XBLA & XBLIG Ratings

Fishing Girl has launched onto Xbox Live Indie Games with force this weekend.  After seeing numberous rave reviews and thoroughly enjoying it myself I got in touch with  the creator Eric Woroshow. He was kind enough to answer a few questions about it for us.

Question: How did you come up with the idea for Fishing Girl?

Eric Woroshow: Fishing Girl started with Daniel Cook's Fishing Girl Prototyping Challenge [1]. He provided the basic premise and the core mechanics along with the art. Then I put my own spin on everything. With lots of play testing I refined the game to the version you can play today.



Question: Could you describe Fishing Girl for anyone who hasn’t seen it?

Eric Woroshow: Fishing Girl is an arcade fishing game. At its heart there is a simple, fun fishing mechanic. And built around it is lots of structure, like equipment upgrades and badges to keep the game fresh and interesting. There's also a cute story woven in. The art is drawn in muted pastels but the fish stand out as bright and colourful. My goal with Fishing Girl has always been simple gameplay that is simply fun.



Question: How large was the team that created Fishing Girl and how long did it take to develop?

Eric Woroshow: Daniel Cook supplied the initial idea and art. I did all of the subsequent development. The first Fishing Girl prototype I created in October and November of 2008, during the initial prototyping challenge. Then I let the project idle for five months while I finished my degree. I completed development over the summer. All told it was perhaps two months of full-time work.

For me, the most time-consuming part of the development process was the art and sound. I'm neither an artist nor a musician, so tweaking the source art and finding suitable sounds took a considerable amount of time. I'm now intimately familiar with Paint.NET and Freesound.org! I also spent a lot of time playing my own game. I knew I was on to something when I spent longer playing my game than I did developing it!



Question: Fishing Girl is a pretty mellow game. Did you consider making it more competitive by adding leader boards?

Eric Woroshow: I did consider it. In fact, when I first started working on developing my prototype into a full game, the feature was on the top of my to-do list. But I decided to drop it for three reasons. One, as Daniel Cook aptly pointed out, score as a resource that feeds into global leader boards is only an effective motivator for the top few percentage points of players. For everyone else, the leader boards tend to remind them of how bad they are! Two, I always intended Fishing Girl to be a mellow experience and adding a highly competitive feature seemed at odds with my design goals. Three, implementing global leader boards for independent games is at best a hack and I really wanted every aspect of Fishing Girl to be fun and high quality.



Question: Looking back on Fishing Girl what are the things that you are most proud of?

Eric Woroshow: I'm proud of finishing the game! It's been such a long process reaching this point with so many interruptions to my development schedule that I'm happy to see the game released.



Question: Was there anything you were hoping to get into Fishing Girl that did not make it?

Eric Woroshow: There are a few features that didn't make the cut. At some point I had to  stop developing, otherwise Fishing Girl would never have been released! I wanted to add a fishing report of sorts that tracks all the fish caught by a player, along with statistics like number of casts. I also wanted to explore adding more variety to how players reel in fish, such as alternating between pressing A and B.



Question: Now that Fishing Girl has released are you planning another Xbox Live Indie Game?

Eric Woroshow: Of course! Though I might make a quick technological detour and write a web game using Silverlight so I can compare and contrast with XNA. But certainly I'd like to write another Xbox Live Indie Game, especially if Daniel Cook has another prototyping challenge!



Question: Can you give us some hints or tips for Fishing Girl?

Eric Woroshow: In no particular order, here are my top five tips:
-    Buy the small lure before anything else.
-    Buy new rods before you buy new lures.
-    Catching large fish with a small lure by chaining can be better than buying a large lure.
-    Use common small fish for chaining up to large fish. Save rare fish to catch.
-    Turn off the timer in the Settings menu if you want a relaxed fishing experience.



Question: If you could change one thing about Xbox Live Indie Games as a platform what would it be?

Eric Woroshow: I would love to see gamer points for indie games, even if they were to feed into a separate "indie gamer" gamer point score. Indeed, having two separate scores may even add to the cachet of indie points. I envision a certain subset of players that would be happy to have many indie points but only a handful "mainstream" points.

I would also like to see Microsoft's legal team resolve whatever issue is preventing the marketplace from displaying the game description above the content description. As it stands now the usefulness of the game descriptions is vastly diminished by the wall of mostly irrelevant text preceding them.

And, finally, enabling the Dynamic Language Runtime on the Xbox so I can develop my games in Python would make me a very happy developer!



References
[1] http://lostgarden.com/2008/11/fishing-girl-game-prototyping-challenge.html