Game Description

Genres mixed: Fishing/Fish Simulator + Horror

Premise: Don’t get caught by the net and become dinner.

What Went Well?

1. First Jam in 3D - This is our 3rd game jam as a team, and all our previous games used pixel art exclusively. We’ve only started doing 3D work in the past year, and the team turned out some amazing graphics.
2. Ambiance - The tank is suitably unsettling to exist in, and sits right where I wanted it between “oddly calming” and “indie horror” while the danger net is not in play. When the net DOES come down, it’s a wonderfully terrifying experience. Having our lead programmer dedicate a whole day to lighting and Shaders was well worth it.
3. Scope - I think we started with a really good appreciation for exactly how much we could get done. We knew going in that the team was losing almost all of Monday, that our Game Designer had a real job that needed attention throughout the weekend, and planned in advance to make this a more leisurely jam than our previous two. This was especially evident when, five hours to go, we had a brief talk of “Okay, so right now we have a really awesome horror tank simulator. Do we have time to make it a game? If not, that’s okay.”
4. Teamwork & Pipeline - At the end of the last two jams, our team was almost not friends anymore from the stress and panic. We tried to take ourselves less seriously this time, and it was well worth it. The last hour was full of cooperative handing of scripts and image files back and forth, rather than quiet resentment and waiting for the programmer to finish implementation of something we knew was a little broken. I think a lot of that is thanks to ensuring that every member had access to the Unity Build from the very beginning, rather than segregating our art team to pass assets to the Programmer to implement. Each jam we’ve done has helped our members individually refine their crafts, but I felt like this go-round we refined our pipeline, and got some much needed practice interfacing with other people.
5. Audio - I’m going to toot my own horn here. This was my first game where I really got to focus on sound design, and the sound came out perfect. I’ve watched several people’s faces pass through exactly the emotions I intended from ‘happy swimming’ to ‘what was that!?’ to ‘OH GOD IT’S RIGHT BEHIND ME’ https://youtu.be/iiIUhd8TzUk

What Didn’t Go Well?

1. The “Game” part of the game - At 5 hours to jam end, we had a really pretty fish tank, a character controller that didn’t suck, and fish that milled about on their own. There were paper pads of design notes for making it actually a game, but none of the scripting had been touched, largely due to our Game Designer needing to be on hand for other real-life issues. I’m still really proud of what we put out, knowing that it was closer to a 50 hour jam for us, but I also know that the “game” part never got implemented. There was supposed to be a fish food mechanic that drove the player to go explore the tank, to give you a marker of success, and a more dynamic interaction with fleeing the net.
2. Occupying our 2D artist - We have a wonderfully talented dedicated 2D sprite artist on our team. She painted some lovely textures for our fish and models, but all of her work relied on someone else having something finished to have her paint. I think this was the biggest hiccup in our pipeline, which I think is a vote in our favor.
3. Animations are hard - We had this fantastic cut scene planned with a beautiful soundscape, some delightfully horrific graphics, and a whole room for the Kitchen that would play when you are taken from the tank. No one on the team has done work like this before, and the whole thing had to get chopped (hah).
4. Audio Implementation - This is a personal frustration. Since our last Jam, I’ve spent some time trying to learn Unity and light scripting. While I’ve improved leaps and bounds, it wasn’t quite enough to be able to take control of managing and playing the sound effects I lovingly crafted. It meant I had to write detailed instructions to pass to our two programmers, and just... hope it came out well. I can’t play the game without being disappointed at the attack of a Sound Stab, or the balance of a bubble ambiance, or the too-abrupt-fade of a tension ring, or the failure of the damned bubble track to cut when the cleaver comes down. Our programmers did AMAZING work, and my audio nit-picks were so not the priority of the last hour, but I’m frustrated that I wasn’t able to make sure my work was well executed in the final product. Something for me to work on for next time.
5. Post-Mortems are Hard - No, seriously. I had a hard time populating “what went wrong”.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I’m really proud of the lovely terrible thing we created. This jam experience left me re-energized and ready to leap back in and make another, rather than burned and disappointed. I couldn’t be more proud of how far my team has come since our last entry. After the team gets a chance to sit and discuss what we can do better as a whole next time, I think I’ll make another of these posts revisiting my LD38: Atlantis postmortem.

I’m still sad some of our more off-the-wall concepts didn’t quite make it in. Evil Fish was my favorite character:

Play Our Game!

Game link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/off-the-hook