Making Mighty Fin: The Beginning
Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts about the making of Mighty Fin! We’ll dive into how we answered design questions, how the art style evolved into what you see today, the creation of the game’s music, and much more. But first, here’s a general overview of just how we came to make a game starring a little fish bedecked in dozens of costumes…
Going smaller Our last iOS game, Scarlett and the Spark of Life, took nine months to develop. And while it was a critical success, it was far from a commercial one — the adventure genre is very much a niche these days, and we couldn’t find the audience we wanted to on Apple’s mobile platform. We desperately wanted to make the second episode in the series (and still do), but the numbers simply didn’t add up. So at the end of February, we held an emergency meeting that involved lots of scribbled notes and beer. By the end of it, Tim, James and I had determined to make a smaller, 99c iPhone game that would hopefully get the business back on track.We wanted to approach things as smartly as possible, so we spent nearly two weeks generating tons of game ideas. Most of these were really terrible, and it wasn’t uncommon to go through a whole day of brainstorming without turning up anything decent. But we’re firm believers in wading through a pile of crap to get to something worthwhile — at the end of the process we had 4-5 ideas that we figured were worth prototyping.
Going smaller Our last iOS game, Scarlett and the Spark of Life, took nine months to develop. And while it was a critical success, it was far from a commercial one — the adventure genre is very much a niche these days, and we couldn’t find the audience we wanted to on Apple’s mobile platform. We desperately wanted to make the second episode in the series (and still do), but the numbers simply didn’t add up. So at the end of February, we held an emergency meeting that involved lots of scribbled notes and beer. By the end of it, Tim, James and I had determined to make a smaller, 99c iPhone game that would hopefully get the business back on track.We wanted to approach things as smartly as possible, so we spent nearly two weeks generating tons of game ideas. Most of these were really terrible, and it wasn’t uncommon to go through a whole day of brainstorming without turning up anything decent. But we’re firm believers in wading through a pile of crap to get to something worthwhile — at the end of the process we had 4-5 ideas that we figured were worth prototyping.
The next week was spent making those prototypes, which included a few other game ideas we might still pursue some day. A couple were made on the PC, with the others getting whipped up on an iPhone.One of the ideas was (surprise!) about a fish leaping in and out of the water, collecting bubbles and avoiding obstacles. At least, a fish is what he became — initially you were in control of a very sexy red triangle:
Quite a lot of that original prototype made it into the final version of Mighty Fin: the way the fish moves, the random generation of level ‘chunks’ and the multiplier system didn’t change much at all during development.
