Fishy Meal is a game that sprouted from a tweet with a simple idea - "you're a piranha, waiting for protagonists to jump over a gap between 2 platforms to leap out of the water and devour them." The twist on the classic obstacle from almost every platformer game. I liked the idea so much that I spent close to a year working in my free time (alongside my more-than-fulltime job) trying to build, design and polish the game to be fun and addictive to play.
It just called for a really simple mechanic - while building it, I played around with more complicated motivations for nomming on protagonists (decreasing health/food level, using energy for swimming, etc... ) but everything was too complex. In the end I chose a simple solution - tap the screen to "wiggle" the tail and don't let anything cross - be the evil minion doing your job.
It's definitely not the only or the first game that's driven with a single input - but it's different from the rest. It requires rhythm and concentration - which is part of the fun - a slight lapse in concentration means the next jump will miss the protagonist and you (as the piranha) will fail your job.
The whole game also has a nice visual style, with pixel graphic art combined with dynamically rendered water and environment - all in a crisp pixel style, to bring back the nostalgic feeling and make players remember the games that served as reference and inspiration (mostly the original Prehistorik).
It was also a completely one man project - I did everything myself (game design, code, art and graphics, "sound"), which made the development time longer and there might be some aspects of it that don't look like they are finished. But I am still working on it, and have exciting things still planned.
Fishy Meal
Who Is It? Music!
