Didn’t have much time lately to do any real work on my games, but managed to finally fix the text system on “Something Fishy”. It got screwed up some point in the near past, with the upgrade to the font system (that allowed for variable spacing between characters, etc).
I managed to patch it up, which made me have to rebuild the main font for the game, and in. the process I found a bunch of small bugs in Something Fishy that I took the opportunity to solve.
So, finally I have a working build of Something Fishy for the PC (although the “Kids” and “Easy” difficulty levels need some tweaking).
Now I can think seriously on porting the game for tablets and (hopefully) for Linux and Mac. This will make me have to solve some small issues, namely the sound engine, vibration and interface issues.
The sound engine is just a straight implementation issue. The current port of my sound system on Marmalade only supports fixed bitrate RAW sounds. To really be able to port this game, I’ll need to add at least a WAV loader (and maybe an MP3/Ogg streaming system).
The interface is much more complicated. Currently, Something Fishy works with the mouse controlling the hook in which a worm of a specific color is caught
This obviously doesn’t work on an iPad, since we don’t have a cursor… So, we currently have a “point and click” mechanic, and that has to be translated into a working “tap” mechanic, which changed the game overall (not dramatically, I think).
My current idea is to replace the fishing pole for an “attractor ray gun”. The player taps the screen in a specific position and a beam will grab the fish at the target position. The color of the sparks in the gun’s muzzle indicates the necessary color. Players have to grab the fish in succession (from smallest to largest), and the first two sizes serve to power the gun, so it can grab the larger one, which Ernest actually uses as food.
This will require some new art (and my artist is still on leave), some new testing (difficulty levels will need to be adjusted), so it might be a good idea to start porting to Mac/Linux first (in which we can use the mouse).
Work is not something that’s actually missing in my small hobbies, so I’ll probably do a detour I’ve been planning for sometime, converting the shader system on Spellbook to use the new XML format, and add a live-link option (changing a shader on the file makes the change visible on the game instantly).