Good morning, Jammers!
Like fishing? Conservationism? Dodging missiles? Then you should play The Fat Man and the Sea!

My game has a global leader-board! Can you beat the highscore?
You can play it here. Fixed Linux version now available!
P.S. - I'll be playing games tonight. I don't want you to think I'm just trying to get ratings without giving them!

Relax and catch some multicolored fish in The Fat Man and the Sea, my LD41 entry! I'll be playing the games of everyone who reviews later on.


The Fat Man and the Sea
P.S. Pro tip! To create linked images, wrap your image shortcode in the link shortcode: [ ![image.jpg](///raw/9d5/2/z/1099e.jpg) ](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/you-know-its-a-game)

Save the fish in The Fat Man and the Sea. Post-mortem coming soon!

I'm sitting in my chair, breathing heavily. I press F5 for the millionth time, just in case the theme was announced a bit early, or the clock was a bit off. Three minutes to go.

I'm so excited, I have to go to the bathroom. But I rush it, and when I get back, there's two minutes remaining.

One minute.

Seconds.

It's time.

I slam F5 and the refresh button as hard as I possibly can and wait. And wait. And receive a timeout. 'Server crashed again!' I thought. Quickly I rush to Twitter. No news on Mike's page. No news on Ludum Dare's page. Refresh again. Then, finally, there's the theme.

And I hate it. For a moment. And a brilliant ideas blossoms in my head.

First impressions of the theme were not that great. I tried a lot of different methods to get inspiration, my most complicated of which was to find a random number generator, and generate two random dates. The genres of the first game I could find released on each date would be combined into my game.

Which probably would have been kind of cool. I ended up with Golden Eye and some JRPG released in 2002. But I couldn't come up with an idea fast enough, so I scrapped it.

I though back to my favorite genre: Metroidvania. I'd never made one before, which should have been the first red flag. But I decided to mix that with the most unlike genre I could think of: Diner Dash.

The idea was going to be that you were the caretaker of the West Chesterfield Archives, a massive natural cave system full of old books. Your job was to keep the visitors of the archive happy by bringing them the books they requested. There would have been an indexing system, upgrades, and all manner of comical cartoon bookworms.

The key word up there is 'would.'

10 minutes before I decided to knock off for the night, I realized: I can't make this. It's too big! I played around with other ideas, merging other themes into Metroidvania, like stealth, horror, and art house. But the idea I finally settled on was completely different.

I doodled around on a piece of paper for inspiration (I like to base games around characters that I draw). I came up with this chubby boatman:

He quickly became Elias Muttonhedge, the last of the Conservationists, and before I knew it, I had a plan.

To Be Continued...

You can play the final product here: The Fat Man and The Sea

The Fat Man and the Sea has global leaderboards! Currently @wheffle holds the top slot with a score of 5370, higher than my own of 4700! :laughing:
Can you dethrone him?
Not only that but it's got some good reviews so far too (thanks to everyone who played!).

My game, The Fat Man and the Sea, has only 6 more votes to go! I'll be playing the games of the people who comment tomorrow, as well.

See if you can make the high scores list!

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

I've got 20+ in all the other categories, I just need one more in Audio!
Do you like ukulele music? Play The Fat Man and the Sea here

Thanks to everyone that played my game!

@GexAlmighty @pandademic42 @pahlsoftware @jcmonkey @onnofal @GiGiChef @Beebo-Studios @silkworm-sweatshop @Wheffle @Laktris @hank1996 @joekickass @Tay @fashionbatman @Scout @Linus @David-Wallett @Rick95

And of course if you're interested, you can still play it here.

Thanks to @pov for running the event and for the amazing community here!

This is the first game I've published on the platform, and I'm really liking it so far. Check it out here!

@wheffle still holds the top spot on The Fat Man and the Sea leaderboards! A couple have gotten close but no one has since dethroned him... Can you?

Play The Fat Man and the Sea here

Barring any unforeseen complications (or mood swings :laughing:), I'll be participating in the One Hour Game Jam this weekend.
Are any of you planning on joining?

I have been hard at work remaking my LD38 entry into a full-fledged game. The website is now live! There's a link to the itch.io page where I'll be posting development progress for now.
And of course, if you want to see my LD41 entry, you can find it here.
@somnium @ethereal-psyche-games @spacesparkle @sagarpatel25700 I have included your excellent feedback on the site :wink:

My scores this time around show a marked improvement: Plus 87th in humor! Thanks to everyone that rated my game!

I've noticed some interesting changes to the site lately, and every time it's updated I want to see all the little features. Is there a changelog somewhere where we can see the updates when they roll out?

This summer went by so fast! I can't believe it's already time for the next Ludum Dare.
Thinking about moving back into 3D for this one, does anyone know a fairly robust 3D engine with a shallow learning curve?

I'm in! Starting 3 hours early is going to lose me 3 hours of time but I'm OK with that. I'm looking to create something different this time, most likely in 3D.

I've also (finally) wrapped up my entry for the 1 Hour Game Jam held directly after LD41. I don't remember what the theme was but I've only got about 5 hours worth of work on this so don't expect a whole lot:

RUN!!!

I've just scored enough time off of work to lose absolutely zero time during LD42, so I'm definitely in for this one. My tools are (as usual):

• Blender or GameMaker Studio 2
• Adobe Photoshop/Audition/After Effects
• My trusty off-brand guitars and 3D printed ocarina
• Pencil and paper
• Hopefully a bit more than 10% of my brain
• Noise-cancelling headphones

My goals for this particular jam:

• Do something different; preferably in 3D
• Actually put some music theory to work in the soundtrack
• Squeeze in a couple more night hours for polish
• Do it right the first time!

As always good luck to everybody that participates and don't let the ratings get you down!