fishy facts preproduction announcement

I started preproduction for a new singleplayer tile-laying puzzle game called fishy facts, which is about a marine biologist and a succubus going on dates to the aquarium. The succubus, who is at first interested for ulterior reasons, falls for the wholesome, nerdy marine biologist as she recounts fish facts and fish puns! The succubus expresses her love by gifting the marine biologist a sea creature plushie from the aquarium gift store and at the end of the story they are hanging out at home with all of the plushies piled up nearby. That's the general idea, at least.

why now

You might remember that I also recently announced preproduction for another game earlier this year. I would normally avoid working on two games at the same time. The reasons I'm working on this game right now while I'm also working on DOSIMETER include:

• It will likely take several years to make DOSIMETER and my art partner Tanuki is only available part-time.
• I want to make a name for myself as a developer who makes good yuri games and attract an audience.
• DOSIMETER has an emotionally intense storyline -- in fact, all of my published games do. I would like to finally make something more lighthearted, cute, and funny!
• I am no longer actively seeking full-time employment, so I need to make more money. I can't risk waiting five years to see if DOSIMETER is financially successful, so a shorter game is necessary.
• Small games have different development needs than longer ones, and I still enjoy that production puzzle.

As usual, I don't have a timeline for this game yet. During pre-production, I want to make a prototype that:

• Allows players to build their own puzzles
• Has an aquarium map that acts as a level selection screen
• Has narrative hooks at the beginning and end of puzzles to deliver the story

After I make this prototype, I plan on developing a more concrete timeline.

what's been done so far

Here's the tile reference sheet:

You may notice that the 63 tiles look vaguely similar to the circuit sliding block puzzle from no signal. The puzzle will work largely the same way; you have a bunch of dots that need to be connected with the paths drawn on the tile. However, I wanted to make the puzzle a bit more interesting and a little less frustrating, so I added the following changes:

• You can move and rotate the tiles freely instead of needing to slide them around. You still cannot flip the tiles.
• The tiles themselves are more complicated, featuring paths that don't intersect and wind around each other.
• The dots can be colored and the puzzle requires you to connect all dots with the same color without mixing them.

The slices at the bottom of the reference sheet show the 18 different slices needed to build all of the tiles. Instead of making 63 different tiles, we can make 18 slices and then glue those together to render a full tile. This part of the problem was completed by using some CSG and a generator script to build the necessary assets.

I've started on the editor as well, but it doesn't look like much. You can make basic puzzles, but it will need a lot of polish and there are a couple of bugs that still need addressing.

One particular feature I'm quite proud of is the ability to place paths by drawing them on the tiles instead of picking up the tiles one by one and toggling through the different path states. This will make it a lot easier to make puzzles.

There's still quite a lot to do with the editor -- you can see the list of TODOs here as of this writing -- but I feel like it's getting very close to being ready for others to try using.

future plans

The plan is to layer more mechanics on top of this puzzle design as you visit different places in the aquarium. So, the list of locations and mechanics may end up changing. Here are the different stages and their associated mechanics that I currently have in mind:

• Touch pool (tutorial)
  • Basic, no extra mechanics
  • No tiles that have multiple paths on them
• Open Sea
  • Shapes made up of multiple tiles that have to be moved together
  • Tiles which emit directional light that go over other tiles, which are treated as an additional path.
  • Mirrors that reflect the light.
• Kelp Forest
  • Tiles which have multiple paths on them
  • Tiles that can only be rotated
  • Tiles that can only be moved
• Coral Reef
  • Tiles which can do color mixing.
• Tide Pool
  • Tiles that cannot be moved or rotated
  • The areas between the paths on a tile are colored and have to match the color of the areas in adjacent tiles.
• Deep Sea
  • Combination of all the mechanics in previous stages.

I am inspired by real-life aquariums that have open plans which let you go wherever you feel like going to next, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And, of course, I still love the idea of a story that can still work after being reordered. So, I want the player to visit the stages in whatever order they please -- I will only restrict the player to the touch pool for the first stage and the deep sea for the last stage.

estimated completion

Hopefully, it will only take me a month or two longer of preproduction to build out the complete prototype. Part of me is really drawn to spending a lot of time perfecting the editor, but I've got games to make! The editor polish can wait.

I've genuinely enjoyed the project so far though. The math I've had to do for this game has been a lot of fun to explore, I actually got to re-use quite a bit of code not just from no signal but also from older projects like flambe, and I feel like what I'm building now has a high chance at being reused again in future projects like DOSIMETER. I'm really excited! I feel like I'm finally starting to build my tools.

Right now, fishy facts is definitely my focus at the moment. You can catch me working on it at twitch.tv/exodrifter_ every Wednesday at 19:00 UTC and Friday at 23:00 UTC.