Postmortem

The game as uploaded on the JS13K website is now also here, on itch.io.

I have mixed feelings about this game. On one hand, I've received some unprompted, enthusiastic feedback. On the other, I haven't necessarily reached out to more people and looked for the harsh, hard-to-hear notes that could have made a difference. As far as I can tell, some people love it, nobody hates it, and the rest is neutral. In fact, even I, as the developer, am in the neutral camp.

Things that went well are the art direction (huge thanks to my fiance for the color palette, love you misio), the sound design (although it was done last minute), and the smooth animations, I believe.

Now, onto the negatives. I don't like the game design.

To beat a level you have to perform consistently well for two whole minutes: a little slip up and you can't catch up. The real test isn't how many fish you can label, but how fast you can label ONE fish. Maybe there's a speed at which, for any specific player, the game is just right: challenging enough to be enjoyable, fast enough to not be boring. Still, the fixed difficulty levels, as they are, won't hit the spot for a lot of people.

The main interaction is also ill-designed. If, as discussed, the challenge is in quickly labelling one fish, then it follows that taking the fish to the table for closer inspection is just a waste of time. After all, if you can't label it by the time it moves off screen, you might as well move on to the next one--the result is the same. Inspect it from afar, print the label, stick it onto the moving fish, done. And boom, just like that, half of the available interactions could be thrown out the window.

Overall it's a funny premise--a cat working a job as a fish inspector--planned badly but executed fairly well (if I can say so myself).

Lots to learn from this one, and it was about time I published something I wasn't entirely proud of. My previous project were so small that not many things could go wrong. This time I properly sticked my neck out. As the generic advice in writing goes: first you should get all those rough and half-formulated sentences on paper and out of you, then the good stuff can come out. Hopefully that's how it'll play out for me and my games too.

Thank you for reading. Until next time.