The game looks very nice, the style, music and everything fits very well. The fish always being pulled to the center felt a little weird. Unfortunately the game crashed after reaching the bottom but was enough to get a good look at it.

@lenan Ah! I have fixed it (0.0 not 0 in a shader specifically for html5...). The bottom is the midpoint so if you want to see what the ending is it should work now.
Edit: Ah, the center thing was kind of a early test for movement so I just removed it as well.

Very pretty!

Very nice game, really like the animation on the fish as well as how the text appears piece by piece. Very touching story as well.

The fish looks fantastic! The animation almost appears 3D at times; Super great work!
You've always done an excellent job making games with heavy emotions.

Loved the style, animation, and message. Thanks for the emotional check-in!

ough that hit a spot in me, i'll say. Not the usual kind of entry i see, but lovely nonetheless. animations are really nice

This game puts unstability in narrative instead of mechanic. Not my cup of tea but did complete the game and get the message.

This is just so sweet, I loved it! It hits close to home, made me a little emo :cry:

This entry is lovely. The animations are simple but very well executed. The music matches perfectly. I was expecting some more game mechanics in addition to the narrative but the cuteness of the fish and the overall mood compensate that! Would be very curious to see what it could look like if pushed further than a ldjam entry

Very sweet game. It's a bit slow to reveal the text though, and didn't really see much of interactivity though it, but still it was a nice experience.

I'm glad the fish made it through. The chain-moment was very sad, and removing the input there made the point very well. I liked the graphics (I have a soft spot for monochromatic games) but also the text effects! Well done.

So cute and poetic, as always with your entries I just experimented a short special moment, thank you and good job!

A very beautiful experience. Would have been perfect if not ruined by the painfully slow pacing!
The visuals are so simple and yet so charming!

@elastic thanks!

@gamepopper Thanks! I was able to try out more shader stuff and do animation there :). Glad story was touching for you!

@100th-coin Just 4 frames for the tilt to the side and the rest is sine waves in a very specifically applied shader. Still figuring out the writing thing, thanks!

@badbill Thanks, glad it was encouraging!

@torcado Thanks! I wasn't sure if it would work (a whole lot of one shot features just following a narrative and not using anything tilemap-based haha) so this was pretty experimental for me too!

@bloodbane thanks! Yes that was my thinking haha.

@notaltright thank you! I think self reflection is always good, just gotta make sure it's not rumination, friends can be very helpful for that.

@jeremyfa thanks! There were a bunch of other things I was planning to add, but as it turns out adding events to a narrative means that every new thing is a new feature. Probably something I'll get back to at some point (especially in the 2nd half of game).

@mateusboga The tears passing over the text reveal it, but the feedback ended up being not super clear for that. Also this is not explained, but you can move the friend mote up and down and that also reveals the text faster.

@kumber Thanks! I am glad the fish made it through too.

@lereveur Thank you, I hope it was encouraging!

@nyxkn Haha, it used to be slower and I had to speed it up. The tears coming from the fish reveal the text, and the friend also reveals the text faster. But I don't really explain that and it's possible to play through it a bit slower. I may try and add more feedback to that (aka rework how the text reveals) but that will be a later thing. Thanks!

I supose you game will be at good place in fun, because it is FUN. You art is not good, sorry. Overall your game is good, good job.

One last note: I always write down honest review, because everybody need that, not just nice craps with some bullshit, but sometime I will appreciate very good games. So if this review insult you, but use it well :) Anyway every game is counting so :)

Delightful experience. Nice execution on the message (and a lovely one), conveys the proper emotions perfectly. However, (and this is personal taste) I feel like the gameplay should add something meaningful to the narrative. It seems to me that the mechanics here fell a little flat, or better said, didn't add the depth I hoped for. Still an incredible game (and more so for a compo!), and one I'm glad I played!!

Wow this was a beautiful little game! A nice little bite sized experience, with really beautiful minimalist art which I loved. I really liked the little touches where the narrative and animation crossed over into the gameplay, like when it was "you can't move" you couldn't move, and when the little orb pulled you up to reach the text. Really nice and out of the box thinking. I totally disagree with the above comment from @hadik I think it looked amazing, it wasn't particularly fun, and it clearly wasn't supposed to be :/ I loved it!

I loved the art style and how the fish's tears were used to reveal the text.

@hadik Honest is good, but you'll have to give more detail for it to be helpful. In what way is the art not good? For example, "it did not feel like the fish was even crying because the tears did not visibly come out of its eyes." Honesty can be encouraging, but it can also tear down or make someone feel bad. Sometimes it's just about the way it's done. If it can be done in a nicer way (or even just in a more specific way), wouldn't that be preferable? A lot of times, giving feedback really just reveals more about the person giving feedback rather than the subject (for example, someone's personal preference for the art style, what kind of game they are even looking for, etc).

@qaeron Thanks! I had some more ideas, but as it is with implementing everything towards a narrative every thing I wanted to add ended up being a new thing to add (who would have thought haha). Having the tears do something more was something I was thinking about, especially at the turnaround, and will probably be something I'll keep thinking about.

@weirdybeardyman Thanks! I'll just generalize "fun" as "engaging" as usually that's what people are really looking for.

@kalevrk thanks!

There are so many subtle things going on here that I almost lack for words. It's not just the chains taking away control, some action mimicking the words that will appear is happening for nearly every phrase!

As for the art, the music*, and how it all fits so, so well together: It reminds me of that story about a client coming back to complain to the artist, that, yes, it was very pretty, but did they really have to pay so much for 2 pen-strokes, and wait for years for that? Then the artist takes the client on a tour through their house and countless of sketches and studies done in preparation for those two lines lie on all surfaces and pour out of every cupboard and chest that is opened. (It may have lost something in the retelling, but I think about it often.)

(*: It's interesting how music you suspect wouldn't be that (for lack of a better word) 'good' on it's own can nonetheless perfectly fit a certain mood or other piece of media, isn't it?)

One last thing: When I put it in full screen immediately after the haxe-flixel logo, it took a very long time to load (or maybe I already clicked a few times when it was still loading something and then needed to click again to start). So much so that I almost went to close it and write a comment about how it wouldn't start for me. I've been trying to reproduce it, but no luck, it now starts fine.

Thanks for this little experience! I appreciated the care on the details and how the graphics albeit simple, were not basic. You told a story with not much, and that was exactly the point, there was nothing else to take out.

Wow! I love this idea and concept! It speaks to the failure of language to express emotional trauma I think. I really like the mechanic of the tears revealing the dialogue as well. Great Job!

Very artistic approach to the topic! I like that things that happends along the way are impacting controlls, so I can really expierience things that are discussed in game!

Also I would like to ask, how did you animate the fish?

I enjoyed the game. It feels very polished (story, graphics, musics, etc). Simple, yet there is a very good mood to it. I can smell the passion behind it :). Perfectly fits my representation of LD games.

@ryjcio Thanks! For the animation, the fish has four main frames for tilting when you change direction (and duplicate frames for blinking and getting hurt). Then the swimming is a shader with 3 sine waves specifically applied across different masks on the frame uv ratios. One mask is for the tail, one is for the fins on the side, one is for the head. There are also some values fed into the shader so when you are moving, the tail and fins will wiggle faster.

@wafflesys thank you, glad you enjoyed it!

I like the visual effects, and the change from tears rising to tears falling was cool.

It would have been nice if there was some more visual feedback for the tears colliding with the text (like if they disappear or change color when they collide with the text).

I think this is not really my kind of game, since there isn't too much to do while waiting for the text to appear. I can see it having nice emotional impact for some people.

Oh, this is a different-paced project coming from you! It is fairly short and narrative focused, which...I admit, isn't really my cup of tea. Still, there were some interesting details I liked: for one, I liked how there were timed controls limitations that helps add to the narrative impact. I got the sense that the text reveals themselves, regardless of whether the tears hits it or not; but there was one moment where I felt that detail was really effective. The "positive" text reveal about still having control over the situation in particular was memorable, given how ironically little control I had in revealing the text itself. That said, it also made the segment *feel* like a struggle, so I guess it worked as intended.

I'm unfortunately not a huge fan of what little control I had over revealing the text and interacting with in-game elements. I can tell those game design decisions were deliberate...and I simply didn't like them. Still, at least I thought it was an interesting experience, with a few shining moments.

@almost thanks! That's good feedback I'll like to address whenever I come back to this.

@omiya-games thanks! I'd like the text revealing to be a bit more one to one actually, had some "level design" thoughts that I ended up not really doing because of how the text reveals itself (aka trying to access frame data for text is complicated and I ended up with the brute force solution of covering the text with squares and the collision detection for it is bad). I'd also like a bit more interactive bits, but since it's all tied to the narrative it ends up being a new thing for each moment. That's helpful feedback though, thanks!