Time to Make: 1 semester (approx 3 months)
Principal Roles: Music and Sound Design, UI Design
Environment: Panda3D and Python
Fantastic Fish Find is a simple children’s game. The goal: find your lost fish friends of your school before time runs out. The player can use the computer’s keyboard to move around to find the other fish, or find powerups that will allow the player to solve simple puzzles to find the lost fish.
Working on this game was intriguing and very fun. It was my first game that I had made and I was in a team of 5 people: 3 programmers and 1 3D artist (and then there was me too). I got to learn how to communicate my ideas to an interdisciplinary audience, while still getting my feet wet in both art and programming.
In terms of programming on this project, I helped to design and implement the UI. It was confusing at first, since I was dealing with a large environment, but after I kept working with it, I found Panda3D to be moderately helpful in creating a simple interface. It was also extremely rewarding to be able to build the UI, as this is the primary element I use to play games when I am the player. I was able to sit in the shoes of the player, and figure out what information he/she would need to be able to effectively play the game.
In terms of sound and music design, this project was extremely fun. I got to step into the world of a child and create music for a fun and comedic experience. I used the program Reason to create all the music and Audacity and ProTools to create the necessary sounds. While these pieces of the game were hard at first, I found that it became easier as time went along, as I could present the sounds to the team and then iterate further upon them to make the perfect sound and emotion for our game.
Overall, this was a very rewarding experience, as I also helped the other members of the team out whenever I could, in either programming, design, or writing. I learned much from this experience, and I would love to work on future projects like this one.