Lasers and Fish

I've realized that it's been a whole month since I've last posted here and there's a reason for that. One of the reasons was because I hadn't worked on Heart Realm in a while, another reason is because I was busy working on something else in the meantime.

I had made the decision a couple weeks ago to take a short break from Heart Realm, not because I wanted to get away from it, but because I wanted to work on a short-term project. A few weeks ago I had decided to look into LibGDX, it's a library for Java game development that seemed pretty cool too. So after checking it out and fiddling with some basic tutorials I decided I would attempt to re-work some of Heart Realm's code to work with it. There were many reasons for why I would do such a thing, something I can't quite get into at the moment as it was weeks ago and don't remember all the reasons, but basically it had a lot of cool and useful features one of the big ones being that it was using OpenGL, something I wasn't using. Unfortunately I did not succeed in implementing it yet, though I will attempt again in the near future.

In the meantime, working with LibGDX was great, it had it's quirks like all frameworks and libraries, but I enjoyed it, so much so that I decided to create an Android game, something I hadn't truly attempted. So I set out to create a simple game with the goal of actually publishing it within a week or two of starting. I wanted to get the experience of actually publishing something for once, something I hadn't yet attempted. So I created a simple side-scrolling "shooter" called Laser Fish.

Laser Fish is a very basic game where all you do is move your fish up and down while the ocean background scrolls by with other fish swimming towards you. Your goal is to simply "fry" all incoming fish getting as many points as possible without letting 10 fish pass you by and survive your powerful laser beam attack.

I treated this little experience as something similar to that of a game jam in that I had a set deadline... sort of... with the goal of actually publishing it upon completion and as I'm writing this, it's going through the submission process at Google to be added to the Google Play store. Link to game.

Now that I'm done working on Laser Fish, I think I'll go back to working on Heart Realm, or maybe another simple game. I'm not quite sure just yet. Fortunately another Ludum Dare is coming up and I hope to take part in that, though I can't guarantee anything.