Rapid Prototype Reflection: The Life Aquatic

This was the second in the series of rapid prototypes that we needed to make in under two weeks using DarkBASIC. We worked in pairs, and were all Games Design students with minimal programming experience. The restrictions were:

• No direct character avatar
• No visible mouse cursor (or similar)
• Single button press control only
• Single Screen contained world
• Use of swarms in some way

We decided to play with the idea of having an angler fish who you needed to help eat bait fish. The general idea was that the angler fish would move automatically around the screen (original design called for the angler to move between a series of nodes around the screen, but ended up just having it move left to right).

The bait fish (swarm) would move randomly around the screen, and would then move towards lights activated by the player which were at the top, bottom and sides of the screen. These lights were activated by the player moving the mouse in any of these directions, but they could not see their cursor (response on light activation needed to be quick and clear in it's cause).

When the angler and bait fish were close, player needed to press the left mouse button to activate the angler's light, which would pull any fish into it's mouth. Bait fish that collided with the angler would automatically move away for a few moments before returning to the swarm.

The angler light and the lights on the sides all had cooldowns, when not available they would be smaller and slowly grow larger again until they were useable.

Player challenge was to co-ordinate the movement of the bait fish to intersect with the angler fish and consume them before they could run away. Primary toy was screenclearing (win condition was eating all the bait fish)

Below is are some basic diagrams of how it would work.

Here are some screenshots of the intro sequence and menu (menu options were selected by moving the mouse up or down)

In-Game Screen

Example of light activation

I feel this game loses a lot without being able to see it in action, but I haven't yet gotten a decent quality video capture to work. So it's on the to-do list, but if you would like to see a working version, please contact me and I'll happily send you the exe.

The main thing I learned from this game

• Tokenisation - I don't feel that the cooldown/warmup of the lights were clear enough until you'd played around with it a bit, and the lights on the sides also weren't clear in function. Also needed better color variation, the lights and the angler are too similar, as are background and bait fish.

Over all I still love the feel of this game, and it's one that I intend to come back to and finish, if I ever have free time again.