UPDATES:

2/17/2020

Fixed broken input on Firefox

Added some drag to the fish so you can slow down by flying belly first

2/17/2020

Tweaked drag on fish so it doesn't slow you so much, but lets you steer slightly

Added a wind effect to help visualize your velocity

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So this is actually the 2nd game jam this game was going to be a part of, and I STILL didn't really get it finished how I wanted.

Last year, I decided to join in on the Wick Editor Jam. The theme was basically make a Wick game that felt like a classic NG Flash game. I knew Wick Editor wasn't all that full featured, so I opted to go with a really simple toss game, like Kitten Cannon!

I put together a rough demo and did a bunch of art, but Wick just wasn't up to snuff. The game just ran like crap, so I rage quit that jam and moved on. On a whim I copied as much of my Wick work to a Phaser project as I could manage, and it just sat in a folder on my laptop collecting dust for months.

Then, some genius got @TomFulp and @PhotonStorm together to host a Phaser game jam, and I figured I would just breeze through and finish up my simple game that already had a bunch of groundwork done. I figured since Phaser is a lot more full-featured than Wick was, I'd add a bunch more gameplay too. I always liked how Toss the Turtle gave the player a sense of control, so I added in the rocket powerup. That was nice and all, but it needed to mix up the gameplay a bit while so I added the glider and wings next. Then I got sick of how my code was organized and I started cleaning it up.

By the time I got back into the game, I had become more interested in experimenting with Phaser rather than just finishing the damn thing. I spent a bunch of time writing tutorials for other people whenever I figured something useful out. I still had a few weeks left right?

Well my simple game got ambitious. I started thinking there needed to be goals, rather than just trying to go far. So I added in orbs to use as money, and an achievement system that would give you new things to do as you played over and over. Of course adding all this stuff meant I had to build a bunch of menus and user interfaces. And at that point, it was somehow already 3 days before the Jam deadline.

This is one areas I SORELY miss doing in Flash. You can bang out a decent interface in minutes if you have a nice visual IDE. I did all of mine in pure code, using vanilla JavaScript because I'm a masochist.

I literally spent the last 2 days just building interfaces, and my big ambitions for the actual game just didn't make it. But at least all the menus work with pure touch or pure keyboard input, so people can play it however they prefer, on whatever device they like.

This version is really bare-bones, and quite buggy. I opted to just publish it anyway (as a prototype) so it could be included in PhaserJam2020, but I will definitely be taking more time and releasing a proper, finished version at some point.

I want to add a few more purchasable items to the game, different fish you can unlock, tons more achievements, different backgrounds, sound settings, a better pause screen, etc etc. I think with some more time, there's a really fun (and maybe even commercially viable) game here.

Hopefully you guys get enough of a taste with this version to want more.

If you happen to be running this game on old hardware , and you notice the game is really slow, try disabling WebGL in the options menu.

There's some bugs where certain menus don't seem to get removed when the game starts too that I'm aware of. Hopefully I can fix those soon. If you get stuck reload the game and it should pick up where you left off.