The game suffers greatly for a lack of completed levels, but *this* failure to communicate is down to the lack of instructions or a tutorial.
The sky is the clock. You have until dark to get home. Sadly, I don't think there are enough levels to exhaust the time limit unless you play on "hard." Hence, most players won't notice much change.
Regardless, we are feeling the consequences of the level situation all over. One of our teammates suggested that we designate a level designer next time around who can work all jam through. Wise, I think.
I like the visuals a lot, and I'm looking forward to trying it again on desktop, but it seems like the solution to the second level is to time the moving obstacle, and I can't get the timing on a weak Android device.
Fishing for Love programmer speaking! This is the main, severe bug that arose during my-VCSpocalypse panic. When that happens, you have been eaten. This is *supposed* to reduce your size, so that you can match a mate who starts the game smaller than you (or get smaller, if you've grown in the process of acquiring traits.)
However, the replacement player model is incorrectly generated, and misplaced with respect to the player controller and camera. At times, you can just barely tell that you *do* have a fish, but it's the wrong fish, and you can only see it from certain camera angles.
We'll be finishing the game, and a complete overhaul of the eating/getting eaten mechanics code is my first job.
Thanks for reporting that. I hadn't noticed that was broken. We didn't put a mesh collider on the ground, but I thought it would stop you from going below a certain Y value.
Thanks! It was cool to see somebody else checking it out. You actually didn't encounter the severe bug that ruined the whole thing =P
If you had yourself been eaten, which happens a lot, it would have bugged out, and you'd have been an invisible fish swimming around with a ghost fish attached to you. It didn't make it into the instructions, but one of the things that mutates (invisibly) is your size. Fish can only eat fish smaller than themselves (unless they're as small as they get, in which case they eat fish their own size.) The trick is this: if you're bigger than your mate, you have to get smaller, so getting eaten makes you smaller! (Unless you're already small, in which case it's game over.)
This makes it kind of a rotating process, where you have to manage the acquisition of attributes against the fact that you'll also have to manage your size. Shame it all bugged out before the deadline, but it'll get bugfixes *apart* from the jam.
I'm the programmer on this, and I feel a word of warning is due: our VCS betrayed us, I had to spend several hours repairing things, and crunch set in. Hence, you can check out our awesome level, swim around, and enjoy the glorious generated fish! And please do so. Our artists did phenomenal work.
Indeed, the first portion of the project, I'm quite proud of! That's what you're going to see when you first start playing. Actual gameplay was about 50% done when I went full panicked-programmer, and now it's more like 20%.
I wanted to mention this because Jordan (visual art) and Zach (music) worked very well under a tight deadline, and produced what I think are excellent results. I'm very frustrated with myself, our tools, and our lack of foresight regarding those tools, because if we'd had just a few more hours, we could've finished this game. As it stands, you can only see what it's gonna be, when I can sit down and whiteboard the broken parts, and write them properly.
I'm still satisfied with what we were able to accomplish in only two days. I just want to make sure everybody knows it's my fault that it bugs early, especially because the game has Jordan's name on it, and he absolutely should not be blamed for the state of the code.
