itch.io

LOL 😂 Thank you so much for playing!
Yeaaah, the reason ultimately comes down to time 😅 We had a lot planned, and the dimensions of the crab were never meant for this particular use case! If you look in our GDD, you can see that this is essentially a more a fleshed out version of just one minigame that was meant to be developed. We actually discussed the possibility of limiting the aspect ratio to be shorter, to help alleviate the problem, but we went with 16:9 to minimize unexpected complications so close to the deadline. When discussing shortening the aspect ratio, we also imagined that each type of fish would have different movement patterns. Without them, though, a shorter aspect ratio would have also meant a less interesting spread of game elements, as all the fish would be funneled through a narrow corridor.
However, one of the last changes we did implement was ensuring that the special fish (the Goldfish [+5] and Irradiated fish [-1]) were always in reach, if only barely!
At the end of the day, when considering time constraints and the challenges we faced leading up to this v1.0, this felt like a good compromise, as at least the fish you couldn't reach didn't feel like missing out on the "good" stuff, and looked better from a population stand point.