Puddlefish Saga

submission for Micro Jam 054 ("BIG")  Hosted by tommy, SeeOne February 2026

The original inspiration for the game was a music track i did back in February 2025:

https://exedexes1.itch.io/march-of-the-puddlefish-iii

And it does serve as the continuous looping main gameplay background music.

And the puddlefish artwork does serve as what the eponymous central character of the game looks like as a 3D extrusion of its 2D original art.

Why puddlefish? i was really intrigued by the art and it's also fan service because the concept was kinda cute so I knew I eventually wanted to make a game for the corresponding music track.  Kind of like some day i will get the Life of Rixlor concept from Lone Rabbits OST #7 but i haven't hit the skill levels yet or the right vibe session with Rosebud to feel like it deserves to be called main Life of Rixlor (different project, change of subject...) so i have discarded some things.  So like i say Fan service for the piece of music, at least in my little anticipatory brain.  Destiny of a sort.

WARNING before you get anywhere this thing freezes up in like less than a minute.

it's JUST proof of concept.  Pretty soon a process hits a bunch of errors that lock it up.

the combat is also not that demanding right now i've yet to see a single good guy soldier die in a fight so far.  I found that peoples experience will vary widely, sometimes theres only ever one puddlefish.  it will lock up pretty much 100% if you research more than 1 new tech right now.  but if you dont research any i got the game to peaceably be stable through several full waves of attackers and get like 2-3 puddlefish spawns before trouble started

This thing is slow and i've never seen itch -itself- complain it was out of resources but...

it's very cute looking and all the basics of an RTS mixed with kind of a Sid Meier's Civilization game are here. It's got the goods it's just really really not optimized well at all to be more efficient at rendering.  The beginnings of something great, tbh.

Themes: BIG is valid because the puddlefish are HUGE and loom over the supporting human settlements.

and then as to Duality:

Duality is 1) you versus them 2) Symbiosis between humans and the Puddlefish that they worship.  The thought was for Puddlefish to be a huge drag on their economy but strategically they're revered by their caretakers, although super fat and unable to move out of their puddles.  (how they propagate by teleporting to a new puddle is a mystery.). in other words in sid meier terms puddlefish are kind of like quadruple-cost Settler units.

The game right now is more of a demo of the depth that i can stack into a game because it seizes up before you get too far.  But the core is there that the puddlefish are deliberately charmingly crudely rendered and it's got the corresponding music piece "march of the puddlefish" in there as the bgm.

2.50 is the Rosebud version before going to Claude, and that's what is uploaded to itch because Claude does understand and has proven several times the last 2 weeks how to keep going off a Rosebud-start, it's just this time I crashed out before having enough credits in the weekly allowance.  The next 4-hour refill of credits, was the exact time of day the game is due for submission so i was out of luck.

Just as in music jams i tend to exasperate the chiptune folks with my manual performances rather than quantizing rhythm, in game jams people are currently seeing my stuff and kind of crying out for simplicity -- and i go right against that grain :)  So just take it with that ethic in mind.  More of a proof of concept.  Maybe in a future epoch i will be more minimal...doesn't seem to be happening right now.

if for some reason it doesn't load the rosebud page is this URL:

https://rosebud.ai/p/civ-fish-voxel-wars

my main website:

https://exedexes1.com/