FISH

Wow, handwritten assembly! :O

I haven't beaten the game yet, but I'll come back for it. What do you mean by Laaph rigging the theme?

Really impressive entry, well done! Cool SFX and nice gameplay. The animations and art are cute and I really started to empathise with the protagonist. The load/save was a lifesaver for me, as I'm bad at jumping and, apparently, even worse at figuring out puzzles - so thanks for that. Some nice humour too. Good job!

@DiningPhilosopher Nobody rigged any themes! Alakajam is completely fair, Laaphgate 2023 never happened. No mods are editing anyone's comments, I'm not sure where you heard such a rumour!

@toasty thanks for playing! The audio is pretty bad but I was out of time as you know. I'm glad you enjoyed cheating your way through the game, hacker

Impressive work, an all assembly NES homebrew, in so little time, even in an easier platform it would be a solid jam entry!

There's certainly a smoothness to the jumps and collission detection that you really start to appreciate once you forget where the fire-once gun-traps are for the tenth time. (This is not the games fault per-se… the guns are telegraphed just enough.) I also like the cylinder approach, where it's all a single column, but wraps around.

I'm not always good at anything involving action+, so I noticed that the way you fall is a bit strange: It matters where the 'floor' of the screen is, rather than the height our fishy friend is falling from. So if your previous jump was higher and it ratcheted up the ceiling, you'd die in spots you didn't last time. Not really a problem though, just an oddity.

(You can't always see the leftover dots on the bottom, but I found it not to be a problem in practice.)

Anyway, I've seen the writing on the wall. (And in the game.) I might keep trying, maybe I'll find the spot where I actually need to use the bubble. -- Maybe if I continue just a bit … hold on, I think I smell something burning. (It was basically on the next screen from where I died. I'm nearly? at the credits now.)

Good difficulty curve. (The way you show of the first gun is neat.) And if I can manage it, it must not be too hard.

+) Bad enough apparently. that at first I thought the bubbles made me float a bit, allowing me to make jumps I otherwise couldn't. I think I just described the plot of Dumbo, but that's neither here nor there.

@kdrnic thx bb jaja. I think you're probably the one person here that can appreciate the effort

@remco huh, you might be right about the scrolling affecting the jumps. Originally there was supposed to be a more obvious 'death zone' at the bottom of the screen that scrolled up the world as a static part of the screen, but I had some last minute bugs with it that I just couldn't overcome in time. Thank you for the considerate feedback - and if it makes you feel any better, I repeatedly die to the obvious traps too

Really tightly-scoped, knows what it's doing and does it well.
Great fun level with a lot of variation and a couple of neat unique mechanics.
I loved the fish jumping out of water and walking on their tail, made me laugh a lot.
The things that shoot at you were quite punishing, though it feels quite typical of the NES era so I suppose points for authenticity.
The bubble mechanic was a bit strange and I wasn't immediately sure what it was for.
Witty and humorous throughout, had a great time with it.

holy carp I cant believe that you made this in 48 hours
typo intended

+1 on the animations, the fish walking on their tail looked awesome :D
I would have also appreciated a checkpoint system, as it took me way too long to read about the manual saving, and by that point I was already kind of frustrated that I always had to restart at the beginning.
Also, the controls felt really good, but I think I would have liked either a little more gravity or a higher max falling speed, as the falling felt a bit too floaty for my taste.

Nevertheless, very solid entry, congrats! :)

This game is very nice! 6502 for NES in 24 hours!? I played the web version, not the emulated version, not the burned on to cart and on a real NES version, but it was still amazing.

We are still doing our best to be themegating and laaphgating, our plan is to make sure the theme changes daily so that no matter what your game idea is, you can easily find a theme that matches, but when the theme is finally decided only my game actually matches it. This should provide the best game jam satisfaction to all those partaking. :) I have to make sure there are enough conspiracy theories such that my name appears in more games!

I'm amazed you made a more advanced game for the NES than I did in Unity last time I submitted to LD!

The art style is very minimalistic but it works. The controls are tight enough that I blame myself, not the game when I fail. Although sometimes when trying to jump up through a gap the fish gets stuck to the walls and doesn't get high enough. It has a nice curve of introducing new mechanics along the way. Can't even imagine what kind of work goes to writing stuff in assembly. At least it paid off!

What an awesome entry! The art and sound really nail it. The mechanics work really well and there are so much funny details like the death animation. I like the idea of the screen wrapping.

Special props for writing a game in assembler and actually providing a NES rom.

Very well made entry! It's extremely impressive that the game's made in 6502 Assembly, even more in 24 hours. The gameplay physics take some getting used to, but otherwise it's really fun. Congrats!