Fishy Business - GMTK Game Jam 2024 Devlog

Wow, this Game Jam was a doozy for me. From using a brand new engine that I had only toyed around with to having my Saturday and most of Sunday taken up by moving a family member into college, it was full of challenges.

This is my first game made with the Godot 4 Engine and I have got to say it was an absolute pleasure! Signals are amazing and the visual editor makes the tedious assigning of textures and variables a breeze! I really did not hit any roadblocks other than time constraints while working on Fishy Business and I am very pleased with how it turned out!

So, let's hop into the Postmortem of my GMTK Game Jam 2024 experience:

Topic Release: 

• When the topic was released, I was literally overflowing with ideas. My friends and I had a Discord channel where we were trying to extract every bit of meaning from "Built to Scale".  We started with the suggested Katamari ideas and quickly started to get into the weeds of what each word could mean. We had so many ideas so here are a few: a set of numbers, a set of musical notes, fish or reptile scales, mineral scale on pipes or surfaces, the oxidized layer of iron when smithing, or we went as far as to even consider the Libra star sign because their symbol is a Scale. Needless to say I was lost in the abundance of potential awesome games.

Brainstorming:

• At first I was going down the path of wanting to make a Highway Weigh Station Simulator or a game where you are a Nanobot built to rid the walls of insects and getting bigger with each boss kill, but I decided on making a Gameboy like Retro feel game about a man who loves to fish. I was really inspired by Warioware for some reason and wanted to make a progressive (aka scaling) game that would be fun to compete to reach hiscores.

Mechanics:

• I was pretty set on the mechanics from the start. I decided that you would use the arrow keys to preform certain actions in the game. 
• The first game was inspired by the Stratagem simulator in HellDivers 2 and DDR except instead of raining death or sick dance moves, I pulled up fish, treasure, and garbage from the ocean!
• The second game's mechanic ideas were changed many times before the implementation but I ran short on time and did another key queue system. Each catch type would have it's own set of actions required to process them and if you mix them up, game over. You have ruined your catch. :(

What got cut from the game:

• A third mini-game where you sell the fish utilizing a set of scales to weigh the fish and select the correct cost by balance it with coins.
• Additional Bonus Features when you hit point milestones. I am not sure what else I could have added in the limited time but I would have at least liked one at 100 points and 1000 points.
• Volume Slider in Options. This was due to me adding the functionality of the Options at the last minute.
• Online Hiscore Leaderboard. I looked into doing this but it would have taken time away from making the second game and the catalogue sadly.

What I wished I did differently:

• The "Speed UP" screen should really be "Difficulty UP" since I changed the games to number of catches instead of a timer.
• More variation of games. Since both use the arrow keys in the same way, it does get repetitive at points. I hope that the random nature of the types of fish you catch makes up for it.
• Better Catalogue UI. I ran out of time to make it an actual selection page and just put clear buttons over the sprites so that it at least worked.

Art:

• I decided on making a retro handheld game feel to the game so I picked up a Gameboy 6 color palette as I wanted to challenge myself to make something that looked like it belonged on the Gameboy. I created most of the art for the game before I started coding it, and honestly I prefer making art first so I can get the overall feel for the game early on. It tends to steer me in better and more refined directions from the start rather then messy prototyping that I get lost in easily.

Sound:  

• I used jsfxr for all the sound effects and Beepbox for the Intro and Gameover jingles.

Story:  

• I would have loved some deep lore for this game but not everything can be deep or epic, mundane is just fine. You play as a man named Sid who loves to fish.

Overall Experience: 

• I really enjoyed making a Full release game with the features and style I wanted. I am extremely proud with how it looks and satisfied with the gameplay loop. For my next Jam, I am going to choose one that I have more free time because grinding away at this one from 9pm to sometimes 4am was not the funnest thing to do LOL

I hope you all like the game and had fun making some games for the Jam!