Squid and JellyFish model + Update Unity project

I made some other models to put into the game as fishies to eat or avoid.
First of all I made a squid looking fishy:

And seconfly I made a jellyfish looking fishy:

I also started a new Unity project (a copy of the prototype) and started cleaning up my code.
I imported the player and 2 fish models as well. One other thing I changed is that now the light of the player won't change color anymore. Instead the target fish will be displayed in the top left corner. This was because I thought it wasn't looking that well on my models as thought.

Art style + Anglerfish model

I decided to take the low poly art style without smoothing, like in the underlying examples.
It's simple, optimised, and I haven't done it before so it seems kinda cool.

I tried out this art style a bit and made this anglerfish looking model. I'm thinking about making the colors adjustable in-game.

Gameplay prototype

So first of all, my friends thought the mobile_03 controls (touch the screen to give the player an impulse towards the touchlocation) was the most fun, so that's going to be how the controls work.

Second, I made some gameplay prototypes during the week!
I tried out following features:

• Simpelest gameplay, just eat the right fish to survive.
• Eat the fish with the same color as your light. Your light will be changing over time.
• Eat the fish with the same color as your light. Your light will be changing by eating fish.
• Your light will grow bigger when eating (the right) fish, so fishies will be easier attracted to you.
• Spawn more and more fish faster and faster according to how many fish you ate.

Some worked out better than other. At the end, I had the crazy idea of combining them with a level system to keep the player motivated. 

It goes as following:

The player will start at level one. After eating a certain amount of right coloured fish, the player will level up. The amount of fish to level will raise each level.

The higher the player's level, the bigger his light (and attractiveness) gets and the more different kind of fish (and light colors) there will spawn. The color of the player's light will change over time.

If you want to try it out yourself, here is a pc build (arrow keys to control):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jsdv17chygomkug/LightThroughTheDepts_WindowsBuild_02.rar?dl=0

,and here is an Android build (tap to give the fish an impulse):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dre1mp3k0oj7on3/LightThroughTheDepts_AndroidBuild_02.rar?dl=0

Next on my todo list is the art, starting with the most important ones, the characters! :)

Controls prototype

So today I managed to get 3 different ways to control your fishy with an android device working.
I'm going to have it tested by some friends tomorrow and let them decide which one I'll put in the game.

If there would be people that want to test it themselves, here are some .apk files (Android builds) with the different gamemodes:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l0l1gfa4pxiav83/LightThroughTheDepts_AndroidBuild_01.rar?dl=0

Oh yeah. I didn't test the builds on other devices than my phone (Acer Liquid E2)  yet, so I can't promise it will work on yours.

First prototype

So I made a first small prototype (windows build) with the very basics of the game.

Next steps int the prototyping progress are to first get some good mobile controlls and then optimise the gameplay a lot by trying out new features in different builds.

Here's a look of what the prototype looks like:

note: the gif is looking darker than the actual game

You can also download the Windows build and try it yourself (arrow / WASD controls):

https://www.dropbox.com/s/qx06637zl8rohjv/LightThroughTheDepts_WindowsBuild_01.rar?dl=0

Intro + Game concept

Light through the depths is a small side project of mine. The goal is to make this a mobile game on the google play and maybe later on the app store.

Well what is this game going to look like you ask?
I'm going to take the basic principle of the "fishy" - like games lots of people probably have played once in their life already. (You are a fish eating smaller fish to grow bigger.)

Fishy1 by XGen studios

There already are a lot of similar apps on the play store so what I'm going to do is add some of my own features to make the gameplay differ and give the player a totally new experience.

The main character will be an angler fish (you know, the ones with a light bulb hanging in front of their face) which will, guess what, try to eat other fish and survive. (I know, the originality level is insaaaane!)


Now how am I going to make this differ from the already overly created fishy games? Well I was thinking about making the map really dark, so you can only see well around the character's light bulb for example. And maybe give the other fish different color to see if they're edible or poisonous.
You'd only be capable of seeing the color when they're nearby, but when you get too close, the fish will start chasing your light bulb.
These are just some examples, I don't know yet how it'll turn out, that's where the prototyping phase is for. ;)

The art style is not decided yet, first thing to do is prototype and see if it's worth putting lots of effort in and having a good concept.

Software I'm using is Unity, Visual studio, 3DS max and photoshop.

I'm not going to put a release date on it yet because appart from this I also have a lot of work to do and I can't really predict when I will have lots of work and when won't.

Well that's about it, wish me luck!