I wanted to capture the relaxing, calm and mysterious underwater atmosphere while still creating some very intense moments.
Even though I usually start with the gameplay, this time around I decided on a setting first and built the gameplay around that.
I saved the most important stats from every match in a big excel sheet. Each iteration of the game had its own sheet. I manly used this to check the win rate of both fishes as well as the average damage output of all abilities.
The yellow circle encourages an offensive playstyle. It gets smaller over time and if you manage to push your opponent out of the circle, you can collect the power up in the center as a reward.
This was the first prototype. It had asymmetric input methods. One player had to use mouse and keyboard and the other one played with a gamepad. Even though that was quite interesting I later changed it to two gamepads to make it more accessible.
I added one ability at a time. Before adding even more stuff I wanted to make sure that what I had was interesting, fun and could be used in a number of different ways.
This was my first attempt to force players into a more aggressive playstyle. Who ever collected three yellow fish first instantly won. As long as the other player was in the yellow circle, too, you couldn't collect it.
One of my self set restrictions was that every ability only requires the press of a button. You don't need to aim. You don't need to do anything else. This keeps it simple and allows beginners to have some success, too.
When designing an ability, I had a close look at every other ability currently in the game and asked myself the question: How do those two abilities interact with each other? If there wasn't anything interesting there, I scrapped it.
I documented all major changes I made during development in this pdf document. This helped me to reflected on my decisions. It is also nice to know that what you have learned can't get lost that easily.
Not only did I try to make an ability fun to use, I also tried to make playing against it as fun as possible. That means players always need to have a fair chance to counter an ability and doing so should feel as rewarding as possible.
Some things I did to add replay value: There are three different maps, you get a random upgrade when you manage to collect a power up and power ups spawn at random positions.
Both fishes have their own character, theme and playstyle. The blue fish is all about ranged combat and electricity, the red fish is about speed, melee combat and bubbles.
One of my final decisions was to add a pretty significant catch up mechanic. The more health you have compared to your opponent, the more (ore less) damage you take. This wasn't noticed by any of my testers, but after implementing this change they wanted to play against me for a lot longer, because the matches weren't as one sided. Don't judge me - I like playing my games. :D
