Ikan, the Little Fisher

Ikan the Little Fisher is a game about a small girl Ikan, who wants to be a famous fisherman, but is not taken seriously by her peers. "You are just a little girl!" they say. Ikan decides to show what she's made of and sets out on a quest to fish the Lake King, legendary, giant fish rumored to be living in the bottom of the lake near Ikan's home village. Help Ikan catch fish, earn money and upgrade her rod so she can reach the very bottom of the lake!

You control the sinking hook with arrow keys or wasd, and try to get as deep as you can. If you hit a fish, you start a fishing battle where you need to keep the fish on the screen while it tries frantically escape. Managing to pull the fish up you earn cash you can use to upgrade your fishing pole to make your hook sink and move faster, or make you pull the fish back harder and reel 'em in faster.

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to finish the game for both Compo and Jam, but I'm definitely going to finish the game and I'm currently working on full, finished and polished version.

The art looks awesome!
Good luck on the development.

-Maarten

Heh. Nice take on the theme.

The game is still heavily work in progress, but I'm trying my hardest to get the game done for Compo

I hear ya'. I basically started over a few hours ago and tried attacking my idea from a different angle. I'm still optimistic that I'll submit, if only for the Jam.

But I want to submit for the compo... maybe I should spend less time writing posts?

Ikan see this will be awesome

I can't wait to see your fish.

Bad news folks, I have run into some issues in making the fishing work properly and it's looking like I can't finish the game for the compo. I'm not sure if I'm going to submit it all, because the last thing I want is to submit a broken game only for people to point out how pretty it is, shame it's not working properly.

Here's some screenshots from the current build.

In the game, you control the sinking hook, and try to get as deep as you can and catch fishes. When you hit one, you start a battle where the fish is trying to get off the screen while it's being reeled up. You need to press to the opposite direction with arrow keys or wasd to keep the fish on the screen. When the fish is reeled up, you get money and you can visit shop to buy upgrades. You can upgrade your Line, which increases how deep you can go, Hook, which increases how fast you can move the hook and how quickly it sinks. Pole, which affects how hard you can pull back the fishes, making it easier to hold stronger ones on the screen. Lastly you can upgrade the Reel, which affects how quickly the fish is being pulled up.

My main problem is, when the fish hit your hook, I can't make them squirm and rapidly move around while changing directions properly. And with above mentioned upgrades, testing and balancing everything would take a long, long time.

I'll probably have to redo the current fishing system, but I'm not sure how I'm going to do that yet.

But it looks so nice...

Why not shoot for the jam, at least?

Also, could you post the "squirming" behavior? Maybe I could be of assistance.

Aww, really?

As was said, why not go for the Jam? Are the issues really that complicated D: ?
And I was waiting to play your submission

Don't give up - it's looking good so far.

Are you intending to bring this to mobiles if you finish the game post-compo? The screen ratio sorta lends me to think of that.

Are you intending to bring this to mobiles if you finish the game post-compo? The screen ratio sorta lends me to think of that.

I think about it. I picked the screen ratio because it was fitting and I'm most comfortable with making games to 480x320.

Also good news, I managed to fix the issues I had the fit the fishing. For now at least. I have 3 catchable fishes right now, I'll still need to make plenty more and make the deeper areas of the lake explorable.

I'd really love to see this on mobile - even for a few dollars.

Hey folks, you can test the early alpha build of the game here: http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/26130

Please note that it's still possibly buggy and unbalanced and it's missing lots of features like different depths, almost all the fish, and line upgrade is currently useless. Also the tutorial textes are outdated and I'm working on new tutorial that pauses the game while you read the hint bubbles.

Use arrow keys and WASD to control hook underwater. Upgrade the hook at shop to make it move and sink faster.

When you catch fish, use Arrow Keys or WASD to rapidly press to the opposite direction than where the fish is going to keep it on screen. Upgrading pole affects how strong your pulls are. Upgrading reel pulls the fishes to the surface faster.

Press Esc to return back to surface.
Press M to mute/unmute music

I would like to hear your thoughts about it and if you have suggestions how to improve, do tell please.

I'm thinking of cutting the separate shop screen entirely and just bring the shop windows to the main view when you press right. I'm also trying to streamline the gameplay by removing the spotlight in transitions and changing them to crossfades and slides.

Not bad at all

With the current controls, making it for mobile might be difficult. I haven't tried out the mobile joystick functions. Would they work for the wasd/udlr arrows?

Not bad at all

With the current controls, making it for mobile might be difficult. I haven't tried out the mobile joystick functions. Would they work for the wasd/udlr arrows?

For mobile, the surface view could simply have  buttons for visiting shop or starting fishing. Underwater, there could be two buttons like this for movement and pulling the fish. Or player could just tap either side of the screen.

Darn, mobile version starts sounding more and more appealing to make. I'm seriously considering it now.