Hi everyone, we’re Cosmic Adventure Squad and we’ve been doing game jams for over 10 years! You may have seen or played some of our previous games such as Deepest Sword and Game Name. We’ve been asked by a few people to share some of our processes and thoughts for how we made It Was All For The Tuna, our LD52 entry.

It Was All For The Tuna is a chill fishing game where you play as Toro the cat and you’re tasked with catching Tuna to feed the citizens of NekoTuna.

Play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/it-was-all-for-the-tuna

This is part 2 of a 3 part post-mortem taking a look at how we approached developing the game. In this part I’ll be talking about the art and modeling. Thank you for reading, please leave a comment if you found this informative or helpful!

You can find part 1 here!

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Art

I have to admit I was one of the people who disliked the theme going in; I wasn’t excited about making a bunch of vegetables and dirt! Fortunately we brainstormed several interesting ideas such as a castle defender where you harvested skeletons from enemy knights, an AI that harvested user data by solving captchas, and finally a game about harvesting fish. We unanimously agreed on the fishing game, primarily because it reminded us of a manga one-shot called “It Was All For The Tuna” (where we also got the name idea from)!

Concepts

I started with a quick, 10-second sketch to ensure the team is on the same page with the same general vision. The final game ended up looking not too far off from the sketch, including the cat in the boat, fish silhouettes, and minimap/radar!

Next I made a moodboard to help inform and inspire the final look of the game. We took some lighting and shading inspiration from A Short Hike for the relaxing first half of the game, while the environment would gradually become more dark and moody as the environmental damage started building up.

As part of my continued research, I decided to dive a bit into different tuna species, their conservation statuses, and their general usage as a food source. I initially wanted an encyclopedia of your caught fish to show some facts about each type of tuna. For example, The Southern Bluefin Tuna, which can grow up to 8 ft long and weigh up to 570 lbs, is on the brink of extinction due to overfishing for sushi and sashimi. Many other species of tuna are fished in unsustainable methods and can go extinct if we don’t change our eating habits. Very difficult to hear for a sushi connoisseur :slight_frown:.

Look and Feel

Now onto the game screens! I painted a quick idea for the start screen first to start getting into the mindset and color schemes for the two game sections.

My typical next step is to draw up a concept image that represents the main gameplay to help influence the music. However, I couldn’t quite grasp the feel I wanted so we swapped up our usual steps – this time Tenki created a quick music sketch first which then inspired this image and set the tone for the gameplay. This image ended up being used as the cover image on both the Itch and LDjam pages!

Day 2, Saturday, began with me needing a refresher on what all was needed in terms of art, so I made a quick storyboard showing what some of the major mechanics could be: a radar, boat and rod upgrades, NPCs, multiple towns, tuna stats, gradual pollution, and a dark, depressing ending. Now I could list out all assets, their priorities, and get to work.

Models

At the beginning I was debating between making 2D or 3D art for this game, on the one hand, I was quicker with 2D, but on the other hand I wanted to practice some 3D. After some discussion with Strega we felt that 3D would allow for more experimentation with shaders and terrain generation. So I gave myself simple tasks for Saturday to just model a tuna, a boat, and the cat – as I hadn’t used Maya since LD47. I quickly painted some top, side, and front views to load into Maya as image planes for reference, and started modeling.

My first model is the tuna. I underestimated just how long it takes to model organic shapes from scratch, and struggled to remember all of the tools and techniques. I was able to skip the UV unwrapping and texture painting steps by utilizing vertex face colors and assigning materials per face. It also achieved the poster-like style I imagined in my sketches.

Animation however, was a whole different beast. I remembered how to make a basic skeleton and skin, but thought I’d be clever and use a fun sine deformer to get this smooth fish wiggle. Unfortunately, Unity doesn’t support deformers! So I spent hours looking for a solution (probably could have just hand-animated it in the same amount of time) and found a workaround posted on the Polycount Forums which involved applying the deformer onto rivets placed on a thin rectangle above the fish and using constraints to have them correspond to certain joints on the fish… And it worked. Now I have an animated tuna!

Next is the cat, Toro. I absolutely loved modeling and animating them, and I made sure to keep the geometry simple this time. And no fancy deformers for the animation either.

And lastly, the boat. With each successive model I spent less and less time modeling. These models were going to be fairly small on the screen and there were other art tasks that needed to be done. I exported all three as FBXs and checked them into the Unity project for Strega to hook up.

Yeah, just these three models for day 2. I started the third day, Sunday, scrambling to get variations on tuna as well as all the upgrade levels for the boat modeled.

For the various tuna, I originally planned to keep the tuna species accurate to reality and include some flavor text about each one’s conservation status, but that was out of scope, so instead I had three real species (blackfin, yellowfin, and bluefin) and a few fictional ones (peep the Cosmo and Wanda reference heh).

There was also a brief point where we thought, “what if you can purchase growth hormones for the tuna, which causes them to gradually evolve more and more grotesque” and here was the sketch that came out of that idea. That would have changed the mood completely!

So back to the model, I simply swapped out one of the materials assigned to the fins/stripe to create each of the species, and had them gradually increase in size for the rarer species. Done!

For the boat upgrades, I went a different route. The models, inspired by fishing vessels such as dinghies, catamarans, and trawlers, would all share a similar shape and add on additional basic geometry: center units, smokestacks, and life rings. Overall no more than a couple hours for these.

Polish

It was down to the last 24 hours and there was still so much art to do! I did some lazy kitbashing to slap together towns and their upgrades. Each of the 4 town levels were built with these 7 pieces, which themselves were mostly basic primitives and some extrusions. I really wanted them to feel like a gradual evolution from a small rural Japanese village to an industrial complex, showing technological advancement from the tuna trade. There were going to be some particle effects to show smoke coming from the smokestacks and pollution flowing from the pipes into the ocean, but we ended up cutting this part of the story due to time.

Fortunately the UI needs were fairly minimal this time. I made a simple scroll texture for text boxes and buttons, a tuna cutlet in both 2D and 3D to indicate your tuna currency, an NPC for tutorial dialog, and found a fun font called “Cutesy” by Arty Crumbs.

Now that most of the core art assets were done, I wanted to tweak Strega’s water and ripple shaders to meet the color scheme and mood I set in the beginning. Strega had also set up a terrain shader with one or two test islands, but I was tasked with creating the whole game world itself. I did find this neat online map generator to give some inspiration for edge shapes and island distribution. I then filled in terrain coloration for sand, grass, mountains (with simple repeating textures on each) and some smaller islands here and there to break up any monotony. While doing this I placed clusters of tuna around the map in a natural distribution based on proximity to the starting island; 100 blackfin tuna near the start, 60 greenfin a little outside of that, 40 pinkfin, 25 yellowfin, 10 bluefin, and finally 5 elusive godfin in the farthest reaches of the map. I worked on this well through Sunday night, only resting for a couple hours in the AM.

I didn’t end up getting much sleep Sunday night, as I wanted to have all of the terrain and fish distribution throughout the world ready before Strega woke up. On Monday in the wee hours before submission, there was some art downtime so I put together a little map with some town names generated by ChatGPT. This map isn’t in the game, but I felt it added to the lore!

Last but not least, in an effort to at least have some of the original message of ecological collapse due to tuna depletion, I painted a sad end screen to really bring it home-- well you're going to have to play it to see!

~ Ouroborose