Wow, day 6 was crazy! It was the final day of the jam so I've put up a version of the game you can play right here, but I think I'll probably be doing some more with this post-jam. Right now though I'm very tired.
I started the day by doing the final sea creature mechanic: squid leave 5 tiles of impassable ink when you start reeling them in. Above is a gif I made of the introductory level for this mechanic. PICO-8 lets you save a gif at any time with the press of a button and I love this feature, so when I'm doing a game jam in PICO-8 I regularly save gifs and tweet them. I tweeted this one, and it got crazy:
I was retweeted by Adam Saltsman and Alec Holowka, two highly respected and very well known indie devs who I greatly admire. I mean, these guys have Wikipedia pages they're so big. I love their games and the fact that they liked mine enough to share it with their (pretty considerable) audiences really means a lot. Then it happened again. A few hours later I tweeted another gif of a more complex squid level (below) and then Zack Bell retweeted that. Mental.
Over the rest of the day (when I wasn't freaking out over how many twitter notifications I was getting) I made several other levels (and tweeted a couple). I realised that I had been right when I mentioned having crabs reduce your line length after you catch them; this proved to be an extremely useful way for me to design levels where creatures have to be caught in a specific order. There's even a level that just has 5 crabs at various distances. It all ties back into that idea of everything having multiple interactions, some positive and some negative. Which is why it ended up being very difficult to create levels with squid alongside other sea creatures; the squid only have one interaction (they leave an impassable ink trail) and it's a strictly negative one (limiting movement). There's never any benefit from having caught a squid other than the fact you caught it. Because of this it is literally never the best strategy to do anything with squid until you've already caught everything else you possibly can.
I really like the squid ink mechanic and the levels I created with it. But if I continue working on this game post-jam, squid are going to need something positive. There could be something that you actually want to block using ink (a shark, perhaps). Or ink could be somewhat similar to debris in that the hook can pass through it but creatures can't, meaning squid would become a way to dynamically create places where you can intentionally drop creatures after moving them. Or squid could start inking from the first square they move to, not the square they start on; this would mean that a squid could be blocking something and by moving it you clear that space, but you also block off another 5 next to it (the problem with this is that I'd probably have to redesign the existing squid puzzles). Not sure yet, but they need something, something to make it worthwhile to move a squid while there are other creatures still available.
By the end of the day I had 10 puzzles of varying difficulty. I'm quite proud of them, and 10 seemed like a good number to release with. I added an in-game level select menu with live preview, which also tracks which levels you've completed (the numbers go green). Sadly I didn't have time to do actual save data, but you have full access to all the levels immediately so you don't really lose anything by leaving and coming back. That would definitely be on the post-jam todo list, as well as more levels, more mechanics, better/more graphics (I'm looking at you, fisherman), a title screen and logo, sound effects and music. It's a big todo list, but I do really like this game and the reception has been fantastic, so hopefully I'll find the motivation. This is already the biggest, best and most complete game I've made. I'd like to turn it into something even more special.
