Star Fish

Code by Richard Davey
Graphics by Richard Davey (vectors sourced from iStockPhoto.com)
Animation by Eric Su at Cavalcade Games
Music mixed by Richard Davey, main track by Dan Gautreau

Genre: Action / Reflect / Mouse Avoider
Release Date: 10th September 2009

Play Star Fish on RobotJamGames.com, or license it for your own site here on FlashGameLicense.com

About

Star Fish is an undersea “mouse avoider” and “collect-em-up” game at heart. You guide the little nemo style fish around the levels, avoiding everything except the lovely star fish which you collect. It’s a race against the clock as well as your dexterity.

There are 25 levels to conquer, soothing music and cute animations!

History

My previous game Bug Box was supposed to be a “game created in a single day”, but in actual fact it took me nearly a week. With Star Fish I was determined to rectify this situation. So I used stock art that I had already bought a license for, got a talented friend onto the animation side of things (as I suck at animating in Flash), and re-used a lot of the Bug Box framework. You’ll notice a lot of similarities in the two games presentation (the same menu, font, reveal sequence, etc). But that is where they end – Star Fish is a totally different game to play.

This re-use, coupled with a fast development time and tight main game loop allowed me to have the game up and running in 7 hours of work. By this stage it was still a little rough and only had 10 levels. I spent another 5 hours on it, took aboard the play testers feedback, polished, adjusted difficulty and added another 15 levels. So I’m happy that I finally achieved it – a game created, polished and put up for sale in a single day. And it’s not half bad too

Development Trivia

The levels were created using the Flash IDE and parsed at run-time by the main game code. This makes the main loop of the game extremely small, which is a bonus. Originally I didn’t have any interval between one level and the next, the aim being to just see how far you could get. A number of early play testers commented that they didn’t like this, so I slowed things down a bit and added the “click to swim” requirement.

Some of the later levels incorporate a bit of pop and geek culture. For example there is an Atari logo to find and my take on the Jaws movie poster

The fish follows your mouse around on the main menu, which I guess most people will spot. But how many will see that he deflects the bubbles he bumps in to I wonder?