Platform: PC (Xbox)
You’re a slippery fish trying to escape a fish-stick factory. (How did you even end up there???) Channel your nerves into powerful farts to evade obstacles on the conveyor belt and slip your way out! Beware of the chomping fish-grinder!!!
This game was a continuation of a 2 day game jam I did, you can read more about that through this link!
For this project I iterated on one main mechanic (you guessed it: farting) and built a game around it using concentric design principles. The goal was to give the players a feeling of controlled chaos. The gameplay is similar to golfing but you can control the ball in air and while rolling, all while being a bit more slippery than your average golf ball.
Trailer video
After some initial brainstorming, I made three movement prototypes which I play tested with some friends. I ended up moving forward with a combination of the first and second prototype.
To make the game more chaotic, I wanted the movement to be a nice balance between having and not having control. I achieved this by splitting up the movement into different stages and having different levels of control for each stage. The player only has controls of the character when aiming, falling down and a little bit when sliding over the ground. This causes players to think more carefully about their launches and also enhances the slippery fish feel.
During early playtesting, the gameplay felt a little stiff and unengaging, so I decided to add slopes to the obstacles. This caused the slipperiness of yourself and the ground to become way more obvious and added more ways to interact with the obstacles. Especially because they can also be used to your advantage in combination with a powerful horizontal fart.
I also ended up adding boost rings to make the movement more fast paced and help the players with hitting some crazy slopes!
Final main mechanic notes
Obstacle design notes
For the onboarding, I made a small section where the player go to know all the movement mechanics without the pressure of the treadmill. Once they reach the end of the onboarding, the treadmill activates and they are greeted by a cutscene of the big chomper.
I made sure the onboarding is as compact as possible so that the player can get through it quickly. When players press restart, they can choose to replay with the onboarding or skip it instantly. There is also a restart button in the pause menu so that players who want to speedrun can quickly start again after failing!
