A few years ago I participated in this game jam called SeaJam, which was hosted by my friend Polymars to raise money for TeamSeas. In it, I made a game called Katamari DamaSEA, which was a parody-ish game of Katamari Damacy, where you picked up garbage on your katamari in a certain time limit. Beyond that I actually had a few other ideas that I never ended up using, and the specific one I want to talk about is that of a fish soccer game, since I recently participated in my own game jam called FishFest, where I actually ended up using it.

Here’s an animation I made for the devlog when I started as I really liked this idea and initially assumed it would be the one I go with

After the conclusion of SeaJam I still held onto the idea of the fish soccer game, cause I thought it could be really fun depending on how it’s implemented, but wasn’t confident at the time in my ability to do it well.

2 years later I decided to host FishFest, a fish-themed game jam I conceived in an extremely sleep deprived state at 2 am.

Here’s the full story for why lol

So a little while ago I got an email from Humble Bundle about some sort of 'Fan Fest' game bundle. I misread it as saying 'Fish Fest' and was actually really excited to purchase a bundle of fish related games. I'm sure you can imagine my dismay when none of the games in the bundle featured fish in any capacity whatsoever. After such a devastating moment I decided my only option was to create a game jam, in the hope that someone would be willing to provide an interactive fish experience like no other.

The rules were simple: make a game… featuring fish.

Conveniently I had this idea backed up from SeaJam 2 years prior, and a lot more experience in game development, so I thought it would be appropriate to spend the week finally creating my dream fish soccer game.

Honestly, I’m super proud of how this game looks. Shockingly, even a world renouned game developer such as myself has idols to look up to, specifically people like Ash K, Torcado (who was very nice in telling me how to do diagonals in CSS which I do a lot for my main website), Kultisti and in this case I was inspired by some games made by the team over at Sokpop.

Oh Crab!, by Sokpop Fishy 3D, by Sokpop

Oh Crab! and Fishy 3D, by Sokpop

I definitely took a lot of inspiration from Fishy 3D, but even then I did a lot of my own stuff too. This was the first time I ever really wrote a shader on my own, which I used for the moving background water. It’s just a simple scrolling noise texture over a static one, but I think it looks pretty good and have even been using it subtly, but hue shifted, in some of my website favicons.

The favicon for blog.possiblyaxolotl.com

Additionally the transition shader I used was also hand-written by me, which is huge for me as I haven’t really done much with shaders previously.

I have to say, I think this game looks pretty good! Combined with some state-of-the-art simple fish AI I’m genuinely pretty proud of how this game turned out.

I know this isn’t a huge game or anything, but this is a huge step for me as this is one of the first games I’ve made where I can step away, even for as long as it’s been since FishFest, and say “yeah, I think this game is good.” It’s a sign that I’m actually growing as a developer, capable of going back and making this game that previously seemd unattainable, and I’m super happy with it.

This game is proof to me that maybe someday I’ll be one of those cool itch developers like those who inspire me to do what I do. 🐟