Part 1
By the way I used GameMaker Studio 2 :wink:

Design

Day 2 was the best day of the jam. I woke up refreshed, ate breakfast and got right to work by 6 AM.

I fleshed out the gameplay flow of my game: - Player must catch fish / defend self - Catching certain color fish would allow the cannon to shoot down certain color missiles - Arcade style = no ending, try to get the high score!

From then on the game design was made up as I went along! I quickly sketched some fish and missiles and prepared to color them in Photoshop, but because they were going to be so small on screen, I colored them in Paint.Net instead for efficiency.
Then I colored the boatman in Photoshop, using a brush I found that gives me some nice, patchy edges:
The reason he has no eyes is because the eyes are a separate sprite with a randomly timed blink animation, independent of the lever-pulling animation of the body.

I quickly threw together a scene, using camera code from my previous project, which re-scales the view to all screen sizes, and started writing the player code. Originally, WASD would control the boat and the arrow keys would control the cannon. This was a little to hard to play, though, so I thought about making it a two-player game (which would have been a lot of fun!). In single player mode, the cannon would auto-aim. I even started creating the code for it:

After creating the game controller object, which generates random fish as long as there are no more than 15 on screen, I drew the buoys to contain the player and remove the invisible wall effect. Then I added the waves and the up and down motion to all the objects.

I sketched a bunch more art and then went into creating the powerups: - Invincibility: 4 seconds of .5 alpha invincibility - Rainbow Cannon: 4 seconds of 'I think my cannon just got a Starman...' - Speed-boat: 4 seconds of double-speed on both horizontal boat movement and vertical hook movement. - Instant-catch: Reels the hook in instantly (in case you can't pull it in on time).

These are one of the few sets of powerups I was happy with in the first iteration (though there were some tweaks, of course).

I spent the better part of the afternoon polishing the programmatic animations and the boats on the left and right. I added Rudolfo on the right but left the left boat blank because I didn't have a character for it. By the end of the day, I had a nearly completed game with only a few bugs, but no points system or high scores list. That came on the worst day of the jam: Day 3.

You can play the game here.

• Post Mortem: Day III
• Code Breakdown
• Post Jam Post Mortem
• Conclusion