Before I got my foot in the gaming industry, I worked on a poor excuse for a video game just trying to build up my portfolio, and I called that horrible manifestation of logic and polygons “SeaCrit”. It was underwater and had light RPG elements like critical hits. Back then the game was much more like the classic flash game “FISHY!”.

https://freefishy.org/

I had this lofty goal of keeping that super simple and satisfying gameplay loop of gobbling up fish and getting bigger and being able to then gobble up even bigger fish.

This is the third time I’ve made this exact post, I’m adding gobble back! This is not the first time that I’ve re-added gobble mechanics and I’m happy with the results! Not ALL fish will be gobbleable, but a lot of the “trash mobs” will be.

It’s a little finicky right now, sometimes you gobble fish when you don’t want to, but i’ll figure it out in time.

Basically how it works, is once a fish is under 60% health, they will begin to shrink and at 20% health they will reach their smallest size.

The way gobble works is the player will automatically gobble a fish so long as they and the enemy fish have not attacked in the past half second.

So now the player has 2 ways of vanquishing their enemies, they can kill them, and take their items and gold OR!.. they can just gobble them whole!

And this is where it gets fun, I’ve made it so when you are in melee form and using your vacuum suck, you can gobble fish 80% your size rather than the usual 60%.

And BEYOND THIS… by overhealing with lifetap bites, or just by gobbling other fish, the player will grow in size to become big and hefty, which increases their size, which in turn… ALLOWS THEM TO EAT WAY MORE FISH!

So how is this friggin’ balanced if the player can just gobble everything once they become fat!? Well… eating fish doesn’t give you $$$ and it doesn’t give you items, since you’re swallowing them whole. What it does give you is a unique bonus per that fish type. So for example eating babysharks will increase your max health. Not a TON, but by a small amount, and it’ll add up as you eat more and more of them! Come to think of it, I might need to add diminishing returns, but we’ll worry about that later!

Adjusting to this new upbeat and optimistic format is weird… should I stop being goofy too? Do we have to be all formal? I think what we’ll do is ping poing between very serious and rally cry type posts (I have one in the works) and for quick little blathers about the days work, we’ll just adopt this less formal format.

I feel like I’m getting too technical! I could keep going on about technical issues, and blah blah blah. But short and sweet, we got gobble back in the game! And it runs to the very heart of the gameplay and if you want you can gobble up darn near every fish you come across! Just like in one of our great inspirations Fishy!. I’ve added and removed this system so many times, but I think this time it’s here to stay, a little rough around the edges but we’ll feel it out.

I’m always happy to add some new system that affects the overarching gameplay loop, that has been our focus for so long. Not making huge mounds of content, just one really polished engagement.

To quote the great Bruised Lee again, “I do not fear the game that has 10,000 moments I want to play 1 time, I fear the game that has 1 moment I want to play 10,000 times.”

So many dev sessions lately have been painful, and technical and boring, and it was really nice to have a solid stint just adding compelling and impactful gameplay and not run into any snags. In fact, I felt like I was on fire today, we just knocked this sh*t out of the park, if I say so myself.

Game is kickin’ arse, excited as ever for this to come together. New mini demo hopefully in the next week or two!