This is super fun! You really nailed the gameplay loop. Overall it feels great to play and is pretty challenging, great work!
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TROPICAL WASTELAND's itch.io pageHow does your game represent "Slick"?
Surfing by definition is a pretty slick sport. But to make the player feel extra "slick" there's a rad combo system which encourages you to kill a big group of fish by kicking out your board like a badass. This some risk / reward to this though, given there's constantly a huge barrel coming for the surfer, risk slowing down for too long and you'll be forced to pump your way out of being dunked by the wave.
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First of all, is it possible to get a downloadable windows build after the jam ? I kinda want to play this offline
Anyway it took me a few tries to really get how to play this, but I have to say that I really enjoyed the hell out of this when I finally got it. This is an extremely stylish and charming game with a solid amount of depth to it's mechanics as well. The overall presentation was great. Audio was cool and the art was honestly sublime. I love how immediately readable everything was with how fast the game could get.
The feel of the game was also great. Killing the fish always felt good because of the feedback. That said, I do kinda wish that killing the different types of fish led to different actions happening. Something like the pufferfish exploding. I don't think I ever got any seagulls, so I take it back if I maybe missed something. ( Unless something does happen, but if so then it wasn't all that noticable ). I also love the little screenshake while swimming to get your board. It made it feel even more frantic lol.
I wasn't really a fan of the board's targetting so to speak for when it tried chaining fish. There were numerous times where it effectively missed and left me stranded for something which wasn't really my fault. This by itself isn't that big of an issue, but it can kinda compound when you have fish blocking you and the waves catching up. Maybe this is just a skill issue, but I thought it was worth pointing out.
Another thing which I'm not really sure is an issue or not is the fact that you can kinda just go on forever without actually hitting a fish. Maybe to compensate the number of fish increases as you go on or something which blocks your path maybe ? Maybe more humans spawn or maybe you could have a timer which gets replenished when you hit fish in general ? But then again you already have the waves. I'm not really sure how to fix this all things considered. Especially since the waves also become less of a threat the further you go.
All that aside though, this is a great little arcade game. Really fun stuff
18 days ago(+1)
First off 122 is an incredible score. Thanks for giving my game a chance! Can definitely export a PC build once uploads are available again :)
This is all really great feedback and I completely agree. After I submitted I realised a small change would probably address a lot of the flow issues - like the board flying off behind you when you've missed a fish. Instead of making the fish come from the right and go towards you, I'm going to try some which come from the right and move away from you. Conceptually this should force the player to keep moving without losing forward momentum and the board will likely always be moving away from the barrel because of this.
Anyway that's just a thought, I'm really happy you enjoyed it. Thanks for spending the time to try my submission, I'm a huge fan of yours :)
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