Shoal by Kerdelos
Hello there !
Welcome to Shoal, a small and peaceful scoring game where you control a shoal of endangered fishes ! Try to survive as long as possible and avoid the dangers of the river ! Get along the flow, close your eyes (don't.) and enjoy a small trip outside in the wild.

Controls are quite easy, arrow keys or WASD to move, space to split in two shoals and avoid obstacles!

Can you beat the current highscore by @ausstein?

We'll keep this description updated with the name and the score of the best players (yeah I know that's a really cheap leaderboard).
Team: @Kerdelos: graphics @Shadocalex, @Erilhir, @Tyrannas: code @Tyrannas: music and sounds
Credits to mixkit.co/ for the free river sound.
| Link | https://kerdelos.itch.io/shoal |
| Source Code | https://github.com/get-shwifty/LD50 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/shoal |
Ratings
| Overall | 91th | 4.094⭐ | 114🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 153th | 3.923⭐ | 113🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 157th | 3.873⭐ | 112🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 536th | 3.795⭐ | 112🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 171th | 4.339⭐ | 114🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 132th | 4.009⭐ | 114🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 95th | 4.201⭐ | 114🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 36🗳️ | 67🗨️ |
Controlling the group of fish feel pretty natural and smooth. Losing a fish never feel nice (of course) because it feels they get stuck on tiny corner.
Overall a really great game. very inspiring.
The game is really good, i like the procedural generation of levels/obstacles. Not sure if it's just choosing from pre-made segments, but doesn't seem too repetitive, so I'd say it works really well. The graphics and sound create an awesome mood, I really like the slow and calm voice of a fisherman, only wish it had more variety (more sounds to choose from when a fisherman catches you). The mechanics could maybe use some tweaking - I'd try lowering the scrolling speed and fish speed, at least in the beginning of run and maybe speeding it up later (?). Not sure how it would impact the game, it would need to be checked, but the gameplay seemed quite chaotic, which isn't bad on it's own, but for me it clashed with the generally calm mood of the game.
Overall you did an awesome job, it's enjoyable to play and looks and feels good.
The scrolling speed is speeding up (from 60 to 180 pixels/s). Before the end of the ludum it was slower but each game was very long, so now you arrive in difficulty quickly (the max speed is reached at distance 1500). And yes it is premade segments with randomness.
Also, I got to 22 fishes :D
It's so pretty and peaceful.
The music and graphics fit perfectly together and the concept is great as well.
What is the fish sound? I kinda like hearing it.
At first I was confused with the fish splitting.
I thought I have to hold down the button so when I tried it out I was confused why their all going in different directions.
But later I realised.
Great game :)
I will get back to this again after the jam/my rating period.
Great work, thank you for sharing!
Then it got faster and faster, I kept losing and gaining fish, and eventually all of them ended up stuck on some rocks and died...
Fun times all around! :laughing:
(Great work!)
Gets boring already after the first attempt.
My highest scores:
19 fish, 999 distance, 7800 score
25 fish, 693 distance, 10100 score
36 fish, 1013 distance, 15099 score
Some points of confusion for me:
There's a screen where the autoscrolling stops and I wasnt sure if it was a game over but it resumed a bit later. At around 900 distance I still had healthy fish but the autoscroller went a bit faster than me and it counted as game over. I guess in that case I need to press Up more. Some of the round rocks were stickier than I expected, where I thought fish would slide around them but they got totally stuck.
For the rocks, as I said to someone else, we wanted it to be a bit challenging, fishes that hit rocks are getting locked for a very short time (which is not the case for river borders) but it’s enough to be quite punitive in the endgame !
Overall really nice.
Excellent game. Visually and audibly, it's just perfect. I like to relax in the game.
I feel sorry for the fishes though :(
Nice job!
Thank you for your game!
On my very first attempt I've managed to jump over to the land and "swimmed" there for some time, but went into a dead end and lost.
The only thing that's bothering me a little is when you get the same course segment again and again several times in a row, especially if it's a pause segment. Would love to see less randomness there.
36500 on the horizon :)
Wow @ausstein !! great job, I myself couldnt get above 30k yet !
That was close :(
Did it !!!!
Chainsaw Cheerz!


-Tim
Managed to get a score of around 15000 during my few tries. Like others, I did not find the split functionality that useful in the gameplay itself, but it was a cool idea and fun feature.
Very good game all-around.
Excellent!
Relexing, fun casual game.
Some more map tiles would be great. I did a score about 15.000 :-)
I loved the fish animations, very smooth but still pixel arty. The gameplay mechanic is very simple but works unremarkable well, the idea of controlling a school of fish makes the gameplay very interesting, great game :)
I like the calm and charming graphics. The audio and sounds mix well together.
I don't know when splitting become useful actually, but it was fun dodging all of those fishermen (with funny sound effects).
I don't know if it suit really well the theme but it was a lovely time for me, nice job !
The presentation is great, with lots of graphical touches and the harrowing waterfall rocks that slowed you down. Touching a pack of fish felt *fantastic*. Personally it was hard for me to get more than say, 15 fish, but over time I just expected that to be the case.
I was pretty incentivized to get my little swarm growing and getting far. Only got 25 fish though unlike some pros here. A failed split attempt cost me dearly!
Great animated title logo btw :)
The only real complaint is that I wish there was more variety in the procedural generation of the river paths. From what I could tell, there was about 10 different environment chunks that would get selected at random for this game, and with the fast screen pan speed, it resulted in a game that the feeling of going into unknown environments quickly.
Regardless, what is here is really solid. Nice work, guys! I managed to get a max of 34 fish.

@proxy-games You are completely right. We didn't have time to work more on the level design. And yes there are no more than 10 chunks chosen almost randomly. A post-LD version will be available to fix that!
Lovely little game that has a simple mechanic which was nicely introduced in the first few seconds of the game. Im glad the music was very chill when things started to speed up and get hectic as well as the short stops to take a little breather (even if youre trying to dodge bigger fish haha). It would be nice if it kept your overall high score. I also like the little school of fish inscoproated into the logo 🐟
Controlling a group of things is an interesting idea like said above. It also fits a little more with the theme as it's the inevitable disparition of this fish species.
One of the few games I've given 5 stars on everything.
I really love the art, the music, and the general mood of it all.
The gameplay struck a fantastic balance between feeling relaxed and laid-back, while still having a sense of danger and tension.
My only complaint is that the stage felt a little repetitive after a while, but otherwise this was brilliant.

> It’s a kind of bossfight area. We didn’t have the time to put some effects or dark music to help understanding that.
i'm really impressed with how all the level pieces come together, it feels very organic.
i think i hit the "boss fight" area you just mentioned, where the screen paused and there were several sharks, before it really sped up again. i think that's a cool mechanic to have, but it was really confusing to me when it happened. maybe having a countdown timer some sort of visual indicator that this area is special would help. also, the second level is crazy fast and difficult! i died so quickly, heheh. i think a slower curve up would be nice, it felt kind of jarring to the atmosphere of the game for it to suddenly become so much more difficult.
i had one run where i was absolutely showered with new schools of fish, and then the following run was extremely sparse, so i think a good refinement would be to control the randomness a bit.
also, i appreciate that sometimes there are bonus schools of fish in the outlet or sidepath streams, but i felt like, since most of them are just deadend deathtraps, it was never worth trying to go into one to get more fish.
