(NES) FISH
Originally made in 48 hours for Alakajam 17, handcrafted 6502 assembly. Climb and find your way home to win! Watch out for traps!
Tips:
Your health decreases slowly over time and when you shoot. Enter water to instantly refill. STAY HYDRATED! All traps are avoidable and can be spotted if you're paying attention. Don't touch the fire!
If you're playing in the browser, cursor keys and z/x are the default controls. Enter restarts if you die. You can press ESCAPE to access a menu that lets you cheat with save-states 😛
Update V1.2 2023-11-19:
Big update:
- Game actually tells you when you win, get to your home!
- Much improved jumping through narrow gaps, no more pixel perfect jumps required
- Fixed buffered jump
- More feedback to show your water meter decreasing, new sound effects and visual bubbles help indicate the bar is depleting, and an alarm begins to sound when the bar reaches critical level
- Longer map! With the improved movement, the old map became a little too simple. The original map has been improved and extended
- Fixed orphaned sprite glitches
- More fair hitbox for dart traps (fires are still extra dangerous though)
- Extra effects for dart traps
- Hidden secret greets screen
- Player bubbleshot now has a maximum lifetime, no more infinite looping bubble softlocks
Update V1.1 2023-07-18:
Killed the annoying music loop at request and removed some of the gamejam in-joke text, game otherwise identical!
Update v1.0 2023-03-08:
Finished version! Added a little music track, improved health bubble visibility.
Update v0.3 2023-03-01:
Fix: It was possible to reach an out of bounds area at the 'two fires' puzzle. Thanks Tijn
Update v0.2 2023-02-28:
Fix: playing on some emulators (and hardware?) showed weird colours because I didn't initialise the attribute colour ram and left it with random values. FISH now clears the attribute data for nametable A
Update v0.1 2023-02-27:
Fix: it was possible to get into an impossible situation at the first fire if you fired a bubble on the floor below. It's still possible but less likely.
Fix: fixed a missing water tile that caused the player to fall through the floor into the void
Download
Development log
- Fish v1.2Nov 19, 2023
- 6502 jamminFeb 27, 2023
Comments
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challenging indded :D
Well, that was a fun quick romp!
A very neat concept you have here,
I enjoyed it from start to fish! Err, finish 😅
Would love to see this game expanded upon someday. Here's a playthrough I did!
Good pun and good taste in games, thank you kindly for playing! Nice playthrough, but too bad you missed the little secret room at the very end
Wait- SECRET ROOM?
Please tell 👂
👀
This should get you on your way, just don't expect too much!
sneaky sneaky 👀
Thanks for the hint!
Just saw the update! I'll have to give it a look next time I get a chance!
no worries. i was going to mention it to you while i was watching your stream but i got distracted by the puzzle game and forgot 😅. Nesdev23 just wrapped up and there's a whole pile of good entries to check out if you're interested
wow I'm dumb, I didn't even realize that's who you were 🤣 we've got COVID going through the house right now so I may/may not be streaming this week.
Looking forward to checking out the update, though!
there's a surprise for you after you reach the end, let me know if you find it
I wondered if it was somewhere at the end, there's some bubbles that looked like it was hinting toward something. I haven't figured it out yet, but I'll get it lol
I knew it! That first jump was just a tricky one to make. I tried a few times, then thought maybe it had to do with bubbles... then went back to the jumps and got it :D
I've never had a shoutout in an NES game before - that's awesome! I'll make sure Zarc and the others know to go past the end, too! :D
haha, good job! Thanks again for playing my game and reaching out to let me know you all were playing it 👍
No prob! Good luck with the NESDev Entry!
Awesome game, I feel it might be eating the occasional jump input, but maybe I just need to git gud lol. Is there no hard ending after you reach the top? This might be a fun game to speedrun, but it would be cool if there was a defined "finish line".
Would also be cool if there was an option to keep the audio, but mute the music. No offense to the tune, but it's gets a bit repetitive after a few runs lol
100% agree on the
shittymusic, I even removed it from the dev version and just never re-uploaded itIf I get a chance I'll add a 'hard end', but I feel like the jumping through one tile wide gaps isn't quite forgiving enough for people to enjoy speedrunning?
Thanks for your feedback
It's still pretty fun to casually run, and that section where you just barely have enough room to sneak through makes a great bottleneck to have to overcome.
As for the finish line, I realized you don't really have to worry about it - we can just stop the timer on the "splash" in the pool at the end :)
The music isn't bad - it's perfect for people just playing through once. But for those of us crazy people out there that will literally play the same minute-and-change run a whole bunch it gets a bit.. much 😂
also, I got a board set up on speedrun.com :)
https://www.speedrun.com/nes_fish
I dig that this is mostly all down to skill, and it's a super quick run so if you scuff up it's not a big deal. Sure it's not the hardest or most technical game to run, but I'm still having a fun time with it! I think I can probably get my time under a minute with a bit more practice 😁
No music build is now uploaded, thanks for playing my little jam game!
Got my run down to 57 seconds :) There's a weird glitch in the latest release where you can get stuck on an invisible wall near the start. There's those 4 blocks that you can jump across, but if you walk off the first one on to the second, occasionally the fish will get stuck. Here's a clip where it happened to me the first time lol: https://clips.twitch.tv/MotionlessAmericanCattleJKanStyle-P-gFtN6QbbavOgOu
Later on, I realized it was better to just wrap the screen off the right to land on the left, so it became less of a problem... but I was able to re-create it several times. I don't recall this ever happening in the previous version to the music.
Question for ya - what's the deal with the "run killer" section with the really tight gaps that you have to jump through near the start? Seems like sometimes we jump just a bit short of clearing the gap, while other times we can breeze through. I assume it's just really tight hitboxes and sometimes we just nick an edge?
Also - we've got 4 runners on the board now. Apparently there's 2 or so more that are running it but haven't submitted times yet :D
Real Games (tm) let you slide around corners you'd otherwise bump your head on when jumping, like Mario when he jumps with a few pixels of overlap into a solid block above. FISH does this too but in a slightly less player-friendly way, where you lose a frame of jump for each frame spent sliding sideways around a corner. Because the max jump height is only a few pixels more than the amount required to make the jump, any jump height lost to sliding around the corner means you probably won't be able to make the jump. Probably the easiest fix would be to increase the maximum jump height.
I'd love this if when you died you started back at the last pool you entered. Maybe a little too old school for me to start all the way at the bottom again. Everything else is great. I'd probably play all the way through if I didn't quit at the idea of retreading the same steps over and over.
That's fair and a good suggestion. I had to cut a lot of conveniences to fit the game into one weekend. You can save and load state (escape if playing in the browser) to achieve this yourself. Thanks for the feedback :)