Super Salmon Migration
"You're a fish. Go for a swim."
Released in July of 2016, Super Salmon Migration is the first game I worked on and was a collaboration between myself, Colton Onderwater and Jaymie-Rae Sargent. I handled all things programming and most of the art related to the UI whilst Colton handled the in-game art assets and Jaymie prototyped the in-game economy. The trailer is available here, you can download the demo or purchase the full game on the Google Play Store, but unfortunately it has since been removed from the Apple App Store (likely due to inactivity).
We were also lucky enough to be able to do a short collaboration with Tracy Theseira, an incredibly talented artist of whom we all had the pleasure of attending university at the SAE-Qantm institute with. She is responsible for the Hipster and Sailor outfits in-game, and you can visit her website here!
The premise of Super Salmon Migration is simple:
- You're a salmon swimming in a body of water.
- Gravity wants to pull you down, so touch the screen to swim upwards.
- The further you swim, the faster you'll go.
- Use momentum to launch yourself out of the water to avoid obstacles and collect stuff.
We like to think of it as an "endless swimmer," and the trailer does a better (funnier) job explaining the game than I do.
We released Super Salmon Migration under Colton's company 'Bear-Tooth Studios,' and though he no longer has a dedicated website for his company you can view his LinkedIn profile here. Colton also made a number of efforts to publicise the game, landing an interview with GameCloud and participating in episode 29 of the Pixelsift Podcast. Without disclosing any financial information we feel that we definitely made a comfortable return on our investment, especially given that we spent a minimal amount on advertising and didn't purchase any premade assets.
I'm writing about this retrospectively, so it's hard to accurately reflect on my experience during the development of this game. We iterated through a few different gameplay models and had eventually settled on one in which the player's global-horizontal movement slowly increased and when the screen was tapped or touched their vertical movement would increase and the fish would animate accordingly. Initially this felt great and allowed me to create very smooth and surprisingly 'realistic' feeling gameplay, as well as offered us the ability to animate the fish for doing different tricks in the air (though this idea was scrapped in the coming months).
At higher speeds, however, it became increasingly less comfortable to control, and so at some stage about a month into development I rapidly prototyped a new method whereby the players local-horizontal movement increased and touching the screen rotated the fish's transform so that horizontal movement translated into vertical movement rather than the two being independent. This made the game control a lot more realistically, in the sense that moving more rapidly upwards would mean slower horizontal movement and a more natural feeling arc in the air. This is ultimately what killed our "tricks" idea, but that wasn't a major part of the design and could have potentially been addressed later.
Once we'd settled on our gameplay loop, we moved on to building the rest of the game and getting show-ready for the 2016 Sydney Rooster Teeth Expo (RTX). Despite some issues, we eventually had a stable build in place (lacking a shopfront and use for the currency in-game) for the expo and had an amazing time showing the game off. We received a tonne of useful feedback and left Sydney with a really solid platform of which to finish the game. There isn't really much else to say except that we released about 6 months past the one year mark we'd hoped for, but we all know how much worse that could have been!