Unfortunately I cannot open this... It's says the JAR File cannot be found... maybe another way to upload this?

I liked the feel of the simple graphics and the sounds matched them well. But after maybe one or two rounds of fish spawning it felt a bit repetitive. I'd like to see where the game could go if the safe zones were procedurally generated and forced the player to find new safe zones.

A great little game; I was pleased to see that the fish try to swim away from me. Some actual shark graphics would have been nice, but these get the message across.

Thanks for playing guys!

Sorry to hear that Eddy93, I just registered a mediafire account, hopefully this one works for you.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/4us7m43y4uyt44j/ld27SharkSpawn.jar

Interesting game, seem to be a bit hard to end it though. The opponent was out of the safe zone for 5 times in a row before I could eat him.

Good work done! Loved it.

Really enjoyed it! Would have been nice to see the shark change as it gained weight or something but very fun nevertheless.

Simple but fun idea

Nice game, simple and very cool, I'd to see it with better graphics, music :P

Overall this was a great fun game. I like the idea of simple graphics, but actual sharks or fish would have been nice. Like how its a fast paced simple game but still so much fun. Good audio also. I did have a problem where I was in the safe zone and still died. Not sure what caused this.

mutilator, there is still the problem that fish can spawn in the safe zone. This means that anyone in the safe zone can gain a random amount of weight at the beginning of a wave. It's unfortunate, but I did not address it completely in the time allotted. Sorry for the frustration, thank you for giving it a shot!

Nice one. I'm not sure the safe zone makes it more fun, but at least it's more challenging. Once I got the grip of it I won every time. I would have liked to see my circle grow as I gain weight, to get a better feeling of satisfaction when I was eating others. But I liked it! :)

This is a bit delayed, but I until I get to my post-mortem, I wanted to talk about the point Kragnir made. The reason a shark could stay out of the zone so long successfully hinges on two decisions.

One: The weight fish grant to anyone eating them scales with the player's weight each wave. This would need to be much more sophisticated since the player's advantage is rolled into the consumables for the next round.

Two: I started to implement different behaviors for sharks. The two I nailed down are aggressive and not aggressive. Aggressive sharks go directly for the closest fish at all times. Passive sharks spend time trying to eat the fish farther away.

If your "dominant" shark you end with is passive, you are dealing with a shark chasing the farthest fish, gaining a reasonable percentage of your weight with each successful catch. I think I have useful nuggets in place, but the interaction between these systems isn't much fun in some cases.

As my first entry, I am more than thrilled. I won't be going anywhere anytime soon, I'm hooked on this style of development and release, especially concerning the unexpected growth and insight possible.

Regarding visible growth and your weight, this was actually in my first builds. It became a fairly significant bug on Saturday morning. There was a time in this game where you size was dependent on your weight, but the scales I was using ended up way over exaggerating your true size, and the points you needed to move through to "eat" another entity became unclear.

It was chopped simply for clarity, but I had it as a major component for almost 1/3 of my development cycle. I just couldn't get it to look right. When looking at circles, even a 10% advantage is nearly impossible to tell with the scaling of sprites. I just could not get it working in this release. But I agree it should in some way be more visible. I considered color intensity, but there is the same problem in being sure of color fidelity on any given screen.

Keep the feedback coming, thank you players!

Good concept! I like it. Nice work.

Nice game, it took me some time to understand what the colors mean, but I enjoyed it.