Help make generations of fish survive the onslaught that is the trash in the ocean destroying their environment! Command your army of fish to destroy trash bags, plastic, and tires to stop their home from being destroyed!
Imagine a mix of Tetris, Space Invaders and Missile Command! (with the real-life fear of ocean pollution)
This game was made to help promote awareness of ocean pollution
Bottom Feeders was made under two mission statements:
Participating within a global games jam without impacting life and creating a movement system completely independent of any premade movement logic.
Within my position as a creative enabler, I witness so many projects that have the same stamps on them, unreal retargeted animations, or the same basic unity or unreal movement. I believe it's important within this generation of Game Developers to highlight the importance of understanding how basic mechanics are created. There is an ever-growing community of Game Developers who will never make a movement mechanic and that in my eyes stifles innovation.
Due to the restrictions of the time limit and not allowing myself to use any premade, default or plugin movement logic, it made me thing practice my critical and creative thinking to make a way for my fish army to maneuver itself around the sea. By utilising splines I created a method similar to an A* pathfinding. Making the fish independently make a spline path between themselves and their target location, splitting that spline path into multiple nodes (similar to Dijkstra's algorithm), and then deciding if the path is logical by asking questions such as static or dynamic obstacles. This way fish could move from A to B while understanding if there was anything in the way if something was going to be in their way, and dynamically changing its path from the node to node to make sure they were on the best path. One interesting highlight from this was the fact that fish would create a shoal when moving towards similar locations.