After a change in the title, Pierre and the Fish is now beta, and can be downloaded here. I'd also appreciate it if you would try it out, since I've only tested this on my computer. I won't be making any more changes to this in the timeframe of the contest (as I'm meant to be working now, as it's Monday morning over here). Hope you enjoy the game!
The new, improved, and quite possibly over the top menu screen for "Pierre and the Fish"!
Well, it's been a productive five days for me. Possibly a bit over-productive; I just wouldn't quit making small adjustments to the game, polishing everything that I could; so much so that I completely lost track of time and it was dawn before I finally decided to call it finished (for those of you in a different time-zone, that's okay for me; I've got until eleven local time. It's the Australasian time-zone advantage [wink]). Now I can't sleep, so I'm back in at work to put in as much research as I can before I pass out. Thankfully due to the twists of fate I'm a postgraduate student these days rather than a school teacher, otherwise my Monday classes would be considered malpractice.
But I think it's been worth it. I wanted to prove to myself that even with my limited understanding of game programming, if I really put an effort into it I could make a decent game. And while I'm not in a fit state of mind to properly judge how good "Pierre and the Fish" is, I think it's quite decent, and I'm happy to have my name on it. Once I've had an opportunity to recover, I'll do a proper postmortem of the project to see where I can move on to next. I'm still aiming to eventually make my own indie games, and I hope that what I learn from this project will help to towards that goal.
The completion of this project also solves the objectives of "Project Nova" too, which I was starting to lose interest in anyway. The whole point of "Project Nova" was to finish a game by the end of the year (to satisfy a New Year's resolution I set myself; make a game in 2005), but I think "Project Poisson" is good enough to satisfy this objective; even more so, because this type of game has a lot of the elements that I would like to include my future games. That means it might be time to move onto the next stage; tool development for games along the lines of "Pierre and the Fish".
But not until next week, at least. Sheesh, pulling an all-nighter on Sunday two weeks in a row is just crazy stupid....
Addendum: By the way, if you do try the game out, I'd love to hear any feedback from you, even if it's just word that the game seems to run okay. I'm always a bit paranoid that I've screwed something up, especially with no time for exhaustive testing.
I like the increased resolution, and the namechange is now a bit catchier.
I think I preferred the score in the upper right, but that may just because I'm used to it being there.
If you're planning on doing any tweaking after the contest, I'd suggest the addition of a pause button.
Well done, and good luck with the contest. Oh, I liked the new animated title screen as well btw. [smile]