Hello! Congrats on your game! I find that the most valuable playtesting feedback is given while playing so I use voice to text while playing and narrate my experience. Below is my feedback!


Logos really nice who I like. Movement that's some really cool wife making pixelark look camera is moving a little bit too slow I don't fully know where I'm going which makes it difficult but I saw a cute seal dogs with the electricity okay it's nice that I can see the electricity from afar. I looked at the training effect. The music is nice. I should have been famous but that's okay for now there was places to explore. Yeah right now I'm at the top left side of the corner and I can barely see anything because I'm really close to the Border but that's all right. Wandering aimlessly haven't found anything but electrifying Eagles. I see that there's an arrow pointing down and right on the user interface so maybe I will try to go down and left. Oh that's just became three I don't know what that is maybe I love with love maybe I'm just trying to survive. Don't know if it came to again I don't really know what that number signifies I want to backpedal to see if that number is location-specific trying to figure out where it became two and three i'm swing back okay all right I found the edge where it becomes it switches from 3 to 2. There's a Down I guess I want that number to be smaller so I'm moving away from the three area oh I found a different enemy it is not doing anything it's spiking so I think it will hurt if I touch it but there hasn't been anything different so far so I want to touch it okay it does hurt that's expected i'm in number three again however each number four so I guess the bigger the better I have reached a dead end. Oh they're so high score that's great i'm Number 7 unfortunately I never saw a shark or the green fish

The game is very atmospheric, I like the way that the fish move, and the art in general. The concept could be expanded on, but the novelty wares off, this game has a lot of potential to be expanded on, and I hope you do so.

Cool concept and very moody, I actually quite liked your soundtrack despite what you said. The progression is good, but the novelty wears off ater a while, I would've liked to see the other enemies earlier in game. Really good entry!

I liked this game. The graphics are nice, the sound design is good at making it satisfying to kill the eels, and it was a pretty chill experience. One flaw is that the camera moves when you're at the edge of the screen, making it hard to see where you're going to go, tiny things like that you could improve to make this game better.

Awesome game! I like the art style (specially characters) and the sound is good, it's a very calm game, maybe adding a "sprint" button or making the shark a bit faster could make it more engaging. Also some sort of timer. Just throwing ideas :D Nice job! Really enjoyed

I was really impressed by this game. The controls felt great, the art/animations are beautiful, the enemy abilities made every fight interesting, and the power progression really got me feeling like a hungry shark by the end. Until I got eaten by an even larger, hungrier shark... And the world generation was great too, I should mention. Good mix of corridors and open spaces without feeling too maze-like. Probably my favorite game so far, well done!

Amazing game, I especially love the art. The leaderboard is a really cool feature, and I managed to take the top spot (for the moment) with 15 levels deep. As for feedback, I think the sharks should appear a bit earlier. The game doesn't really start to feel threatening until they arrive, and I think that it would be more engaging if there was more danger early on.

Very nice and coherent art style, ?I bet you had much more work than most due to using custom engine. Solid effort.

@ghast-neoh "the power progression really got me feeling like a hungry shark by the end. Until I got eaten by an even larger, hungrier shark…" That made me LOL! Glad you made it to the Shark! Level generation was something I planned on coming back to polish, after I got my very first version working, but I never did, but I guess it was good enough. That was fun to code, and made exploring the game fun for myself, too =).

@nanoarch Glad you liked the art! My goal was to do something simple so I'd have time to polish the art, but I ended up just getting distracted making the art and didn't quite get around to the other things.

@gagouman @stevenjmiller Yeah, I didn't actually give myself time to test out the enemy progression until after the compo ended, and the shark really should have been earlier! I'm afraid a lot of people won't even see him.

@camilo-quintero A sprint is a good idea. I actually had a 3X speed button I used for testing, and that totally should have been a mid-tier speed boost unlock ^_^.

@tomeks Thanks! Custom engine is both good and bad - it's what I spend all day working in most days, so being ultra-familiar with it helps, but then occasionally I have to spend time adding a new feature ^_^.

I made it to the shark! i probably should have run away but i went for the kill instead. big mistake. really enjoyed playing.

I had fun with this. #2 on the leaderboard, not to flex... Didn't figure out you could bite things until the end of my second run, at which point I tried to eat a shark but it was better at eating. Then I tried to level up enough to eat a shark, but it ate me that time too. Had a lot of fun. This could really do with some expansions into a full game. Great work.

@thedashdude Way to go! From the leaderboard, I can see you're not the only one who made it (almost) that far without eating anything =). I'm curious... was it a better, if simpler, game before you realized you could bite?

@Jimbly I don't think so. It was nice as just exploration, and really fearing the different enemies, but I think the biting did add to the game. There were merits to not biting that I think are worth exploring more, though. I know others have suggested making sharks earlier, but you might also consider making all the enemies harder, so biting isn't something you all the time, at least initially.
The big plus to the biting was the sense of progression for leveling up, and the different strategies to attack the other animals. I don't think you want to lose that. Not sure if you can fit in into the level generation, but having upgrades guarded by extra hard enemies would be neat.

This is a really relaxing game. I was getting some Ecco the Dolphin vibes.

Also what-up JS buddy :) The cutout shader looks really good too!

@shawn-moore Glad you enjoyed it! The "cutout shader" is just some [textures](https://github.com/Jimbly/LD46-sharkbait/tree/master/src/client/img/vis) (from Photoshop's Halftone filter), and the equivalent of good ol' OpenGL 1.0's `glAlphaFunc(GL_GREATER, x)` (which, of course, doesn't exist in WebGL, so it *is* a shader, [albeit 3 lines](https://github.com/Jimbly/LD46-sharkbait/blob/master/src/client/shaders/cutout.fp) ^_^).

The shark moves so smooth and the sound effects are nice. This game has more contents than I thought at the beginning. New enemies begin to emerge when I go deep. This game looks simple but everything is well polished especially in 48 hours. Great job!

That's awesome that you tried something different with this jam! Glad you liked the outcome. I really enjoyed playing :)

hey, that was the best compo game I played on this ludum dare, it was:
-simple to learn
-everyhing was sticked together
-sounds effect was good, nothing special but they fit the rest
-very polished
-nice characters
-i met 3 types of enemies, don't know if there are more

About audio I think sounds effect are to loud relative to music

Great job!

Nice game!

The idea is simple and works well. I find the shark to be a bit slow at the beginning (and almost too fast when I died) but otherwise the controls are fine.

I didn't truly understand when you get to upgrade?
Great graphics by the way. I would have also made the sound effects a bit quieter, but other than that, a great entry. Congrats!

@linky439 Thanks for playing, glad you enjoyed it! For upgrading, there's a counter in the upper right (starts at 0/10), and as you eat things you get XP to fill that up in order to level up and upgrade. Only clever (too clever?) thing is that I don't pop up the Upgrade dialog if you're in the midst of battle, it waits until you're either half a screen away from enemies, or have not tried to do any movement/biting for a second - otherwise as you're desperately chomping to kill a shark, you end up getting distracted with the popup, or, worse, selecting something unintentionally.

I really enjoyed the modular characters. They are very well drawn and their movement are very smooth. It becomes something really cool for a game set in the water.

However, while the characters are really nice the scenario is off and needed more polishing. And i guess that is the only point i could find a flaw. The audio is nice, the controls are smooth and the game is fun.

Excellent job!

@derek-volker Thanks! Yeah, I really like how the characters turned out (I might have spent too much time on that ^\_^), though they're mostly basically just balls being dragged behind on a rope, with a little normalizing when idle. I call the main character "Fishballs" internally ;). I was surprised how well that worked for both an eel and a shark (though their movement is different, they're both using the same "drag the previous parts along behind" logic). The scenario definitely needed more polishing, I should have spent a little more time playtesting and balancing that, or adding something fun to find in the caves ^\_^.

@jimbly Thanks for the answer, I figured it was something like that but I couldn't see any enemies on the screen at one point and no popup showed up, so I wasn't so sure ^^

Good idea by the way, it's better than to get distracted in the middle of a fight as you say. Another solution was maybe to use a dedicated button to power-up ?

Hey! This is an amazingly well put together jam game. Cool line of sight graphics, and a cool background track. Like the idea, would play more!

Really awesome and impressive for the jam time. I really love the concept of the upgrades and the increased variety in deeper depths. Starts a bit slow in my opinion and the difficulty is low in the beginning but escalates quickly when the sharks appear but with a bit more polish this is a game that I could imagine playing in my free time

Graphics are really nice and all the characters have a lot of personality to them, great job on that! The mechanic is interesting, but the pace of the game could be a bit faster for me. However technically and visually very impressive job that you could definitely work on refining some more!

Amazing game, really love it and try hard to become #2=) Also what algorithm you used for random generation?

@tigerfinch @reisn Glad you enjoyed playing so much!

@team-on I talked a little about the procedural generation [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/g81ehr/sharkbait_procedural_game_for_ludum_dare_46/), and you can interactively see the map structure a bit with [this link](http://www.dashingstrike.com/LudumDare/LD46/?D=MAP). Will be happy to expand more if you're curious =).

I usually make game jam games with to much text/complexity as well. This time I also tried to go simple.
It worked out well for you I think. The eels are really cute, they look like something from a Matt Groening cartoon.
I would have liked a bit more direction at the beginning. I did a lot of wandering before what I was seeing started to change.

Loved this game. The way the shark moved, the different upgrades and enemy types. My only gripe was the the camera didn't keep up with the player very well but overall this was a great entry that I enjoyed playing!

Nice, the art and the mood of the game are pretty good.

I love the simple upgrade choices: it is clear when you will get them and what they will do to you.

A bit slow (literally :D) at the beginning, but as you level up you can feel the progression.

Uh I'm sorry, is this a procedurally generated level or did you make this enormous map by hand?? Either way, absolutely well done!

This was a nice little exploration game, and I really appreciated the ambiance you were able to build up with it. Pretty bold to make a slow burn of a game for a game jam, but I respect it wholeheartedly, nice job! :thumbsup:

@coleslaughter Thanks for playing! Yeah, procedurally generated level (and music), you can play with the generator and read a few details [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/proceduralgeneration/comments/g81ehr/sharkbait_procedural_game_for_ludum_dare_46/) if you're curious.