Garbage Monger

Drag the garbage to the robot fish before the real fish eats it and mutates. If the fish mutates too much, it will leave the sea and attack the city!

When the robot fish is full, it will blink red for a few
seconds and slow down while it's digesting and not accept more food until it's finished.

I am at this solo with many assets used from opengameart (the only art I did myself was the ofean background and the
silly fish sprites), but I could really use some art for the fish and its various stages of mutation.

Voting results

Climateness

5th

50%

5.667

Changeness

5th

50%

4.500

Jamminess

3rd

25%

6.000

This game entered in the Ranked competition (8 entries).

Comments (7)

Sewo • 5 years ago •

Hello , the base of the game is correct however some song are maybe a bit so much high.
Good start.

Tushar • 5 years ago •

Its a fun game! The monster fish is especially mean looking XD. You can add to the mechanics to make the player actions more varied(to give the player more choices). Also the game's play length can be increased. Apart from that the art was simple but cool.

SavedByZero • 5 years ago •

Thanks all. Yes, I definitely plan to add to the length. Ultimately the idea will be that you protect the fish long enough that it swims away, and more fish come on screen needing protection (with their own art and mutations and cartoony city attack endings). Also a simple store interface to spend garbage collection points on improvements to your robot fish.

Thrainsa • 5 years ago •

Nice little game.
Some idea for improving the gameplay without adding too much feature:

Keep the real fish away from the top and bottom of the see, sometimes you can't catch the garbage first.
Drop more garbage at the same time so you need to focus more on the way to move garbage while the robot digest them
With the fish not able to eat the garbage on the bottom of the see you will have garbage stacking at the bottom and the image of a pollute see will be more efficient I think ;)
Add a restart button
Enable Hightscore ;)

ratrogue • 5 years ago •

Cute game, although I am not sure giant mutants destroying cities will be the biggest danger of climate change. ;) It really needs a "Restart" at the end.

Wan • 5 years ago •

A fun idea, I like the idea of a robot fish that detects and captures waste at sea. It could become a thing sometimes, who knows :P

The gameplay is decent but could use more balancing to rely on skill more: for instance I could see the game work better if the fishes were 3x smaller, not too fast and with their collision detection boxes smaller (sometimes the real fish can eat something from far away). The fishes could also be both kept away from the surface enough to always give us the time to click on trash. In compensation, trash items could be thrown in more often to make the player panic a bit more.

A couple things I found pretty cool:

The fish AI was good. It was fun to move the trash around and see one or both fishes follow you. It we had a bad AI both fishes would at some point always stay with each other because they're following the same items. Here there's some randomness (and I think a max view distance) which is nice.
The robot fish having to digest food is a great mechanic to add some complexity :)

SavedByZero • 5 years ago •

Thanks, yeah -- these are all suggestions I agree with. Funny you should mention smaller fish, I'm making some new ones ("real" ones) now and I instinctively downsized them to make the play area feel bigger (it;s 1280x720, yet it still felt filled up).

It's too bad updating is essentially locked now, or I'd also put in the restart button.