks!
What a game! I don't know if that was the optimal way to play but I combined all my fishes into jelly fish and was like invincible :P I think adding some kind of limit to the combining would balance things out and made the player think more about what do they want to combine.
Really cool gameplay and ideas with tons of potential.
Thank you! We had discussed making the ability to combine cards a room reward or a thing to spend your coins on, but we realized that we wouldn't be able to finish that feature in time, so we decided to let players experiment freely.
That would be actually a great idea!
Those time constrains.... Killing our games! 😁
Very fun to play and the spells feel satisfying to shoot. Combining the fish to create new spells is cool. When progressing in the game the fishing minigame became quite too difficult to not catch any junk but overall a good game! I love how you combined wizards with fish.
Thanks! I agree with you about the fishing minigame. We would have loved to have more time to adjust the balance. Making it have a lower max difficulty and scale up in difficulty slower are both on our list of adjustments that we plan to make.
Awesome system, I could definitely see this being part of a bigger game. This is probably the game I've played the longest in the jam so far. Very fun.
That's really nice to hear! I'm glad that you enjoyed it!
Nice game, got me very hooked quickly and I don't usually play this genre of games. Took a while to understand what each fish/spell did but it was fun finding it all out! All parts of the game were consistently good and the fishing mini game was an unexpected but welcome touch. Great work on this game!
Thank you, that's quite an honor!
Cool concept, nice vibe. I do wish the projectiles collided with solid objects instead of passing through them, I liked the option to choose between different room types. I wish there was a better explanation of how the spells work.
Thanks! About 1 in 10 times we had enemies spawning inside of terrain, so we decided to make projectiles penetrate terrain instead of making situations where rooms can’t be cleared. We’re planning on doing a couple of polish things after the jam and voting ends, and projectiles colliding with solid objects is high on the list.
Very into this, the game is obviously very pretty to look at. I really like the colors you used, it feels serene but not necessarily "safe", if that makes any sense. I LOVE the process of getting new fish that is very clever. Congrats on a great game!
Thanks! When we exported the game, we realized the coloration was all messed up so we had to do some emergency color adjustment in the last two hours of the jam. Glad to hear that we got the visuals and colors to a good place!
its fun to be a fish slinging wizard, interesting concept with the changing abilities on the keybinds