Whatever Floats Your Boat by Rage Paint Games
How to Play: - Throw starfish at your ship to patch holes in the hull.
Game Description:
Whatever Floats Your Boat is a physics based game where you have to throw starfish to keep the ship afloat until you reach the island. The ship hits a rock every 10 seconds, causing damage to the hull. If you fail to patch 5 holes, the ship will sink to the bottom of the ocean. Can you make it all the way to the island safely?
Team Members:
RagePaintGames consists of a married couple; Maui - the programmer/husband - and Signe (sea-nah) - the artist/wife. This is our 2nd game jam. You can check us out over at Twitch: https://twitch.tv/RagePaintGames.
Post Mortem:
This was our first time using the GoDot game engine. It definitely had some quirks to it, but we'll likely be using it again in the future. Signe's computer died at the end of day 1, but thankfully she was using Procreate on her iPad to create all the art assets for the game, so it didn't really impede on our game development - other than taking a little bit of time to troubleshoot and see if there was an easy fix.
If we had more time, we would have loved to add splashing water animations on the front of the boat to give it the illusion that it's moving forward through the water, as well as splash animations to the starfish when they fall into the water/miss the boat. Would have also liked to implement a "hard" and "extreme" mode -- could have lowered the amount of starfish spawning or lowered the amount of holes before the ship sinks to make this more difficult. Also wanted to add seagulls that would be on a different 10-sec interval than the rocks, that would be puncturing holes in the sail (hence the giant single sail).
Patch Notes:
v1.1 - Fixed bug where game wouldn't end sometimes, added full screen
Ratings
| Overall | 620th | 3.484⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 774th | 3.172⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 603th | 3.281⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 872th | 3.344⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 181th | 4.219⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 552th | 2.891⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 596th | 3.435⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
8/10
We came up with the name on the night before by looking up boat puns. XD
- Really feel polished
- Presence of a tutorial (that can be skipped!)
- Easy to understand
- Music changes with the fourth hole and the defeat animation/music/screen
- The defeat screen is beautiful (yes, that needed a point)
Cons / Feedback :
- The throwing mecanic is a bit cluncky (played on PC - I had some starships never going down xD), but this is made up for by the forgiving hitboxes
- The game is too easy (a higher difficulty is not always good, but with the ten second timing, if the hole is patched immediately, it's just a ten second wait untill the next interactive phase, and with nothing to do, it can get a bit boring). Maybe having less starships spawn or more holes per rock hit with (especially with a gradual augmentation) could make the game more engaging
Bug :
- The game kept playing after reaching the end (the scrolling kept going on, with the boat taking damage, the starships spawning, the ability to fix the ship...)
We had hoped to add different difficulty levels, but ran out of time at the end to implement them in. We wanted to have the starfish peel off after awhile (at random times), and also have seagulls puncturing holes in the sail on a different 10-sec interval than the rocks. In the end, we had to cut these things out of scope so that we could have a complete-feeling game, even if it was too easy.
Thanks for letting us know about the bug too! We oddly didn't experience this in our testing, so we'll have to play somemore today and see if we can replicate it and fix it. Appreciate you!!
I wanted to add a bit on the bug, since it seems I found a rare occurrence (bugs love me...) :
I think my end bug had something to do with having a starfish grabbed during the end, or throwing it before it ends and having it repair the boat after the supposed end. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I remember trying to fix the last hole right as the game ended, so it probably has something to do with it
@zerbu - We definitely noticed there's a bit of a learning curve for throwing the starfish. Perhaps a visual indicator would help people get a grasp of it sooner (like a dashed, arched line from the hand to the ship for the first throw). We're glad you enjoyed it and won!
@melbadream - After receiving your feedback, we figured it had to be something of that nature. We even witnessed the bug happen on a stream the other day -- it was truly funny to watch the ship crashing into the island. Plot twist! Thanks for giving us more information to go on the bug! We'll be hunting it down to squash it.
https://youtu.be/cbu3KZnDqik
It is ridiculousley easy. For a ludum dare game i expect games to be very hard, but this was too easy.
In the end i was mainly messing around and trying to fling the starfish with my eyes closed
Other than that everything is spot on, just needs more difficulty
Thanks for submitting your game to stream!
This was an absolutely lovely entry. The gameplay was simple, but unique, and the art style felt strangely nostalgic. :smile: Loved it!
Congratulations!
Overall really fun and polished, the starfish latching on felt generous but still very satisfying :3!