A small 2D game made from scratch for the 29th LudumDare 48 hour competition. Created with GameMaker: Studio. You play as a school of fish as you move through the level you find more fish to add to the school. The novel thing about this game is that you control multiple entities at once, the idea was inspired by boids AI.

Being my first jam/competition the biggest challenge was stress more than anything else. I had no idea what’s possible to achieve in 48 hours and I wasn’t feeling confident in my artistic skills, so I settled for simple black sprites on blue background and later added shadows and god rays (scaled and rotated gradients with either additive or subtractive modulation function).

I also had not touched GameMaker in a while, so I had to figure out how to use it again. I did very little actual game design or planning and most of it was simply building on the original idea, the game ended up being evasion in an obstacle course, where the core skills were mastery of the controls, timing and learning how the fish AI works. Looking back I could have spent more time on polishing the gameplay rather than the graphics.