graphite 2022-04-05 00:15
That was fun! I really like the art style and laid back music. Great work!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Shoal
By kerdelos, tyrannas, schadocalex and Erilhir
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 91 | 4.09 | 114 | |
| Fun | 153 | 3.92 | 113 | |
| Innovation | 157 | 3.87 | 112 | |
| Theme | 536 | 3.79 | 112 | |
| Graphics | 171 | 4.33 | 114 | |
| Audio | 132 | 4.00 | 114 | |
| Mood | 95 | 4.20 | 114 |
That was fun! I really like the art style and laid back music. Great work!
Enjoyed playing this!
Liked the graphics, and it felt like a warm an fuzzy game. I did seem to lose control (left arrow) at some points, and I'm not entirely sure why? That said, it was a nice game, and a good concept.
very cool result!
Really enjoyed the game, mood is perfect
Really fantastic art direction. The flat shading, the colors and animations, this is really great. Controlling the group of fish feel pretty natural and smooth. Losing a fish never feel nice (of course) because it feels they get stuck on tiny corner.
Overall a really great game. very inspiring.
Wow. Loved and i don't know why but this game made me sad.
Woah, how did you menage to make a Godot game load so fast on HTML5 export? Is it gles2 or gles3? I really need to know :D
The game is really good, i like the procedural generation of levels/obstacles. Not sure if it's just choosing from pre-made segments, but doesn't seem too repetitive, so I'd say it works really well. The graphics and sound create an awesome mood, I really like the slow and calm voice of a fisherman, only wish it had more variety (more sounds to choose from when a fisherman catches you). The mechanics could maybe use some tweaking - I'd try lowering the scrolling speed and fish speed, at least in the beginning of run and maybe speeding it up later (?). Not sure how it would impact the game, it would need to be checked, but the gameplay seemed quite chaotic, which isn't bad on it's own, but for me it clashed with the generally calm mood of the game.
Overall you did an awesome job, it's enjoyable to play and looks and feels good.
The various ways you could lose fishes added to the fun of the gameplay and the waterfalls made it so you can't always stay at the bottom of the screen. Very nicely done for a short jam. More/longer levels could turn this into a very fine game. I liked the relaxing tune and the pixel had a nice feel and was well animated too!
@lisek-gagatek GLES3, regular export with no debug (there's a checkbox when choosing the destination file). The scrolling speed is speeding up (from 60 to 180 pixels/s). Before the end of the ludum it was slower but each game was very long, so now you arrive in difficulty quickly (the max speed is reached at distance 1500). And yes it is premade segments with randomness.
I really enjoyed this game! It looks beautiful and is a lot of fun to play. Loved the simple mechanics, and how easy it is to pick up and play. The music and mood is awesome and the difficulty felt right. Really great effort! I do hate the sharks though.
@alpqty This can happens sometimes with a smooth / nature mood, you might feel nostalgic ;)
Wonderful, it was so peaceful and at the same time so chaotic :D Also, I got to 22 fishes :D
Very cool game ! I love the calm relaxing mood. The fisherman voice adds to the rythme. Did you make a boid simulation for the fish ?
@bozarre The fishes were hard to dev. For the ludum the last solution was just circle colliders with a common target and some tweaks to avoid latency and shaking.
Very cute game! The mood is high, got a good meditative experience :)
Incredible game! Such an interesting and unique mechanic, loved it. Wish the fish didn't get stuck at obstacles that often :) Are they using some kind of flocking algorithm?
@lisyarus Yeah we wanted it to be a bit challenging, fishes that hit rocks are getting locked for a very short time but it's enough to be quite punitive in the endgame !
Simple rules and control. Beautiful music and style. Really nice game.
Very cool game! I love the visual and the sound, it's really relaxing. The gameplay works well, it's not too hard but you have to be quick on the reflexes, maybe it gets a bit repetitive once you know all the river patterns. I didn't really use the split function because it was too hard to control two separate group, and you can still go through most obstacle without dividing. Anyway, thanks for the game, I enjoyed it a lot!
I'm a little fish! A bunch of little fish! I love the art style and atmosphere. The sounds are a nice touch. Sometimes the game stopped scrolling, but I'm not sure if that's intended or not. I enjoyed it overall, good job guys!
Oooo I love this game a bunch! The energy to it was wonderful - the graphics, the audio and the gameplay made for a really fun and intuitive experience. The sound of another group of fish joining along was so charming, it always made me smile. A really nicely polished experience! :fish:
Really cool graphics! Nice music! Solid peaceful gameplay!
I love this game. It's so pretty and peaceful. The music and graphics fit perfectly together and the concept is great as well. What is the fish sound? I kinda like hearing it.
At first I was confused with the fish splitting. I thought I have to hold down the button so when I tried it out I was confused why their all going in different directions. But later I realised.
Great game :)
@finn-pickart haha thank you for your review! the fish sound is just a recording of me making a silly sound #nofilter ;)
I love this! Fun, well balanced gameplay, and the different obstacles makes it more interesting. The art is gorgeous, with great light, colours and animations, and the controls work really well. Would be interesting to see this expanded upon, maybe having different types of levels and even more obstacles that work in different ways!
I will get back to this again after the jam/my rating period.
Great work, thank you for sharing!
@okamit Wow thank you for the review Okamit! We'll be working a bit indeed to balance a few things and create more content for a post-jam version :D
@tyrannas Looking forward to it! :heart:
I was thinking: "Neat! This is pretty relaxing." Then it got faster and faster, I kept losing and gaining fish, and eventually all of them ended up stuck on some rocks and died... Fun times all around! :laughing: (Great work!)
The mechanics are cool, I wish the loop was longer or procedurally generated. Gets boring already after the first attempt.
@teawhydee it's not really a loop but 8 premade chunks that spawn randomly (aside from the first one) but yeah we're planning to create more of those :)
@for-science yeah I guess we could make a Zen mode ;)
Great game, fits the theme so well. Graphics were good and I liked the relaxing sound effects. I didn't use the split mechanic too much though it didn't seem necessary. Well done.
A simple concept well executed with good graphics and a nice soundtrack. Cool start screen too. The soundeffects of the fishermen made me really dislike them XD! Good design there.
Nice game! The flowing water sounds are really relaxing, and the art is lovely. It feels nice to join another cluster of fish and keep running up the river.
My highest scores: 19 fish, 999 distance, 7800 score 25 fish, 693 distance, 10100 score 36 fish, 1013 distance, 15099 score
Some points of confusion for me: There's a screen where the autoscrolling stops and I wasnt sure if it was a game over but it resumed a bit later. At around 900 distance I still had healthy fish but the autoscroller went a bit faster than me and it counted as game over. I guess in that case I need to press Up more. Some of the round rocks were stickier than I expected, where I thought fish would slide around them but they got totally stuck.
@almost thanks for your review ! 36 fish on 1013m is great! For the rocks, as I said to someone else, we wanted it to be a bit challenging, fishes that hit rocks are getting locked for a very short time (which is not the case for river borders) but it’s enough to be quite punitive in the endgame !
A beautiful and relaxing game with a simple and a bit wonky mechanic, i like it. The only thing i don't really like is the one tileset where you have to wait with the same pattern but that is personal preference :) Overall really nice.
My scores - 17 fish, 1354 distance, 9836 score. Excellent game. Visually and audibly, it's just perfect. I like to relax in the game.
Nice, I like the mechanic, it's fun to go straight to an object and split up so you don't get hit
Great design! The concept is innovative, and the smoothness of the gameplay and animations makes the game feel very polished!
I feel sorry for the fishes though :(
Nice job!
Very nice game! Liked style. And your developer, who did 36500 is just invincible
Thank you for your game!
I really like the game, it's quite relaxing despite all the stress. Love the sounds especially, for some reason fishermen's mumbling makes me laugh every time. :D
On my very first attempt I've managed to jump over to the land and "swimmed" there for some time, but went into a dead end and lost.
The only thing that's bothering me a little is when you get the same course segment again and again several times in a row, especially if it's a pause segment. Would love to see less randomness there.
shoal.png
36500 on the horizon :)
@mortus oh well, the land thing was supposed to be fixed but apparently not enough haha!
Wow @ausstein !! great job, I myself couldnt get above 30k yet !
shoal.png That was close :(
Great mood! So chill and calming, despite all my lil dudes getting eaten or stuck on rocks 😭 good job, really enjoyed this.
shoal.png Did it !!!!
@ausstein oh. my. god. that's insane hahaha well played
Wow! No this was a treat to play, a nice laidback feeling all the way through, even when the game gets a bit stressful the slow music keeps you in balance, the whole experience felt nice and smooth, the graphics are crisp and you learn to play the game fast. And it plays well on the theme as well. Excellent job on this one!
Chainsaw Cheerz!
@ausstein Hold my beer.
@ausstein Thanks for triggering me. I have now master my own game, time to do a harder post-LD version :P
Capture d’écran du 2022-04-06 22-24-29.png
@schadocalex okok shoal.png
Unexpected use of the theme, I really liked it. The pixelart and camera you chose looks georgeous. The song hits your mood squarely. Great job!
@ausstein You deserve it, I've updated the game descripton with your screenshot.
@schadocalex Thank you :) this was really fun to try and hunt for a highscore. But now the highscore is at a level where it is no longer about the skill, but about when your fingers get tired :D
Oh this was a fun play! Kinda laid back, and a nice neutral take on the theme. Life finds a way, ya know? While it may take away a bit of the mood, a bit more variety in things around the river or even pick ups would be nice.
I quite enjoyed this even though I cannot match the scores I see posted! Annotation 2022-04-06 204150.png
Awesome game! Art was really well done, gameplay felt polished, overall a great submission!
-Tim
btw @schadocalex do you use the split at all? I found it did nearly always more harm than good so I started playing completely without it
Interesting idea and nice graphics and sound effects. Good job!
Very relaxing mood for a game that gets stressful this quickly. I like such kinds of juxtapositions. It was a nice surprise when the song started playing after some distance. Managed to get a score of around 15000 during my few tries. Like others, I did not find the split functionality that useful in the gameplay itself, but it was a cool idea and fun feature.
Very good game all-around.
Solid game, I like the style, chill music, fits the theme well. I see Godot, I like.
Absolutely fantastic game! It looks beautiful, the sound effects and music are perfect, the controls feel very snappy and the shoaling is very impressive (especially when poor fish friends get left behind). A really innovative take on the infinite runner idea!
Excellent!
good game! 5/5 Excellent! :-)
Well, as a non-native person, I expected that the game features the evitable of life growthment and I could get several cute frogs at the end of the level... And I was wondering why the fishermans catched tadpoles. At the end I found that I was collecting some fishes. Relexing, fun casual game.
Game is simple but real fun! Some more map tiles would be great. I did a score about 15.000 :-)
Excellent game! I'd like to save it and play eventually. game.jpg
Easy, simple, sweet! You play it and relax! :) I am adding this game to the collection of the best games! Great job! :)
This game is simple yet so beautiful ! I loved the fish animations, very smooth but still pixel arty. The gameplay mechanic is very simple but works unremarkable well, the idea of controlling a school of fish makes the gameplay very interesting, great game :)
This was a beautiful game. Really nice controls, very responsive and I loved the school of fish mechanic and the way they looked underwater with the excellent animation. Well done!
26 fishes max :) I like the calm and charming graphics. The audio and sounds mix well together. I don't know when splitting become useful actually, but it was fun dodging all of those fishermen (with funny sound effects). I don't know if it suit really well the theme but it was a lovely time for me, nice job !
Great entry, love the vibe, the graphics and the audio - unsure how to handle the waterfalls though :D
Such a nice game! I really liked the graphics and the audio, the mix of calm music while getting more and more stressful trying to get the fish along was surprisingly nice! The visuals also looked really good :) I did have a hard time knowing when to split the fishes but that might just be my playstile!
@ausstein i'm gonna answer for @shadocalex since he probably didnt see your message, but apparently yes he's using split a lot! But yeah, we didnt have time to make a proper level design in order to make a really good user of split, and it's becoming useful only when you have a lot of fishes ! We're currently working on some ideas for a postjam version on how we could force to use a bit more this mechanic! Feel free to share if you have some ideas since you are probably our number one crash tester ;)
Excellent game ! Beautiful art style, pretty relaxing to play and crisp, responsive gameplay, a pleasure to play. Reminded me of Zombie Tsunami, but in a very different style :laughing: really great submission, bravo
@forgin-bits Haha yeah we definitely talked about Zombie Tsunami while designing the game !
Pretty chill game. I like the style and general vibes. I haven't really used the split functionality, seems like unnecessary addition, but it's cool you've actually made boids into the pretty fun game!
Been playing and rating action-y games for a while now, so this chill one was a nice change of pice. Nice graphics and music, the game is definitely very strong in mood.
Lovely art and calming audio. A bit like a wildlife documentary, what starts as a light-hearted look at nature's beauty turns into a story of survival - perhaps for an endangered fish - and now you are that fish! :sweat_smile: I enjoyed playing this.
That's a neat concept, though with a pretty grim take that all fish will die eventually lol.
The presentation is great, with lots of graphical touches and the harrowing waterfall rocks that slowed you down. Touching a pack of fish felt *fantastic*. Personally it was hard for me to get more than say, 15 fish, but over time I just expected that to be the case.
I was pretty incentivized to get my little swarm growing and getting far. Only got 25 fish though unlike some pros here. A failed split attempt cost me dearly!
Great animated title logo btw :)
Great mood for this one, felt like I was really playing survival of the fittest for these fishes, also love the simple graphics - very effective. Great submission.
Really completed game in three days! And the mechanism is new and fun. The shadow animation of the three, fishing and water are very nice. Intense gameplay and relaxing experience at the same time.
Nice entry. Great aesthetics overall, and the audio complements it nicely. I found that the screen moved a little too fast, at least to start with, maybe thats just me... Great job!
I enjoyed my time with this one-the simple, but colorful pixel art combined with the banjo strumming in the background give the game a very peaceful and relaxing mood. The sound design in general was very nice, aside from the noise for collecting more fish, which I felt got a little grating after a while (though this is a minor complaint). The gameplay is simple and not anything groundbreaking, but it works very well and is very polished.
The only real complaint is that I wish there was more variety in the procedural generation of the river paths. From what I could tell, there was about 10 different environment chunks that would get selected at random for this game, and with the fast screen pan speed, it resulted in a game that the feeling of going into unknown environments quickly.
Regardless, what is here is really solid. Nice work, guys! I managed to get a max of 34 fish.
Capture.PNG
Thank you all for the comments!
@proxy-games You are completely right. We didn't have time to work more on the level design. And yes there are no more than 10 chunks chosen almost randomly. A post-LD version will be available to fix that!
I love this game! Nice pixelart and peacefull strings
Very fun game! The art style is wonderful, the music really sets the tone, the challenges along the way are very creative and it has infinite replayability! I really don't have any constructive feedback, as I think this was perfectly executed for the time of the jam! Great job!
Great worK! I love the concept, art style and calming music. The mechanic of splitting the school of fish in two is very creative and makes for some interesting/unique gameplay. I also really like the idea of controlling a group of things vs and individual character. Great work!
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Lovely little game that has a simple mechanic which was nicely introduced in the first few seconds of the game. Im glad the music was very chill when things started to speed up and get hectic as well as the short stops to take a little breather (even if youre trying to dodge bigger fish haha). It would be nice if it kept your overall high score. I also like the little school of fish inscoproated into the logo 🐟
It's very pretty with a nice music, I like the mechanics, it works well, it's yet another survival game but a good one, congrats :) Controlling a group of things is an interesting idea like said above. It also fits a little more with the theme as it's the inevitable disparition of this fish species.
Very original idea! I loved the song the first time I heard it. Bring the peace of the countryside. The game mechanics are great and the idea is very original. Its graphics have a special simplicity and clarity and are very well polished. Some small bugs, but all forgivable due to the excellent quality of the game.
One of the few games I've given 5 stars on everything.
What a lovely game!
I really love the art, the music, and the general mood of it all.
The gameplay struck a fantastic balance between feeling relaxed and laid-back, while still having a sense of danger and tension.
My only complaint is that the stage felt a little repetitive after a while, but otherwise this was brilliant.
I loved this game, both the art and the music are very relaxing and help the gameplay to be enjoyed a lot. I was sad to leave so many fish behind, but I think it's part of life jaja! Great job! Sin título.jpg
Very nice game. The visuals and music gelled really nicely with the mechanics to make a relaxing almost zen experience. More variation in the sections would have been nice to keep the game fresh for longer but I think the repetition also went someway towards the zen feel.
really cool, its polished and the arts are awesome i love it
Awesome game! I got a score of 5821. Really cool game mechanics. Great job!
I really liked the mood set in this game - the combination of music, visuals and general setting worked really well together. The split mechanic felt interesting but the level design didn't give me enough reasons to utilise it. Had a good time with this, great effort!
between the bright pixel art and the peaceful music, the game feels relaxing and nice to play. I almost closed it the first time I reached a new level, though, because I thought I reached the end of the map. It could use an indication to let the player know there will be a new level, soon. I didn't really understand what I had to wait for when I wasn't allowed to continue up the river for some time.
@amberfall92 It's a kind of bossfight area. We didn't have the time to put some effects or dark music to help understanding that.
That's a really polished and neat game design. It could be published to mobile platform as well~
Easy to play, the controls feel great and I loved the atmosphere. My only concern is with the "predators time" where it's impossible to go further and I didn't get why. I first thought of a bug. Then it goes again and you get it. The play experience was very nice, good job to you all :)
@nidel Few comments above someone didn't understand either. Here was my answer:
> It’s a kind of bossfight area. We didn’t have the time to put some effects or dark music to help understanding that.
this was really fun! like peaceful, wholesome version of badlands. i like the visuals and BGM, but the fisherman's voices were rather startling, a bit too dark and gruff for the rest of the atmosphere.
i'm really impressed with how all the level pieces come together, it feels very organic.
i think i hit the "boss fight" area you just mentioned, where the screen paused and there were several sharks, before it really sped up again. i think that's a cool mechanic to have, but it was really confusing to me when it happened. maybe having a countdown timer some sort of visual indicator that this area is special would help. also, the second level is crazy fast and difficult! i died so quickly, heheh. i think a slower curve up would be nice, it felt kind of jarring to the atmosphere of the game for it to suddenly become so much more difficult.
i had one run where i was absolutely showered with new schools of fish, and then the following run was extremely sparse, so i think a good refinement would be to control the randomness a bit.
also, i appreciate that sometimes there are bonus schools of fish in the outlet or sidepath streams, but i felt like, since most of them are just deadend deathtraps, it was never worth trying to go into one to get more fish.
Screen Shot 2022-04-20 at 11.12.20 AM.png
Beautiful work. Gotta love how the fish make up the 'O' in Shoal.
Wow, what a beautiful and fun game! Very well executed. Great variety of mechanics that all make a lot of sense and work great together. Excellent mood-setting music. I love the rapids sfx, and the fisherman sfx. I love the pixel art.
Could not launch because my PC does not support GLES3