Always great to see more retro console games in Ludum Dare!

I quite liked the graphics, and the idea incorporated the theme pretty well. I also liked how you used the palette to show how deep into the water you got. I also liked how you used a and b to punch in opposing directions. (Though calling this out explicitly in the description might be good! It seemed random at first) The intro and ending graphics are also quite nice.

I always try to give some constructive feedback, so I'll give a little. This was a pretty tough game - the hitboxes on the fish seemed a little big, and I could swear I punched a few fish that got me. (btw, the idea of a worm punching fish is fantastic!) I'll be honest, I ended up resorting to VBA's rewind feature to finally beat it. That said, I did beat it!

I hope you're able to continue with this to make it the game you envisioned. Thanks for a fun game.

Hey, thank you for the feedback! I will finish it.

The fish are random, btw. They are spawning randomly at the bottom - max 5 at the time on screen - and randomly swimming left and right. They float, but sometimes, can hover. Even can change speed for a short time. And they get attracted by Wigly when close enough.

Not sure what's with the smack collision test, it's a simple AABB test with the flinging tail area and the whole fish (excluding fins).
When the fish catch you, it's a collision between the worm's head and the fish's mouth area.
Will check it.

There are too much hacks at the moment everywhere to worry about bugs. Next up is cleaning and weeding out. There is also a half implemented power up in there, what's got out last second 'cause couldn't find where it failed - probably tiredness. That was meant to be the way to kill deeper level fishes..

All spawning and moving is tweakable though.

Thanks again for the rate and feedback!

Cool game, the cartoony pixel art was real nice and it's cool to see a GBA game here. The gameplay felt pretty solid apart from the hitboxes.

A little weird but its fun ! good job

Zany concept, fun game, like the retro visuals

The best part is that it was made for the GameBoy Advance. Gonna take a look at the source and maybe try to make a GBA game in my free time :P

Nice little game! Funny simple graphics.

Some remarks:
1. Smash needs more range or fish need less range to eat you.
2. Game lacks of indication of progress. Expectation: score shows how many fish you smashed or how deep you are.

Interesting entry!

@gnevesdev: oh, please don't! :) I have literally vomited hacks and bad code everywhere in the last 5 hours. Will clean it up next week.

@retrome: Man, I don't know what happened with the fish. :) Hitboxes should be fine, and the smash move checked before the nom nom.
Having the score on the hud is something I forgot, yes. Sorry! Point like 1 per frame, 100 for blue, 250 for yellow and 500 for red fish.


I beat it. :) Pretty awesome that you were able to make a gba game - this is the first LD game I've ever played that is a GBA game. It would be nice to provide links to an emulator that you recommend for people who don't already have one.

It's pretty easy to fudge the game by sitting at the top of the screen and avoiding the fish. The later fish were too sporadic to bother trying to attack with the small attack hitbox. I also couldn't tell my score from the illegible text on the main menu (one of the characters was an "r"?).

Btw, it's cool to see a demoscener participating in LD :) Curious to see what you come up with next.

@maple Thanks for playing! Feels nice to hear some try to actually beat the game. :smile: Was worth to go super haste mode and add an ending. At first, I only wanted a blank screen with a "Congrats!" text, but then I drew that pic instead. (Idea was to make disappointment with the win screen and because you dieing a lot, the death screen needs to be entertaining.)

Yeah, the text is unreadable. Originally it was in the right bottom part, where it looked ok. Then In the last some minutes I realized I have never gave a name to the damned thing. So I added the name in the title screen and then the text needed to move.

As for the emulator suggestion, there is a link to mGBA on the GitHub page. Probably need to add it here and to the release description text also.

Well done! Graphics look nice.

That's an interesting concept :D I love to see people creating games for GBA or GB good job :) (The game is fun BTW)

A nice simple little game, but impressive that you made it for GBA! I'm inspired to try making a GBA game myself some day. Great job!

Woaw, cool to see a GBA game!
As a fellow homebrew developer (never done the GBA yet, but I did try the SNES in a previous LD) i always love to discover new LD games for old consoles :).

As for the game itself the idea is cool and the graphics are great, but the game is way too challenging for me in it's current state! It's very hard to punch those fishes, as they move fast and the punch doesn't have a lot of range.

As mentioned above, if you can add the score on GUI during gameplay that would be cool too :)

Anyway, congrats on such an achievement in limited time, and I'm really looking forward the more complete version for the GBAJam! :)