Hyper Fin News

How did it get to be May already!?!? So much for our daily devlog goals hehe...he :(

Anyways, we've finally finally finally made it past the dreaded tax season and contract work is predictable enough at the moment to dive back into Fish Combat!

This round I've started work on a new main character model for our favorite Fish-like creature. No longer is it just a tweaked out version of the character model from Accelerated (our slower progressing Fish Combat Game). This puts us much closer to a final, defined art style for the game.



Concept art for the new character, that armored one might return as another skin, what do ya think?


It took a bit of trial and error to take what we had for Accelerated, an Inuit themed style with a slight prehistoric hint, and push it to be more arcade-like. I think we've made it with this one, it'll help define our art direction for the environments and creatures going forward.

My next goal is to improve the animation and physics simulation for this new creature (the fins can move a bit strangely right now), then to jump into environment art upgrades! We had a few complaints that our environments looked 'gasp' unfinished. Now that my pride has had time to heal it's time to fix that issue. Fish Combat needs some prettier levels.

Wishlist Fish Combat: Arcade right here on Steam so you don't miss the chance to harshly judge our slow progress!!

We missed grabbing a booth to showcase at Pax East this year, but we still had a presence!

Cocky Rooster Games attended PAX in affordable style with printed posters on our backs and business cards to stealthily distribute amongst any empty table space. Hopefully they caught some good eyes!

While there we were able to meet and talk with lots of game devs and share strats on how to improve our games and survive as indies. Of course, we couldn’t resist stopping by the likes of Pokemon and Final Fantasy as well, had to grab us some of them free Pokemon cards!

A huge shout out to CBO Games with CBO TD (Dark Themed Tower Defense), Vmmersion studios with Scarlet Defiance: The Wall Between Us (Romantic Visual Novel), Astral ClockTower Studio with Kristala (Cat Skyrim), Scalisco with Corgi’s Cozy Hike (Cozy 3D Platformer) for letting us peck your brains and try your demos!

We also had a chance to attend PAX’s 20th Anniversary Concert! The Videri String Quartet and the rest of the music team did an amazing job. Their arrangement of Donkey Kong was especially epic.
Comment who your favorite group/song was! (and to rank up this post hehehe)

For as much as we saw, we definitely still missed a ton. If you were able to attend, please let us know what your favorite game was! We’d love to check more of them out :)


And don’t forget to wishlist Fish Combat Arcade right here on Steam to get updates on our progress, and to encourage the starving artist team to eat on occasion.

Enjoy a precious glimpse into the epicenes that was PAX EAST 2024!!!


Larian Studios had an epic looking castle display and Ammonite Ship!



Not sure if the Squirrel here was mechanical or a person in a suit. Looked mechanical when they moved it, pretty neat



Pokemon went all out with the dancing Pikachus!



I'd be awesome to bring a tank someday



Nice view from PAX, but a not so nice cold bike ride back from PAX



Concerts!!

The epic story continues! We are making progress for Fish Combat: Arcade’s logo for our very third DevLog, continuing from the cliff-hanger ending of DevLog 2!!

We have been struggling with how to organize the words. The original idea was to make it look like a fish. The word “Fish” would be the fin, “Arcade” the tail, and “Combat” would be the body.

After agonizing for hours over the “fishiness” of the F, we decided to go with the rule of thumb: Simple is Best. The rest will be all your space for imagination ːsteamhappyː :)

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Please let us know of all our graphic design sins by commenting below! Let us know which version is best!

And don’t forget to wishlist Fish Combat Arcade to get updates on our progress.

Welcome to Fish Combat: Arcade's second DevLog!!

We actually made it to the second one, a true record I know haha. We've got the goal of increasing the number of these things we do each week and we shall achieve it! ...eventually

Today we've started on some desperately needed UI updates. Feast your eyes on some Ultra Exciting in-progress shots of our new Health bar and Logo!!!

I know, much better than all them levels and gameplay we usually post. You're welcome :)





Btw, if you see roasted corn tea in a market sometime you should try it. I'm drinking some as I type this and it's really good. It's much better than it sounds I promise!

Please Go Wishlist Fish Combat Arcade or we'll give you more ugly UI posts!

Welcome to Fish Combat Arcade's First Dev Log!!

Fish Combat is a New Movement based Combat game built around speed! Our design has it set be a speed running arcade game with RPG progression elements. Thus far we've got the first part in, got quite a bit of RPG elements left to code though haha.

We're winging it on this game marketing adventure so please please nag our ears off when we write something boring so we can get better :)

Some of you might be coming from our Fish Combat: Accelerated page and wondering why there's now two Fish Combats. That is due to budget/timeline constraints. Accelerated has a more complex environment, character art, story, and boss battle system and thus will be releasing after Arcade. Arcade gives us a chance to not only finish a game before we starve but also hone in on the core of Fish Combat to make focused improvements that we wouldn't have been able to achieve if we'd stuck to our original release schedule. Rest assured, we will be throwing everything we have into making FC Arcade into an full scale epic experience!

And Thus, our humble humble dev log:

Updates from the days when we actually did work:

• Improved the first part of the tutorial! (it reaaally needed it) Got us some better lighting and colors, better environment design, more straightforward level design, and cut off some extra bits at the end that were just slowing people down. It's much faster now... still got some work to do though. We've currently got a few text pop-up that explain the controls and they're incredibly annoying when they stop you in the middle of dashing around.
  
• Experimented with a new environment shader. The idea was that there'd be dots on the ground and when you move quickly they'd stretch, similar to going light speed in Star Wars. It didn't work out as planned so I'll be polishing the grid shader instead. (It was very disorienting when turning and made the environment too hard to read)
  

Thank you for reading all that! (Maybe future dev logs should be less wordy?)

Please go Wishlist Fish Combat: Arcade so you don't miss this epic adventure!