Row Your Boat - Postmortem

A simple game about rowing your boat away from a sea monster. Made in 4 days using Godot and Aseprite.

The bird is the highlight of "Row Your Boat". Originally the bird was just a child of the player and wouldn't fly off to catch fish but would just consume it if it was in the bird's range.  This was very static and uninteresting. To make the bird feel and act more free I made the bird a semi-child of the player by not directly parenting it in code but making it follow the player and loop around the player. I also gave it a few states which are Circle and Pursue. When a fish is in range and the player clicks the space bar the bird will switch to the pursue state, move to the fish, consume the fish and return to the player. If the bird is not being asked to pursue it will return to the circle state. This gave the bird a sense of freedom and make it feel lively.

The quality of the game compared to my previous work "Lava Hourglass" is significant, but there is still have a lot of room for improvement.