Hi all! I just wrapped up making Fih, for Jame Gam 59. The theme was unstoppable, and we had to include an engine in the game somehow. I want to go over some of the development process for this game.
The idea started out as a friend and I were talking in a discord call. “Wouldn’t it be funny if you were like… a mechanical fish working for the Department Of Natural Resources to check people’s fishing licenses?” And, quite frankly, it was a really funny idea!
My first challenge was finding a good water shader. I have no experience making shaders myself, so I knew I was going to have to source one from somewhere. I found a shader that looked good on the Godot Marketplace, but when I tried to actually use it it had serious lighting issues!
After something like a day of looking around, I settled on this shader: https://godotshaders.com/shader/water-shader-3d-godot-4-3/. And I think it looks really good! At least, it looks better than the environment (the best textures i could get were 22×22)
which then brings us to something that took like two days!!! Which was modelling the bass
I am truly shocked at how well the bass actually turned out. I got a reference photo of a bass, and used it to create textures for a brush in blender so I could basically just dab scales everywhere. The fins could have been better, honestly, but it looks fine enough for the game jam. I’m fairly slow with 3D modelling, and I’m not a fantastic artist, but this Bass really worked well. The blue gill in the game is just a shrunk down bass model because i ran out of time, but I would have loved to make another fish.
Also something to point out is that only about half of the lake is used. The lake is, I believe, 200×200, but you only travel around a 100×200 area. The rest is covered up by a big chunk of terrain. This is because the game was starting to get pretty long for something you would play just a bit in a jam, and also I didn’t need to make another whole half of a lake’s worth of content!
This video helped me get through the jam.
The pontoon boats don’t look very good, and that’s because I was running out of time. I finished and uploaded the game at 4:30 AM, and I was honestly tired.
After the voting period ends, I plan on uploading the game here with some bugfixes and improvements. Stay tuned!