Development Notes: ‘The Lake’

Aug 3
2006

The Lake came out of a brainstorming session I had last month. (I was finally starting to feel my creativity returning after being completely drained from 3 years of school.) The idea for the game was really simple, and I knew the success of the game would depend mostly on the look and movement of the characters.

Programming

The programming for this game was fairly simple. I was able to get a prototype (sans-art) running in almost no time. Most of the programming time was spent trying to get the fish movement to feel right. I had a pretty specific idea of how I wanted him to jump, with slight rotation and hang-time.

The main challenge for The Lake ended up being the graphics for the fish.

Graphics

I wanted the fish to be somewhat cartoony, but still be a believable fish. I actually used a very cartoony fish in an early version (on the right in the picture above). It felt very out of place with the lake environment I had already created (and liked). Plus, I was having a lot of trouble getting the fins to animate in a realistic way.

I tried to have my friend Zoë draw some fish for me. Although she clearly has superior drawing skills, all of her fish came out looking too realistic and somehow depressed.

I finally buckled down one morning with my lightbox and drew a couple frames of a swimming fish that I thought looked pretty good. Although, I didn’t use any of Zoë’s sketches in the creation of my fish, they helped me to realize that I was abstracting my drawings too much. A simplified vector fish is cartoony enough—it didn’t need any googly eyes, or funny fins.

Optimization

Initially I was doing all this fancy stuff to get a really nice look for the game. I had multiple layers of semi-transparent water, with the fish going under the water. The mayflies had semi-transparent wings, and I was using Flash’s Blur filters for the background elements and the underwater stuff.

All this was fine here on my beast of a computer, but it slowed down to an unplayable degree on slower machines. Most of the changes I made ended up being imperceptible. I re-colored the flies and made them opaque. I replaced all the blurred vectors with pre-blurred jpgs. The only change that I miss is the transparent water. It was really nice to see the fish coming in and out of the water like that.

Conclusion

I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the game. I think the control scheme is really successful. The main complaint I get is that the game is too hard, but I think that’s okay. It wouldn’t be much fun if there wasn’t any challenge to it.

A lot of people have compared the game to Ferry Halim’s games at Orisinal, which I think is a huge compliment.