Carnival Fishing Game, a new casual game for users of Sinespace (a proud sponsoring media partner to this blog), was the runner-up $2000 prize winner of the virtual world’s recent game development contest. Developed by longtime Sinespace creators Punkarella and Booradley (gotta love the Mockingbird reference), you can buy it in the shop for 999 Gold.
You can also play a free version on region owned by the creators: Click Explore and search “Fishing” -- it’ll teleport you the playable demo at Punkarella and Booradley’s place. If you’re lucky, they’ll be online and you can play with the creators themselves!
It’s designed for social fun with friends who aren’t necessarily hardcore gamers, and the approach this husband/wife team is a good case study for other casual game developers to think about:
“[W]e wanted something that didn't involve shooting/guns and would not be intimidating to players of various skill levels,” as Punkarella puts it. And she designed some clever hooks to encourage multiplay gameplay sessions for different kinds of gamers:
“Although there are people who want high scores and will come back to games to take over leaderboards, that doesn't really appeal to more casual people or those who just don't have the quick reflexes to ‘win’,” she tells me.
“For those reasons we made it so there was both a table scoreboard so you can just mess around with a few friends and do little challenges, and tickets that would let people save up over time to work towards the various prizes. You can also reset the whole machine so that they can be used for tournaments and special events. I wanted to game to bring people back and to appeal to those who care about collecting and socializing rather than just scores.”
While it seems like the game uses Sinespace/Unity’s physics, that’s not the case -- and while it plays like a multiplayer game, it’s not quite that on the back end. Booradley,who handled the game’s scripting, explains what he did instead. And this is another master class in game development:
“I didn't want to use any real physics because that can lead to bugs and inconsistent behaviours. I also wanted each player to have a consistent experience to make gameplay fair. All of the actions in the game that look like they are using physics are actually just using math and interpolation to move over time.
“For example the magnet lags behind a position below the rod which gives it a swinging effect. The magnet also always attempts to aim itself at the rod which causes it to rotate around as you move it. That all adds up to a more realistic experience without needing to rely on a physics simulation.
“The game was also designed to support up to 5 players all fishing at the same time. Again, I didn't want the players’ actions to affect the others’ games, so everyone locally runs their own game and uses the network to broadcast actions like ‘caught fish’, ‘missed fish’ and ‘combo multiplier’.
“The game listens to these network calls and runs more local animations and code to make it look like everyone is fishing together. This lets you see other players pull fish out and have their scoreboards update in real time but also gives you a fair game to play. The prizes are built in a way that makes them completely separate from the game itself. This also uses networking to communicate between the player and the prizes to check things like if the player can afford the prize. Doing this will allow us to release other games that can share the same prizes, or additional furniture items that contain prizes that work with this ticket system.
“The only actual use of physics in the game is when another player catches a fish it spawns a physics enabled fish that drops onto the ground and rolls around. These fish are only spawned on the local client so each player may actually see fish in different positions. These fish disappear and clean themselves up 10 seconds after the round ends, or immediately when another round starts in that boat.”
More pics and gameplay info in the Sinespace shop. And once again, click Explore and search “Fishing” -- it’ll teleport you the playable demo at Punkarella and Booradley’s place and a chance to meet the power couple in person!
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