Very nice game. At first I had a hard time, but then I realized the crabs and fish will be animated when they are going to act. After that the game became a fun dance trying to figure out their patterns and how to exploit them. The boxes didn't seem to have a purpose so it might have been nice if they had fish or some sort of powerups. But this is a very solid game. Congrats for making a game in one weekend!!!

@aarimous: Thanks for playing! Yeah- the main intent of the boxes is to take a turn without moving, to further exploit the fish patterns. Was hoping to add drops to them but ran out of time. :(

Love the visuals

Cute game! I really like the low-fi visual style. Something about the grid based movement is just very snappy and satisfying. I also like the tactical combat; it forces you to think about how to position yourself to defeat the enemies. I will say that figuring out how to defeat each enemy was basically trial and error, which could be fun, but becomes frustrating when I have to start over after just one hit. Replaying the first few levels just to get back to the enemy I'm trying to figure out is not great. But I did enjoy my time with the game regardless. Nice work!

I love this game.Your theme is very great,which really attract me at first.I can't imagine why you are so creative to come up with such a great thought.Platfomer,Harvest fish? Really cool game!

Lovely art and great polish!
Could be cool to use some kind of range attack if you want to continue on this in the future!

🐟

really effective concept, your game is really fun, it made me bring up old reflexes from necrodancer, i don't know if it's one of your inspirations
I agree that the one shot feels a bit harsh when you are learning patterns

Otherwise the progression is pretty well made, the cover art is beautiful, and you handled nicely the penguins scream with Pico-8 limitations :smile:

@Mastoast: Necrodancer was definitely an inspiration, as well as Rust Bucket :P The one-health thing is fair- it's mostly an artifact from not having others playtest and misjudging the entry barrier :( Thanks for playing it!

I almost got heart attack when I saw the babies raise fishes above their head. I thought they were going to toss the fishes back to water but it turns out that's their happy pose.
Anyways, nice harvest game! took some trial n errors to get the harvesting part right but finally I managed to get the groove of this game.

Really great job on the art! The title screen and the intro cutscenes are all great especially for being in pico 8. The gameplay was straightforward although definitely pretty unforgiving.

I loved this game, I wish I was better at it. I hope you get the chance to add bgm at some point! Well done~

pico gang! what a beauty this game is! challenging and super cute, loved it!

Wow! Such a polished game!

The gameplay is great. I really like the animation! :D

Plays a bit.
Leaves a comment.
Goes back to play some more.

Really like that one. I don't know if there's an end, but I'm gonna keep playing.

Man those beta fish got me! Really love seeing people use pico8 for game jams and procedurally generated maps. The character animations before the movement helped a lot in understanding their movement, great design and flow! <3

@Keenao: It's endless/score-based :P IIRC day 10 and onward uses the same generator, so getting beyond that is sort of an end in terms of having seen everything. Glad you enjoy it!

Really solid entry! Only down side is that you have to start over from the beginning after learning what the unique attributes of each enemy are (if you do so by failure). Great animations and such, though. Pretty clearly communicates what the game does. I just didn't know things like some fish have more health, etc.

Really nice entry. Quite fun, although, when you get to the latter levels, it's a bit annoying falling prey to a fish you haven't met before.

YESSSS

Super neat :) Gives off major Crypt of the Necromancer vibes, just needs some cool music to go with it!

pico <333 ^^ addictive game 5/5, My best is day 7, fish 52, and always this is why


This game is great ! Graphics are really good, it's hard to make things as clear as they are in game with so few pixels. Procedural levels and progression are good, especially given that it's a compo.

ohhhhhho ho ho u KNOW Im coming back to this one meep >:D


another game that I saw on one of the streams and immediately fell in love even without playing it. Playing it though was exactly how I thought would be, super fun and addictive! I'm a pixel artist so I always focus the most on the graphics, and I'll admit, I'm not a huge fan of the pico8 graphics. Somehow, you madlad, have no idea how, but you made this game look so so good. With such small resolution, your game still looks super clean, easily readable and cute. I love your enemy sprites and the penguin is adorable. On top of that gameplay is simple and as mentioned before very addictive, with you somehow squeezing it randomly generated levels that never feel cheap, unfair or unbalanced. Not sure if its good programming or great game design or both, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that you're very talented developer and can't wait to play more of your stuff in the future. Amazing job for a compo game!

@edit OMG I just checked your previous games! All of them have penguins and the naming pattern <3 ... that's some sick dedication and I love it even more now :P

Very cute roguelike! I like that you can break blocks in order to stall a turn.

This was a great take on turn based dungeon crawling. I loved this and super into puzzle turnbased stuff. PICO8 is always a challenge and i love that you did procgen in it!

Thanks for letting me play this!

Here's the VOD, split into chapters so you should be able to find your section!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hMhAX_Rgg8

What a lovely game! Love art and love how polished the game is.

YOOOOOO!?

I got trapped by a single betafish at the start of day 11 xD

Thanks for submitting your game on the stream!
Here’s the start of your game if you wanted to re-watch initial thoughts youtu.be/qbBq_nBKk5k?t=19406

Loved the sprites and strategy required! Nice work!

EZ


I'll stop for now, but I'll have to return :)


It's a nice little puzzle game with some chess-ish elements. The random level generation is good for replayability and the score variance is not too bad. Very rarely I feel it gives a somewhat unfair level start (e.g. two betafish and not many crates nearby). Discovering the rules by introducing the different species one at a time was nice, and most of them telegraph what they will do nicely, such as the jellyfish with its two turns of "targeting". I was a bit worried when I saw a new species in a rather late level since I was aiming for a good score, but it was easy to see that the greenish fish simply moves like a chess king.

What I wouldn't do for a "pass move" button :)

There's crab in this game? 10/10

몰라 몰라!

LUV THIS GAME!
I reallt enjoyed it! I really don't have to say about feedback. well m made game!

Thanks for made this game so much! Cheers!

Wow, super cute game, thank you! I found myself playing again and again to try to improve my score, and every time I learned how to deal with a new kind of fish, it was really encouraging! The game reeeeaaally deserves some music, though (and maybe a way to go back to the main screen after you die!). My best score was day 4, 36 fish, but I'm definitely coming back for more! I hope you put up a post-compo version!

Great game, everything seems very well organized. Maybe I would make something for the first level easier because until I escaped from the crabs it took me a while. Or it is probably very bad. Still, great game!

i love the little penguins sprites and how snappy it feels to jump from grid to grid. Really fun and I liked the different rules/behaviors of the aquatic life -also I love the little penguin scene between levels -amazing work!! :D

@milq: I'm curious what you mean by escaped- were you able to defeat the crabs? You have to clear all of the enemies on the map to advance to the next level. The main thing with the crabs is that they only move *every other turn*, so you can plan/delay when to approach them to safely take them down. :)

What a well designed game! Like Roguelike combat but in its purest form where it's a puzzle game without any stats or leveling involved.

I thought it was going to be a very manageable game until I got eaten for the first time. Then I realized I needed to put on my thinking cap. From there, positioning and enemy management started coming into play. Any enemy on its own was easy to kill. The hard part was making sure you never got put into harrowing situations where groups of enemies could checkmate you. At this point I was utilizing the rocks more to skip my turn which was a smart mechanic.

I actually can't sing enough praise for the intro cutscene. Seeing some penguin babies and then diving into the water was very motivating and put me into the context of the game in 2 secs. Incredibly effective.

The game feels very good to play and it feels even better with familiarity as you learn sequences and combos and can kill things quicker. Nice work!

@meep Yep, just after few minutes I try again and play well. I've corrected the review. IMHO, for me, I improve the explanation for the game, IMHO! I stuck at first. BTW, awesome game.

Really nice, love the art style in this and the setup is simple and effective. Gameplay feels good and thoughtful and has a nice replay value from the random gen. While I wish maybe there was an occasional bonus inside the boxes it may be a good thing their empty so I don't feel the need to get every box as well. Great work all together this was a lot of fun!

167 fish! I haven't went back and got the screencap but Meep saw me on stream! Great job! This really evoked Crypt of the Necrodancer in a great way. Each of the enemies had a really distinct feeling, and they worked together really really well. I think my primary complaint, and one I said during the stream, was that there was a bit *too much* randomness in the generation. Some spawns were very nearly impossible, while others were free, at the same day. Fixing this is a very hard problem, but as I mentioned, I think some rejection sampling could help. Really great mechanics though. I'd say overall probably nine tenths of my deaths were DEFINITELY my own mistake and not just a setup that was too difficut :tm:, so that's a pretty good rate. Art was also very cute! Great job!

Super fun idea and very well executed. Of course it would have benefited from some sweet tunes too but even without one, the sound effects remained pretty much non-irritating.


Difficulty seems to stop ramping up around level 12 where the piranhas start to spawn. So after that it's all about luck just waiting until you run in to an un-winnable situation.

It was really clear what enemy was what and how they behaved after seeing them just once. Really good design on that department. Well maybe the tentacle thing was a bit confusing for the first few encounters as it seemed much scarier than it really was.

The early days started to feel like a slog after some repeated runs. There wasn't anything interesting happening and nothing you could do to improve your score as that was predetermined. But trying to breeze through that made me sloppy and prone to mistakes. A similar thing that happens often in roguelikes that you start trying to be fast to get to the interesting and new bits and start making stupid mistakes. But even in roguelikes (which are considered like the hardest genre ever) you aren't punished as hard as here. They always have some leeway for recovering but not here, just one stupid miss-step and you're done.

Like 75% of my runs ended before that day six marker where it actually starts to get interesting due to my dumb mistakes or enemy patterns that just can't be beaten. Usually that being two betas so near to each other in a "wrong" shape and you having no blocks to fall to. Well at least their AI wasn't perfect and you could sometimes juke them out even if they had you cornered.

The cutscenes get annoying. Even skipping them took forever. Any delays between tries (and levels) in a score chasing game like this start to really irritate fast.

And since you pretty much only die on your own stupidity or RNG being cheap, the end of the run never really feels good. At least it does have that "1 more" aspect but it would be boosted quite a lot if restarting and level transitions were quick and if there was something interesting in the early game too. At least like having the scoring be more skill based and not just "you get 80-120+ points randomly by level 10".

Good job! 👍 What is it that PICO-8 games pretty much always are far above other games in overall quality? 🤔

@antti-haavikko: Thanks for the detailed feedback! :D Yeah, the levels start sampling from the same distribution starting from level 10, which is why I drew the line there for beginning to track scores. The cutscene animations were in part to distract from PICO-8's limited CPU struggling to generate the next level- any noticeable delay when trying to skip is from the game exceeding the available CPU per frame. :( I do think it'd be good to have a toggle that will skip having to mash buttons to get to this freeze, though.

Oh right, makes sense. Did not know that PICO-8 has limited CPU too.

incredible game, super fun and addictive! i KNOW i can do more, i'm tryiiiiiing!!!

really, that's a great game, i love the mechanics, having to remember the moves of each enemy, the fact that each level is generated randomly, the nice pixel art (i love pico8 games)… it's like a game of chess, but funnier, and with seafood (i don't know where i'm going with this metaphor)

my plans right now: play again and beat my score


(i'll edit this post whenever i get a better score haha)

@amarokczukay: Congrats on making it onto the ≥ Day 10 board :D Glad to see you getting so much replay out of it!

Dang, this game was good! I've only gotten to day 8 so I'll have to continue some other day and get a high score.

Loved the art style and the grid dungeon movement, there were so many enemy variants too!
Only thing I wish would be added in the future is an endless mode / easy mode in which you can restart the level after you die

Hey congrats on the high ratings! Very deserved!