#comethook devlog

Ok I might have some explaining to do

What does that mean??

I wanted to make a fishing game inspired by fantasy zone and insaniquarium (a bit weird i know but it can work please)

But it needs to be a fishing game where you are a little more proactive in the act of fishing

But what if you attacked fishes before being able to catch them ? That could be fun :)

But fishes are cute and I don't wanna hurt them :(

So I said alien are possessing them, and you need to clean your lake to help your fishes go back to their normal life

And you can only save them by throwing comets (aka boulders) at them. When they are stunned you can catch them and remove the alien menace (which become a comet itself ! space theme wooo)

Some fishes might also have special comet with unique effects :o

And with all this power you need to destroy all fish spawner or bosses idk yet in the level to then fight a big fish boss and save the lake !

And then you move to the next lake with other fishes and repeat saving them :p

How the gameplay work (get fished)

You have a little hook wich follow your mouse

And you have a little comet that you can throw. But to throw it you need to gain momentum, so move your hook frenecticly and get some !

And then either bash it on a fish

Or throw it ! (a bit harder to aim but it goes far and it's safer)

The more momentum the comet has, the more damage it does !

Then after enough damage the fish is stunned, it's your time to try to catch it. Send your hook on them and a minigame start :

Here you need to put your mouse at the arrow's opposite direction (basicly where the fish is pulling)

And either you don't manage to do it in time and you need to restart damaging it

Or you win and free the fish of its alien presence

But you get a small reward, a new comet (which is the alien in its original form)

It's a stronger version of your own comet but it breaks after some hits (resource management time !!)

(also don't worry it won't attack any other fishes it is too exausted)

And now repeat to free all the fishes !

(also all this gameplay needed way more math than I imagined, and u know math is really anoying like eww numbers)

What's next !

For now that's all that is done, just a prototype :p

But I have plan for what to add next :

Some new fishes with special comets !

Some environnement

And having multiples comet at the same time

Of course that's not everything I planned but that's what I want to add for the next devlog :p

that's all for today, thanks for reading through it !

I hope you find this game a little bit interesting and want to see more of it soon :)

I will probably make 4 or 5 devlogs (including this one) on this game before releasing a demo, and move on an other project (making a bunch of demos to gain some gamemaking experience)

Later, i'll remake this post as a youtube video because it'll surely be better than reading a long post. But I'll need some original music for it and that'll take some time to make (i don't know how to write music lol)

So first, i'm sorry for the lack of devlogs, I actually finished the prototype a month and a half ago, but I needed to tweak some stuff before releasing it. And uh college stuff and I had to study. But I have a break right now so here we are :)

I wanted to lock in to finish the prototype, it is quite rushed but it helps to fail faster. That's why I removed a bunch of animation and simplified some stuff so i could work more on the gameplay loop (and now it's your problem >:) ).

And so, here are some notable changes : (also some gif are from old builds of the game, so stuff are a bit different on the public prototype)

Fusing comets ! Replaces having multiple comets at the same time (Having multiples comets should be an upgrade, but heh too lazy to code it)

There's three type of upgrade right now :

D -> Defense (bunch of extra health)

A -> Attack (extra health + extra damage)

S -> Speed (extra health + extra speed)

The little number under the letter is its health. So when you hit a fish with the comet, only the first upgrade will be hurt.

You can have up to three upgrades at once.

Catch multiple fishes

Catching multiples fishes at the same time grants you a bigger and stronger comet ! Isn't that cool ? But now if you do bad at the minigame, it will end (you can see the fish health at the right, and yours at the left).

Also fishes stay stunned for a limited time now, so you can't catch all of them at the same time

The Shop

I will not speak about how it looks

But anyway, take a comet, throw it in the sell box, and take an item like a comet and throw it in the buy box ! easy

And if you want money outside of selling, there's some gold fishes swimming around that you can KILL for money <3

Mini bosses

You see these little red orbs ? Destroy all the fishes around it and it will be unlock.

Attack it again, and !!! A miniboss !!!

Catch them all and you'll finish the level

A map to explore with upgrades

These little thingy make you stronger (health, speed and attack), collect them !

An actual boss ! (no spoilers hehe)

niark niark you'll have to suffer through the whole prototype

Now that the prototype is done, here are my thougths on it

I think it's a bit too hard and not that much intuitive, it also doesn't feel that much like a fishing game :/

The fishing minigame is also kinda boring, but that's because I didn't bother coding something smart. Though I think I can make it better in an other way.

I'm not a big fan of the gameplay loop, having to fight some minibosses could be cool but the way I did it doesn't really work

And finally comets can get annoying ! At the end you have too much of them and that's a waste of performance + no one will go get the comets they left behind, so I do need to work on it.

I go a bit more in depth in the itch.io description :

So I'll make another prototype (but I'll remove the boss at the end, it isn't worth it for a prototype, but for a demo sure! )

And for the youtube video version of these devlogs, I learning to write music to not rely on copyrighted content but it takes time :(

Anyway I hope you'll still have fun playing it though (three out of four people that tried the game liked it, that's neat)

Next devlog will be about another game, I want to try out some other games idea. I hope to be able to release it in a month or less, depends how I'm feeling (im sick of coding, drawing is easier and I can't even do that because it goes against the idea of prototyping argh !!!)

Thank you for reading this devlog and have a good day

Small stuff

First, a small graphical update on the player and the comets, they now have a small eye ! (And comets have a different sprite)

Still placeholder sprites but it gives a bit more personality to the game and that's neat :p

Throwing comets is also easier, I added a simple aim assist to make them go toward fishes when thrown and it helps a lot

But what would be the point of that if you can only use two boring comets ?

Bombs !

Introducing the bomb comet ! It does a big explosion when it hits a fish making it quite powerful

But how do you get it ? Welp with the bomb fish :0

This bomb fish can also explode so be carful, but you can trick them to explode on other fishes and do extra damage

That's good and all but you might have taken a bit too much damage playing with them, and you might want yo heal...

Environment

Here are some seashell to break containing healing orbs !

Also coming in big form

Each orbs recover 0.2hp which isn't a lot so you better destroy a lot of those seashells !

And also as you may have noticed, you can get some mini comets as a bonus :)

They don't do a lot of damage but they gather speed really fast

But now you might be like "oh no there's too much comets, how can I handle so many of them ? :("

And i hear you, it sure would be cool to use them all at once instead of leaving them hanging around...

So you can now ! Isn't that amazing ?

Get up to 5 comets at once and BONK all of them on the mean fishes to do a lot of damages !!

Making the mini comets more useful, as a small damage boost at the start of your game

And to make movement a little bit more interesting, I added some walls to the level : you can throw comets to make them bounce on it, and also protect yourself from fish's attacks

And that's all for now, the game is starting to become something a bit more interesting to play but still has a long way to go.

What's next ?

Next time I'll try to add a shop to upgrade your hook and buy other stuff

Maybe also add some mini bosses that you need to fight before fighting a big guy to finish the level (just like fantasy zone : destroy 10 bases and face the real boss)

And also try to improve the gameflow, some action don't feel good to do and that's a no-no for me

So thanks for reading this devlog ! Gamedev takes time so don't expect any consistency for devlogs upload

So maybe I should upload some small sneak peaks ?