Post by tetravalence in Please Feed the Fish comments

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The YouTube algorithm showed me your video a few days ago, and now I am here.

I 100% understand that you are in the early stages of this project; I have my own project that is baking. So I say all this in good faith:

To start, I can see the beauty in what you are making. I liked watching a school move together towards the food source.

This is how I approached playing your demo:

I wanted to see what you had to offer, look at what you might be either trying to do or looking to do in the future, and I wanted to try and break everything.

In the early stages of the level, I would just instantiate a ton of food for the one little guy. Shortly after the second guy came in, the first fish "died." I am not sure if that is accurate to say. His face was slightly in the floor and he wasn't responding to anything. His hunger was also 0.

After being able to spawn minnows freely, my "dead" fish sprang back to life. Note that I spawned a large amount of fish to see if I would crash. Nope, no crash! But many of the fish seemed to run away. Funny thing, after the group started evolving, one of them went out of control and turned into a giant goldfish way bigger than the level itself. It was hilarious. What was even more interesting is that once the level was inside the giant goldfish, the missing minnows came back. At this point I stopped playing by force closing the game.

I am sure you are aware of all the bugs I encountered, and that you have a vision for what you will be implementing, but I thought I would mention things that I would not expect to see as a player just in case:

1. giant goldfish. - this was hilarious, but clearly not what was intended.

2. unlimited spawns for both food and fish - I have no doubt you will limit this in the future as there are clear problems with giving players that level of freedom.

3. spawn placement - new food can be reliably instantiated when your mouse is outside of a certain radius. When it is inside the radius, you can only spawn in certain areas. As far as I can tell, it might be due to some of the lilipad stems being on the same plane as where instantiation is expected to occur and thus stealing focus from the player and disallowing spawns. idk though. just a guess. Also, the spawns are always a calculated distance from the mouse but always on the closer side to the center point of the aforementioned circle. it seemed a bit odd and felt imprecise as a player. My guess is that it is just a quick fix for something. if it is intentional, maybe a custom mouse pointer that indicates where both the pointer is and where the spawn will take place?

4. camera - I like the "fish tank" execution, where you are basically on the outside and can only act in a 2d plane. being able to move your camera around in 3d could be nice, but probably not necessary for your target audience. Clearly, the zoom in/out will be limited, and I am guessing you will put in some sort of panning movement. I also noticed that the first button that I pushed to get out of the "focus on fish" cam was Right Mouse Button. But that did nothing so I tried the clicking out of the fish, near the right side of the screen but that did nothing. Unless I am mistaken, clicking near the bottom of the screen is what gets you out of that cam/angle.

5. feedback - obviously, because it is so early in dev, there isn't a ton of feedback given to the player for actions they make or that the fish make. Meaning, when the fish eats food, you would really only notice when it is done if it changes size/color.

All and all, I like what this can become. I can see me putting it on for my younger kids to play. Anyway, this was maybe more than you needed. But I hope it was helpful in some way. Keep up the great work!

Wyrmyr162 days ago

Thanks for the awesome feedback! And for taking it all in with a grain of salt. There are definitely some issues to iron out, even with this basic beginning of a game, but I'm glad you enjoyed what it is so far and can see some potential. That's good to hear at this point.

That's hilarious about the Goldfish. I've only seen it once and I have no idea what's causing it. Haha. But it does say something for the value of unexpected things happening in the game. Maybe something similar to that could be worked into the game later.

Your other points are helpful and I'll be working on some of them very soon to make the demo run a bit smoother and actually do what it's supposed to.

Your point about feedback is perhaps the most valuable to me at the moment. I'd like to make that core mechanic of feeding/growing/evolving the fish as engaging as possible and I can see that the fish changing slightly every once in a while isn't quite enough. I'll be adding some particle effects soon to simulate the food being eaten, as if pieces of it are falling away, and when the fish changes to make it more obvious. Sound effects, I'm sure, would help with this as well. Please let me know if you have any other thoughts in the feedback department.

Thank you again!

tetravalence162 days ago

I'm very glad that my comments came across positively!

Without knowing the structure of your code, my first thought as to why you sometimes get teenage mutant ninja goldfish growing out of control is maybe an interruption in a change in said goldfish. Like if you have the scale of the fish change at some point and then the player somehow either interacts with that fish or triggers a state change for the fish, then the scaling process is interrupted and instead of getting the trigger to stop, it just keeps going. Your guess is way better than mine though.

Here's a bit more on feedback:

I like the idea of particle effects for eating. Depending on how many fish can end up eating at once, a sound for eating may be irritating to the player unless you limit it (if I feed 20 fish and then hear the same soundeffect go off rapidly for 10 seconds it could sound like audio artifact. I don't mean to discourage sounds from eating, I'm just not sure what the right balance would be.

As for evolution, a gradual change in color/size might be too subtle for players to feel like they accomplished things. Unless you did a slight gradual change to show the player its progress toward a new evolution, then give it a finale with something like a morph animation from its current size and color to the new one.

Giving the fish the ability to change their environment would be visually appealing to the player. For example, if when swimming by flora or objects, those things could move or react slightly. Like if a fish swam through some falling food, the food would change its path slightly because of the movement of the fish.

Since this scene is so close to surface, some god rays that get interrupted by slightly moving lilipads could enhance the scene.

With feeding/growing/evolving is the core mechanic, I think it would be cool to have different ways to feed. I have enjoyed my fair share of clicker games, but clicking for a 1:1 work:reward ratio forever will get dull. Maybe being able to hold down to spawn a bundle of feed. Or click and drag to spawn a line. Maybe add a food shaker (like a salt shaker). I think your current direction with growing/evolving is good - feeding different combinations of food to see what the fish evolve into will keep engagement for a time.

What I am wondering about is the player's goal. What are they striving for? What will be the loop that gets tied to your core mechanic? Maybe you said so in your video or in the story intro and I missed it.

Wyrmyr161 days ago

That was pretty much spot on about the Goldfish. There was a trigger for when it reached a certain size to stop growing until it gets moved to a larger area but I had used "<=" when I should have used just "<" in the If statement so it was triggering continuously. Simple enough to fix!

Your suggestions on the audio and visual cues for things happening are helpful. I'm sure that will take some experimentation when I get to it.

I imagine the core of the game like one of those merge games, where you merge two or three things to make one larger/better thing and repeat. So it takes 40 pieces of food to turn a Minnow into a Goldfish, Tetra, or Danio to start. To evolve them further they would need perhaps twice as much food or a smaller amount of a higher quality or larger food. (I haven't built that particular difference into the demo quite yet. All evolutions take 40 foods right now.) Once you unlock a predatory fish, you may need to feed it 40 minnows, or 40 of the larger fish to get it to the next stage. Other than feeding them more, it may simply become more complicated what you have to feed them. Maybe they need a specific combination. Maybe they need to be in a specific biome to evolve. Maybe they have to perform some other action first.

You may need a large population of some of the lower stage fish to evolve the higher ones. This is where the ecosystem management comes in. You'll want to keep the lower populations large enough to keep the larger fish fed. The player may unlock some sort of auto-feeder as they get further, to automate the lower fish's evolution so they can focus on the higher fish.

And that goes into the ultimate goal of the game, which is to keep evolving the fish, discover all of the species and fill all of the biomes. So my focus at the moment is making that clear at the beginning of the game (needs some work obviously) and making it engaging and rewarding early on.

tetravalence158 days ago

I'm wondering if an evolution tree would help show the player what they are striving after. It could be a menu that shows the unlocked evolutions as images of each fish, then either darken an outline of the next evolution or have a small white node indicating that there is more to do with the last unlocked fish. I'm probably not explaining it very well, but the best example can think of is the game Cells to Singularity: Evolution. Its a pretty popular clicker game with multiple branching evolution trees. The game also features little environments with the related unlocked animals/plants/things. You can even click on the items in those little scenes and the cam follows that clicked object similar to the way yours is implemented.

Wyrmyr157 days ago

There is an evolution tree on the right side when you click on a fish. It wouldn't have shown up for you until toward the end of the Tutorial so maybe you didn't make it that far.

I would like to make a larger version of it in its own menu and I agree it helps the player understand what they are working toward. I like your suggestions about how it could work.

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