This is nuts! I have not had such fun in a long time! Seriously, this game starts slowly, but it breaks in like a mad fully realized helicopter. I did not understand what I was supposed to do at first (I did not read the briefing, obviously), I probably pressed something standing above a fish piece and the game started. Once it struck me what was happening in actuality, I could not stop laughing with joy. The game is an incredible fun and it carries over some old days 8bit vibe.
At first I did not like the music, but once I understood what was happening, or felt what was approaching, it turned out clear the soundtrack works about perfectly, so I take it back, the soundtrack is great, too.
Cool game, thank you, guys!

Clicked because of the title that reminded me of Splatoon, but instead got this wonderful pun with fish soup. The premise is funny, the theme is promising and I really dig the music with the cat sounds. Maybe it's because of my greedy-ish playstyle that didn't get me that far however. My highscore was 4 soups with I think 34 fish, at which point an army of crazed cats chased me down, only to be outrun with sprint which eventually wasn't enough for me to keep up. The theme fits pretty well, but maybe have the enemy cats not chasing you after you delivered the fish? That way you can keep them on screen while you look for a quick oppertunity to grab more, but as I said again, that could be because of my hoggish playstyle. My cat-death was inevitable once I gathered too much fish.

I can see a lot of work was put in towards the presentation of this game.

The pickup key seemed mostly redundant for some reason? The sprinting mechanics are a little odd too.

It wasn't too difficult to avoid the other cats. Perhaps there could have been more encouragement for the player to enter into a dangerous situation, or have a less predictable opponent.

Overall, good job!

@emmitt
Glad you really liked our game this much man, things indeed go pretty nuts when you get a lot of fish, but didn't expect the madness to ramp up like "a mad fully realized helicopter" to be honest :D
We did our best to make the game as fun as we could so really thank you for giving it a try and giving your feedback :)

@meneer-gus
Funny thing is that we didn't even think splatoon as an inspiration but i guess it has some similarities XD
don't worry about yourplaystyle though, you get more points if you hoard more soup so it's ok thanks for ginig our game a shot !

@kernel-panic
As always during LD we did the best we could on all aspects, glad you liked the presentation though ^^ the pickup key is in fact there just for the 1st fish you take, it sort of activates the "alert mode" for the spawning cats on the level, once you picked up your first, you don't need to press it everytime the AI was supposed to be a bit more complex but we just had to simplify it for time's sake, but we'll try to improve it. Thanks for trying out our game and for your feedback :)

It's a fun little game with some nice art

@sylver-kovy
Thanks dude :)

Liked the art and music. Missed a little ingame tutorial or To do list.

Came for cats found a lot of them. :)

Graphics: Nice art style, I really like your cats. However, your ingame cats look from the top down perspective a little bit weird especially if you turn your character.

Music and sound: I think they are well matched and the level music fits very good to your general atmosphere. It felt like I was playing some good old retro game. :) I also like how the level music progresses with the time and becomes hectic.

Enemies: As already said, the enemies felt a little bit slow in my opinion and gave me the feeling that they weren't scary at all, since you could easily dodge them. Maybe it would have been good to have multiple types of enemies. Some who move faster or some which chase you for a certain limited time regardless if they in the alert range or not. I liked the exclamation mark on the enemies, though. Remembered me of good old Metal Gear Solid. ^^

All in all a solid fun well polished game. Keep up the good work!

Great game overall!

I like that I can drag many cats behind me hahaha. Drifting cats is fun!

Solid entry, Nice job!

XD very good game and fun !!
Nice art, sound, gd and programming ! Though the cat sfx could have better designed and tought in terms of implementation ;-)
bravo les gars !! allez voir les potes français ;-) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/the-darkest-light

@fluffi
Thanks glad you liked em :) we wanted to have some sort of tutorial but didn't have time tu put it in game, so we put most of the instructions on the entry page itself.

@shito
Haha yeah if you come for cats the game surely doesn't dissapoint on that aspect XD

The top down perspective is indeed a bit weird for the sprites, but by the time i made the full animation and seen it in engine it was a bit too late to start over, better luck next time i guess :p really glad you liked the artstyle anyway ^^

I can't speak for @drafura but glad to see you liked his music :)

Enemies are indeed a bit slow, we didn't have that much time to balance out difficulty, and we first wanted to have some enemy variety, some of them even had their sprites ready but couldn't be implemented to meet the deadline :( but we had some in store, we had sort of these different cat gangs who had special enemies pop up from time to time, like a ninja cat that could turn himself invisible, but hey game jams XD With that said the cats hiding inside props and the exclamation mark when you're spotted are totally nods to MGS ^^ we just made them go "meow" because you know... they're cats :p

@cliff-lee-cl
Thanks man ! The funny thing is the drifting cats were sort of a glitch at first but the devs decided it could be fun to tweak it a bit and leave it there to get that impression that the enemies would skid around in sharp turns
the player was also supposed to but this wasn't kept because it affected gameplay too much :p

@josscomposer
Thanks dude, we did our best so it's always nice to see poeple like it ^^ the sfx were put almost at the end during crunchtime so that could explain why, there's also "meow" samples here and there in the music itself XD
En tout cas encore merci, ça fait toujours plaisir de voir d'autres Français dans la communauté LD :)

Pretty solid game.
Good interpretation of the theme. Well done.

It's like Keystone Cops, but with cats! :smile: Clever use of the theme, though I kinda assumed the circle in which cats can see you represented the smell of fish, and that after dropping the fish off, it would shrink again. I had flashbacks to the old top-down GTA, and wanted a way to lose my stars. :wink:

The cat sprites are pretty cool but like mentioned above (I agree with @shito on all his points), the perspective is a little weird. The game art seems to not really have a colour scheme, which is where you could clean the art up a little. Lots of grey on the streets too, which I am personally not a fan of.

I love the music, very oldschool. :smile:

Overall, a fun game to play!

@mr-madcat
Thanks i guess we got pretty inspired when brainstorming eventhough this wasn't the theme we hoped for :p

@flaterectomy
Well we more or less got inspired by GTA2 and older Metal Gear gameplay wise so yeah the circle is pretty much that so you get spotted easyier when you have more fish, it was initially supposed to reset every time you got back to the kitchen but we didn't had the time to implement that :(

Always nice to see people apreciate the art (despite the huge flaws like the perspective which was rightfully pointed out, but hey my fault i'll try doing better :p) i also tend to agree that there are not that many colours, maily cause i think the sidewalks were implemented pretty late and we had to assemble what we had ^^' but hey gamejams ! :)

As i said for the music can't speak for the author but i'm sure he apreciates ^^

Glad you had fun with the game overall even with its flaws, so thanks man :)

@kernel-panic & @shito Did you play on the web build version or the exe version? We're trying to pinpoint the "slow cats problem". We had this problem a lot with the exe version but it is a pretty rare occurence with the web build.

Over 8900 Points... miau! Liked the sound track and the game art. The game over screen is realy nice. And the game made me hungry, I am going to cook now^^.

I get it run around and pick fights / pick up fish. That works well. But why? Lots of work put in here. If you like cooking cats and fish then this is the game for you.

Awesome! I didn't do so well my first run through. But I got the hang of it. I really enjoyed the challenge. The art style is also really going somewhere. It reminds me of the old cartoon Swat Cats with a little Heathcliff mixed in.

Great job!

@rohezal
Thanks man glad you liked it ^^ hoping you don't get in a crazy chase when picking up your ingredients for your meal, but hey as long as you dont come across any cat gangs you'll be fine i guess XD

@arron-fowler
Yup on paper it seemed like a totally crazy premise for a game but that's why we went for it, and well people seem to have fun so that's nice :D not sure about cat cooks but people who like cats seem to have liked the game, so that's that XD

Well hope you liked it also :)

@twotwentyfour
Yeah we couldn't implement a tutorial to meet the deadline so we put as much info as we could on the page itself, agreed that the game may still not be crystal clear to understand on a first try though ^^'

Glad you liked the game once you got the hang of it ! And the artstyle as well, you guessed spot on for the inspirations, Swat Kats was one of my favorite cartoons back in the day so i guess it influenced my drawing style a bit :p and Heatcliff was clearly what i got inspired by when we settled on the whole "cat gangs fighting to get all the fish" thing it seemed to fit for a game based on chase at least :p

Allways nice to see people apreciate our entry so big thanks man :)

Nice work! Things did feel a little slow at first and I was a bit confused by the pickup key that only needed to be used once, but the pace of the game certainly accelerated as I ramped up my fish count. I got busted more than once because I overestimated my ability to grab those last couple fish. The soundtrack is very nice and fitting - I'm a little worried it's just going to be stuck in my head now. Also I loved how any of the random boxes and barrels in the scenery could potentially conceal an enemy cat. My highscore: 37124 points/ 40 fish / 4 bouillabaisses. Good work!

@ogma Sorry, for the late reply. I was playing the web version.

@Shito Thanks for the reply. :) Sorry to bother you again, but I didn't think about that the last time. On which browser did you play, and did you have the "Hardware acceleration" enabled? We're really puzzled by this bug. :/

Tons of fun! Didn't know what to do at first, so I picked up a fish and then suddenly some gangster cats started chasing me. If you get lots of fish, it gets quite tricky, so you really nailed the theme aswell. Great entry!

@Ogma No problem. :) I was playing on some older version of Firefox on my Laptop with Ubuntu 14.04 (64 bit). I am not sure if I had the hardware acceleration enabled or not. I just ran it with the new version of Firefox 57.0.1 and here I have the same observations.

I will describe the enemy behaviour a little bit, why I think it feels slow. Because I don't know if that it is the bug you are searching for or if that is maybe just my perception and in reality intended. ^^ The enemy sometimes only turn themselves first towards the main character, while not moving and only start moving after 3-4 sec. Sometimes they also immediate start to move towards you. However, in both patterns their movement speed seems quite slow, because it is maybe around 10% of the main characters normal movement speed, so you can easily outrun them.

@Shito The behavior you described is the bug we're trying to tackle, thanks again. :)

A cleaver take on the theme. I really like how the range-indicator grows as you collect more fish. Music is also very catchy.

Fish gets a bit sparse towards the end of the match. Maybe more fish could should "spawn" somehow.

https://youtu.be/1tM7iAp1Ygo

Great use of the theme! The radius that the cats spot you is the smell of the fish I suppose? A very fun game, good job!

Neat concept! I included it in my Ludum Dare 40 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtXXwu1asxI