Okay the title sucks but I invented it as I was drawing it for the main screen. Since it was an image I was too lazy to change it later.

The game was made with ruby 1.9 (very cool language) and gosu (very cool hardware accelerated library). I personnaly think it is a much better alternative to python/pygame mostly because its faster (forget about doing side scrollers with only pygame).

So, first LD for me (but who cares). I decided not to make an engine from scratch to be faster, so I used mine. I needed to make some improvements , like for example , the introduction of water.

But it took much more time than I tought. And the final result is far from being polished. I think a game like this requires too much polishing because there is some kind of physics , AI and a gameplay to balance.
My next game will be something more predictable. I plan to make an adaptation of a board game. It will be turn based and won’t need drawing skills of death to do something okay.

About the gameplay of the game :

The idea was to make something between “evo the quest for earth” and “super mario” but more nervous, a la “sonic”.

For the aquatic part , you’ll have noticed that the bite attack is pretty useless , because you can’t hit without being hit. In evo your caracter can attack farther than the size of its body. I could have changed it but that would have been too strange that your enemies have a much shorter attack range. And the idea was to make the aquatic part depends of what you do on land. So I introduced the bonus (things you can throw at your enemies while in water). They encourage exploration.
But you can attack the jellyfishes.

The land crushing attack is not working so well because enemies often have the time to attack you before being crushed. You really need to land straight on them , in spite of my effort to increase the size of your hitbox when you are crushing something.

The game seems to be very hard , but it’s on purpose : Without the fast brown fishes , you wouldn’t have to be creative and find a way to progress. This makes the game less linear.
The most obvious way to beat the fishes is collecting items.
You can also jump on them by doing an exploit that consists of taking speed by going down then moving up and jumping out of the water , as they are down (see the videos).
You can stick very close to the spikes so they die trying to get you , like in this picture :

Theses “features” were not really done on purpose , but they add something to the game.

REMINDER – Level 2 walktrougth : http://www.youtube.com/user/Ickylevel#p/a/u/2/vI5h5vlD0KE