A Fish Out of Air

You are a little fish dropped into a tank. But it's not quite so lonely - meet your neighbors and try to help them out!

AFOOA is a prototype made for Just Play Jam 2023. The title comes from the phrase "a fish out of water" (which for me often means being deeply uncomfortable in social situations), combined with the phrase "out of thin air" because who would have thought the fish this school needed would drop in from the sky! I wanted to flip "a fish out of water" on its head, and hopefully you can quickly find a place in this little simulated community.

This was originally going to be a game about the isolation that disabled people can face and how, for me, it often feels like being a fish stuck in a small bowl. However, I wanted to lean more into the feeling of building community, and build off of something that's stuck with me from Let This Radicalize You: the refusal to abandon. 

Game Devs:

Thi Doan

Efrain Soriano

Assets from: 

Fish (mesh, rig, animation), anchor, filter - Thi Doan

Environment, props, base blueprints, VFX - Unreal Online Learning and Code Coven

Music - Oleg Kyrylkovv (aka Music_For_Videos on pixabay) https://pixabay.com/music/modern-classical-relaxing-145038/

Bubble SFX - kwahmah_02 on Freesound https://freesound.org/people/kwahmah_02/sounds/261597/

Unreal Starter Content

As a sidenote, we found this game jam very late into it and had only a week to develop. There's a lot more we want to add, which we can hopefully do soon!