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[aeiowu]

Wild 'n' Free: A True Story
Arrow keys to move.  "Esc" to access the options menu.

Aid the Boto in his quest to cleanse the amazon of modern man's blight on our eco-system. His sharpened friends, the piranha, have vowed their allegiance in our efforts and many will soon follow with their signatures on our petition of majesty. March(swim) on with your brothers and sisters to find our destined glory!

The object of the game is to destroy as many polluting sea-vessels as possible without getting annihilated by said pollution.  The kelp on the sea floor heals you, and the swarming piranha are your weapons.  Use their inertia to hurl them out of the water and onto boats where they wreak their own Amazonian brand of havoc.

This game has been in the works since the release of Deathworm.  Mike had the idea to make a Deathworm-like game in flash, so we did last summer, but it never really took off and wasn't all that interesting.  So we just played more Deathworm instead.  Nonetheless this fun little pet project of ours has been a long time coming, and when we changed its title from Professor Porpoise: Adjunct Faculty Adviser to the Apocalypse to Wild 'n' Free: A True Story things got pretty fun development wise.  We added the piranha mechanic and made the avatar (Boto) more of a leader than the main damage dealer.  We hope you enjoy it, and please give us all your feedback, we'll be making changes and whatnot here and there when we have free time.

Thanks for playing!
~ Mike and Greg

[Noyb]

Neat twist on the Deathworm mechanic. I liked the idea of indirect control, and it was fun once I figured out that my sharp-nosed dolphin didn't deal any damage. My highscore was 3360, mostly by staying near the surface without jumping, and diving down to heal when I was low on health in case that makes a difference. Fun!

Nitpicks/Comments:

• Right now, since all enemies are close to the water's surface, there isn't much incentive for the player to jump out of the water. Even less, since the cruise ships' sonar works in the air as well. Maybe a minimap would help the player plan out jumping attacks from farther away?
• You lose life *really fast* in an oil spill.
• You should probably spawn enemies off-screen, since they're prone to just pop on with no explanation, even over piranhas.
• Destroying the boats could feel more satisfying than having them disappear to tiny explosions. Having them sink and pile up on the seabed would be hilarious, although probably counter to the tongue-in-cheek environmental method.
• Might be fun if the crew of the boats tried to abandon ship and swim away, to be killed later for more points.
• It feels annoying as a player that you can eat plants even when your health is full.
• The game lags as you get more piranhas and larger ships to destroy.
• Sometimes the camera lost track of the dolphin. I'm not sure whether this was due to lag or some code to prioritize destroyed ships over player movement.
• Restarting seems to take the focus off the flash or something, requiring me to click again before I can move.
  

[jeb]

Nice idea. I got 3170 points but, whining like a true Diablo player, I was killed by lag. The game has a severe performance issue. When more than one ship was destroyed at the same time, the game would freeze up for a second or so, and then jump forward. During this time I had no chance to control my fish, so it was a gamble every time I reached the surface.

[Guert]

Hey there! I played the game. It's a nice twist but I had a hard time figuring out that I needed to lure the piranhas at the boats since I have a "sword nose" and all. In general, I think the game is nice but it feels very similar to death worm and it felt like it lacked depth. I haven't played very long, I'm not that good at this, but after 5 minutes, I felt like it was repetitive. It could be interesting to diversify the types of challenges in the game, like adding nets that catches the piranhas, which you have to destroy to free them or some way to grab the fishing lines of small boat and drag them around the map and smash them against each others (but you wouldn't be able to do that to big boats since they are too heavy).

So, in general, fun but it didn't feel very original and I thought it was too shallow gameplay-wise.  The graphic style is cool tho, I really dig it
Later!

[fucrate]

Yeah, there's a ton of things wrong with the game, but it's kind of at the bridge between the 80/20 point where it's not really worth it to keep developing much at this point.  Greg had a lot of fun doing the art style, which came out really awesome, and I had fun messing with the swarming mechanics of the fish, and really that's enough for us for the time being.

Thanks for the comments though, maybe if we can think of enough interesting ways to push the gameplay we might revisit it later on.