Developer Diary #1: Game Premise & Tank Screen Intro
As much of you have already correctly stipulated, Alien Fish Express is actually a brand-new, spiritual successor to an old, late 1990’s-era NTL Interactive TV box game called ‘Alien Fish Exchange’, adapted for smartphone and modern audiences.
The original game was itself a port of an even older Tamagotchi-style portable videogame that came out long before my time under the same title, but I’ll stay clear of that for now (as I’ve never played it.) Regardless, the original AFE was a pet simulator of sorts, but it’s primary input mechanism was via player management of the in-game mutation and food hierarchy to maintain a healthy ecosystem of virulent alien fish that became increasingly bigger, hungrier, and nastier with every successive generation.
To that end, our new title will be largely the same. Your happy, fish food-eating sprat can evolve into sprat-predating vicious carnivores with enough tender-loving-care. And in turn, said carnivores can mutate into apex predators of their own that feed upon their smaller kindred carnivores, and the cycle repeats almost ad infinitum.
The key to success in our modern AFE, much like the original, is the same tried-and-true formula; requiring players to couple sound economic tank management with an intrinsic understanding of the predator-prey predation paradigm to make your tank the meanest-looking around. Larger alien fish are trickier to maintain, but vastly more profitable if you can sustain their tenacious feeding habits.
Of course, there will be a lot more to it than that, given how each fish has it’s own unique personality, nutrition requirements, temperament etc. - But we’ll get to that at a later date.
...Now for a little extra preview: The Tank Screen.
Arguably where all the ‘action’ takes place, and as you can see although it's relatively WIP, we’ve got most of the GUI nailed down and even some neato tid-bits like bubble generation. I don’t wanna spoil too much but I will give away the purpose of the side buttons:
1) The inventory button. What’s that in your bag you got there? Fish food? Vitamins??
2) Expand tank button. Because your phone screen simply can’t contain all the awesomeness. Click to toggle horizontal scroll from changing rooms (e.g. Tank to Freezer) to scrolling the viewport inside the tank.
3) Customize tank button. Hate having lame plants in your tank? Fancy something cooler like a treasure chest or rocket ship? Heh, no problem!
4) Extra Info button. Toggles on/off data like school size and junk, so you don’t necessarily need to click each fishy individually to get that data.
More to come soon, stay posted!
