Squishy and the Fishes - cute frog bullet hell

Squishy and the Fishes was my entry into the August 26, 27th Chaos Jam game jam. The theme of this particular Chaos Jam was mutation. What better mutation than a cute frog that spews acid, and mutant angler fishes. Squishy is a simple bullet hell because I wanted to finally finish a game jam.

This Jam was also a bit of an opportunity to show that it's largely possible to develop a game under Linux using mostly open source tools. Squishy, the angler fishes, and the acid were all created using Inkscape, then brought into GIMP and resized/retouched. Version 2 of Squishy, the pink blobs of slime, and the explosions were all created using Aseprite (I use it through Steam as it's easier updating). Finally, an older version of Audacity was used to record and create the "whisssh" sound effect you hear when the fishes are destroyed. While Gamemaker 2 is not completely free and open source, of you do some digging you'll discover parts of it are. Godot might have been a better choice open source wise, but my previous experience with Gamemaker made it the obvious choice as I wouldn't have to learn something completely new in 48 hours. Gamemaker is in beta for Linux, another good reason to test it.

Squishy was released to the jam with a number of bugs that have since been fixed. Initially, fishes could spawn right on top of Squishy - this made the game annoyingly hard. That was the first thing I fixed. Most recently I updated the Squishy animation. Squishy is a bit smaller, looks more like a swimming frog, and has an even smaller hitbox. This translates into the fishes having a harder time catching Squishy. It is, for example, possible for a fish to connect with a leg, but still not eat Squishy.

The bouncing pink bullets now last 5x longer. It's still not long, so be sparring with those bullets. For the moment there are still only 4, and the spawn location is not random. I plan on adding more power ups in the future, and adding random spawning when I do.

An outer wall has been added to Squishy and the Fishes. There was no wall during the jam, which probably led to some confusion as to how far you could swim (off screen actually). Squishy and the fishes are now confined to the space within the pond.

At one point I tried adding gamepad support, but my Xbox 360 game controllers all had issues, so I couldn't test anything and I'm not even sure I left the code in the game for controller support. If you play with a controller, it's probably not going to be a premium experience. Until I get a working controller again, Squishy probably won't have smooth controller support - use a mouse.

Will there ever be a MacOS version? Possibly, I might have access to an Intel-based Macbook. But no promises, as the last time I looked at trying to do a MacOS version of a program it proved to be much more pain than doing any other version.

Linux verdict. I was able to completely develop Squishy and the Fishes using Linux. Despite the fact that Gamemaker warns you it's an unstable beta, I really didn't run into a lot of issues. Gamemaker became unstable once, but it warned me that it had become unstable AND let me save my project files. When I opened Gamemaker back up the project was fine. I even tested to see what would happen if I left the project open and rebooted Linux, the project and Gamemaker were fine.

Finally, a shout out to all the people in the Chaos Jam for their encouragement. It was the first jam, and only jam, where I successfully submitted a game before the deadline. Thanks for all your kind words, despite the bugs. I hope some of the fixes of this version make the game a bit more playable. Look for more soon.