WEEK4: FIGGLE

There is a popular arcade game here in Hong Kong called Ocean Star, that inspired the hit mobile game Fishing Joy.

The concept is you feed in tokens to the machine, which powers your net gun. Nets cost tokens and catching fish rewards tokens. It's basically a fishy gambling game but it's incredibly compelling.

There were a couple of things about it that really captured my interest. Firstly, it looks incredible in motion. Secondly, there seems to be an element of chance that I could never quite figure out. Just because you hit a tiny fish with a level six net, doesnt mean youll catch it. On the other hand you could clip a massive turtle with a level one net and take it out in one shot.

I always thought it would make a great mobile game, but as opposed to making a F2P port, I wanted to go the other way and remove the random gambling element. For some reason this game always reminded me of Peggle and so I wanted to try and mix the 2 together. I think maybe it's because Peggle seems random, but it's actually very precise.

Turns out theyre pretty incompatible. The main reason being Peggle relies on a small number of shots hitting a large number of pegs, where as Ocean Star revolves around you firing as many nets as possible into one target to destroy it (since they want to take your money). The only Peggle thing really remaining is the multiplier. I did want to try and get the Peggle style special shots in but didnt have time. In my mind it would still be an awesome hybrid game but I think theyre too incompatible. Still it was quite fun just making a Fishy Shooter.

This week I also focussed on getting things in as quickly as possible, wether it be using drag and drop or GML and it seemed to work pretty well. I also used the Tom Francis shooter as a base, which saved me a bunch of time.