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I hadn't even noticed those cheats. Thanks! I don't think itch supports spoiler tags, so I don't wanna say too much in the reviews, but it involved doing a manual on a slope, and I was able to cheese my way out by taking the slope backwards.

I believe I'm most of the way through the game, and so far, the only time I haven't been having fun is when a late mission asks me to use a trick I've been ignoring all game long. I'm not sure if the ideal solution would have been to have us use the trick more in the early game, or not to require it at all, but either way, I'm now struggling to do my least-practiced thing up my least favorite obstacle.

I'm confident it'll be right back to fun when I clear it.

edit: I was right. Cleared it, straight back to fun.

Edit: After coming back to play with a gamepad, I have discovered so many game design sins in the first few minutes that I'm completely turned off. Lengthy, unskippable dialogue, how to replenish your potions is not explained. The first time I returned to the sanctuary and exited, my progress was not saved; this time, I played until I had explored the whole lower section to dead ends, returned to the sanctuary, was presented with the character progression menu, and still can't tell if my progress was saved. I'm not sure if I was supposed to die back there to trigger something, or what. I'm also not sure if I'll ever launch this game again. Nice idea, gorgeous graphics, save your money.

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I'm certain I'll be back to play this game with a gamepad, but the first moments were very off-putting for someone who wasn't expecting the default controls (and might have been off-putting regardless.) You begin the game with the menus disabled, dropped into a gorgeous hand-drawn environment where your character is trudging, slowly and against the wind, through desert sands. After a moment, you realize the only button at your disposal is the right arrow, so you hold it for what I think was about 30 seconds, watching your character trudge and trudge through an empty landscape, before you get a brief eldritch animation and access to the menu.

Now that I have access to the menu, I see that rebinding the movement keys to WASD would require me to also rebind some other functions, already bound to those buttons, but I don't know what those functions are because (as the menu helpfully informs me) I haven't unlocked them yet.

I am annoyed enough to put this aside for a while, and return to it with a gamepad later. Everybody else seems to have enjoyed it enough that I'm confident I will, as well, but not with the keyboard setup and not right after that introduction.

fwiw, I've just been playing through the Itch client on Arch (which afaik just launches wine, so I didn't even need Proton)

Well, elsewhere in the Pacific time zone, it was 9:04 when you posted that. You know there's a timestamp, yes?

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.

Thanks for reviewing!

It's an LG that came with a prepaid contract, L322DL. Super low spec device.

Workaround: install with the Itch launcher, which lets you specify library folders.

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.

When it was working, you'd eat fish just by swimming up to your prey, and *chomp* that's it! Same with getting eaten yourself.

Indeed, it still works that way. I just broke it badly enough that you can't see it happening.

Thanks for mentioning the art! I'm really impressed with our artists.

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.

Please enjoy Fishing for Love!