FISH

An old school FPS with a hookshot in a tropical island filled with fishmen pirates! Coming to Windows and probably Mac and Linux too when it's done.

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Support FISH on Indiegogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fish-an-old-school-fish-person-shooter-game/

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Official FISH art by Bruno Atanazio http://bruninho.top

Support FISH on IndieGOGO: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fish-an-old-school-fish-person-shooter-game/

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Shellshock

Here’s an oyster pirate throwing his pearls at you:

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Water is wet

In a game called Fish, with fishmen and a fisherman (it’s important to know the difference) it’s expected for it to have water and swimming, so let’s jump in:

Well, it’s water, you can swim and there’s not really much about it, the game gets all bluish and blurry and you start losing health when the little avatar on the bottom gets all blue. And of course you get wet:

So, I an way, you can fish in FISH now:

By the way, this is a new level, some sort of ancient temple. What you think?

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This game is being developed using Unreal Engine 4: The noble and pedigreed middleware from Epic Games

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Victor Leão (from Möira and Dandara) made this awesome fishmen with a Lupin III design mix :) source: https://twitter.com/pxloto/status/903631263667453952

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Here's an enemy that's slightly inspired by One Piece (plz don't sue me, I'm poor)

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The Shotgun guy

Like weapons, I want enemies to be varied and different from each other, no stronger versions of other enemies. DOOM does that pretty well, both the original and the new one, with each enemy having different movement and attack patterns. Thanks to that, with just a few enemies, the original DOOM never felt repetitive thanks to enemy placement. The levels keep throwing the same enemies at you, but in different combinations and situations that make you think* and create strategies* to deal with them.

*Nothing too fancy, shooting usually works well

Mark Brown can explain it better than I:

And if you want more, I suggest this GDC talk from Dead Space 2 level designer, Matthias Worch:

So, today I wanna focus on this little guy:

This is one of the first and most common enemies you will find in the game, every 90s shooter had a "Shotgun guy" and so I wanted FISH to have one too. At first I just thought of a more generic enemy, but for some reason I draw a short fat fish with chubby cheeks. I also added an antennae at the top of his head for some reason, I thought it looked good... probably because of Majin Buu or this Gintama alien guy:

What's up with anime and fat character with antennae?

Making it an anglerfish and having that thing glow was a given. When drawing the sprites, I thought he wasn't looking very "piratey" so I gave him a peg leg. I thought the more "friendly" design was a nice twist for an enemy with a shotgun. In DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D, they are threatening, with red eyes and dark clothes. And you should be afraid of them because shotguns can give you some pretty big damage.

The small enemies in FPS are usually the weekest and not very threatening, like the grunts in Halo, runing from the player with squeaky voices. This is for all the grunts that Master Chief has killed, this little guy has a lot of fire power.

So much fire power that he can't handle the recoil.

He's also not very smart:

But look pretty cool in darker areas and bring up some interesting gameplay possibilities:

And Pescador doesn't care about any of that. Oh well.

Until next time!

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BOW AND ARROWS!

I want each weapon to be unique in FISH, no stronger version of other weapons, so the latest addition to the game is something that seems to be very trendy in games these days: a bow! The distance and the strength of the arrow depends on how much time you hold the string. And of course you can get your arrows back. Hence why you can't carry many arrows (5 for now, but that number may change in the future). From enemies too. And of course you can have fire arrows by shooting a torch or something! We're going full Zelda. A very flexible weapon. Q&A How is the Pescador pulling the arrow with just one arm? He's using his mouth, something like this: How is that possible? He's just that badass. And btw that is possible! Check out Matt Stutzman, he got silver in the 2012 London Summer Olympics and he holds the world record for longest accurate shot in archery.

That makes me feel motivated to reach my goals. What an awesome fella. Let's leave it at this inspiring note, see you next time.

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FISH AND TEAR!

The biggest complaints I've heard were about the HUD looking too simple and about the lack of gore. Considering I'm making something for DOOM fans, I guess it makes sense to have some gore. So I've been working on a new look for the HUD and adding some blood. Since I don't want the game to be "edgy" so I'm going for a more goofy kind of violence, blood in unrealistic quantities and sushi flying around when the enemies explode. Watcha think?

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FISH has been greenlit! :D Thanks everyone that voted and supported it! More news soon (I think)

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Attack pattern changes

Enemy variety is one of the things that made games like DOOM and Quake so fun and it's something I'm being very careful with in FISH. There are currently 3 types of enemies in the game, which are the weakest and most common ones. The problem is that one is a melee enemy and the other 2 have hitscan attacks. I felt that the game needed a weak projectile enemy to have a better balance.

After thinking of the possibilities, I couldn't come up with anything that would make sense in this world. Right now most of the planed enemies with projectile attacks are using things like rockets, grenades or canonballs. So I decided to change one of the enemies to have projectile attacks, just make the bullets show up! And it felt much better!

Also added some trail to the bullets to make them more visible

Being able to see the bullets and avoid them feels pretty good and gives a sense of fairness to the game. So I decided to make the other hitscan enemy, projectile based.

Both have different patterns of movement and attack. And now there's no need for the player to take cover (even thought it can be helpful some times).

FISH is on Greenlight, so if you want to see it on Steam, please vote YES.

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FISH finally has a teaser/trailer.

And is on greenlight! Please vote YES if you like it: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=912247403

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The hookshot

Weirdly enough, the idea for the hookshot only came to me once I thought about the enemies being fish and the main character being a fisherman. Implementing it was quite easy, took me one afternoon thanks to Unreal's CableComponent plugin. Polishing it... that's another story.

Everyone seems to be comparing it to Overwatch's Roadhog since you can pull enemies with it, but I was thinking more of Zelda when I did this. As in Zelda it can be used to pull enemies, items and to move through the world.

My first idea, was obviously the most complicated one. Being able to swing around and do weird tricks with it even, but I soon learned that game physics usually don't always work as you think they would. Swinging mechanics is something that I gave up on very early. The hook latches on pretty much everything so there's really no reason to swing the cable if you can reach places by just pointing at it.

PHYSICS!!

Still, I wanted some freedom and the player was able to throw the hook and choose when to pull/be pulled by it by pressing the button again. There is a big problem with this approach though: there's a lot of things that the player can do in the mean time between throwing the hook and being pulled by it. For instance: jump, move around, shoot at enemies, getting shot, die, fall into a hole... and probably many things that I didn't think of but I'm sure players will.

One thing I tried to address was moving around and having the cable colliding with stuff. I got it working and I'm very proud of it but I can't find many gameplay uses for this other than puzzles. And while I want the game to have some simple puzzles, this is a game about shooting things so that's what I'm focusing. Soon I realized why most games out there don't let you do anything between throwing your hookshot and getting pulled by it.

Pretty cool but not very useful!!

So, now the hook works just like in Zelda/Overwatch: you point to a place and get pulled/pulls. With one difference: you can hook almost anything.

In Zelda games, you can only use your hookshot (or clawshot) on specific targets, I considered doing that at the begining but I want the player to use the hookshot in situations other than just "Ok, I need the hook to reach that place so I'm gonna use it now", which is also why it's showing up on the screen all the time. You can still hide it if you want cause... why not?

The fact that you can hook almost anything should give me enough trouble already. Won't be easy making levels that can't be easily broken without using invisible walls. Now, I can't promisse that I won't be using invisible walls, but I'll avoid them as much as I can.

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Here’s a gif

I said I would update this every Friday but I’ve been too busy this week to write something, so have this gif which is almost a cutscene. If you haven’t noticed before, the crab is holding 2 bazookas and has a pirate hat! Because he’s a pirate.

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Status Update

I wanted to update this every friday, let's see if I can keep this up.

Why friday? Because friday is fish day! At least in Brazil it is... I did a quick search and found out that there is a #fishfriday hashtag on twitter, so maybe it's a global thing.

Anyway, this is going to be just a status update. January was spent fixing what I already had. Fixed a lot of bugs, made some optimizations in the code, tweeked the difficulty and polished the art.

Since the game is supposed to be a lot like old 90s FPS, originally I wanted it to have pixel-art sprites but I don't have the patience or the skill to make pixel-art. I also don't have the money to hire someone to make that for me so I ended up making some temporary sprites using an art-style that I'm used to and well, people seem to like it and I'm liking it so why not? I'm still trying to keep the polygon count low on the maps, but I decided to embrace the cartoony look and upped the resolution of my sprites so they would look a little cleaner.

Also changed the outlines that all the 3D parts of the game have. They used to be all black, now they're a stronger color of their model. Not because the black outlines were ugly but because I want consistency. Now only interactive objects (enemies and items mainly) have black outlines, like in a cartoon! It's also very likely that'll need to use 3D models for something interactive, maybe a boss even. Now the game is ready for that.

Also, I lied, I made some new content. Since today is the birthday of the biggest Roronoa Zoro fan that I know, here’s a new enemy 100% original that has nothing to do with that character (please don’t sue me):

And here's a giant enemy crab:

And I know that crabs aren't fish but I have a good reason to have crabs as enemies in a game about fishes: I like drawing crabs.

Till next friday!

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Some explosions!