Alpha Release

What’s New?

• Added a jumping mechanic where players can control their fish to jump from tank to tank. The ultimate goal for them is to escape from the tanks, go down the pipe in the toilet, and into the ocean! 
• Removed life limit on players.
• Smoothed out fish movements.
• Heavily nerfed dashing, making it consume energy.
• Added background music and sound effects.
• Made the game multiplayer and split-screen using Parsec (requires Windows 10 to host a game).
• Switched to keyboard controls for movement, due to technical issues with Parsec. We originally had mouse controls.
• Added deep-ocean and beach-themed tanks.
• Added a toilet bowl as the escape point, reminiscent of Nemo’s escape in Finding Nemo.
• Added small AI sea creatures like minnows and shrimp that players can eat.

What’s the Motivation?

The motivation behind these changes is mainly to deepen our mechanics, increasing the number of interesting decisions players have to make. Having the game include multiple different stages makes it really easy and fun for us to make each tank unique in its own way. 

We also make the game more of a collection race than a fighting game to give players a bit more freedom. It is still possible to win the game with minimal combat, or with a different strategy. Who wins is not just decided by whoever attacks (or dashes) the most.

What’s Next?

• We plan to add enemy AI like the fish owner and a cat that try to prevent the fishes’ escape when the fish try to jump to another tank.
• Animate the fish swimming, add a background for all the tanks to sit on, and screen transitions for polish.
• A few more tanks are in the works, but we think that we will limit the number of tanks to 5.
• Tank Events: Similar to the Hunger Games, we want to add events that will occur as the players play, and try to balance the game. 
  • The two that we have planned are a pollution event, and an increases food spawning event
• Balance Changes: Food spawning and hazard spawning rates will be changed and we are thinking of making food more sparse as time goes on.
• Add a variety of food like small fish with different values and players can only consume food that are smaller than their sizes.