So, there we go. The final day of my War With Farbs. And what shall I be spending the time doing? What did and did not make it?

Let’s have a looksy and reveal, finally, what Fish Fish Bang Bang is.

I’ve said all along that my intent was to not tread the same path as Farbs. To be fair to the man, the mashup is something that he truly excels at. It’d be a madness to try and take him on at his own game. Have you played RomCheckFail? It’s fabulous, both as a game and as an expose of underlying mechanics and how 30 years of gaming evolution has trained us to interpret these mechanics.

It’s also oh so incredibly clever. I don’t really do clever. At least, I don’t do clever first, game second. Which is a horridly unfair thing to level at Farbs when you consider the rest of his output but user generated content stuff aside, most of Farbs output is about playing with mechanical structures. Whether it be erring towards emergence with the Captain Braben series, toying with platform gaming tropes in Polychromatic Funky Monkey or the chaotic carnage of Fishie Fishie, they’re all in one way or another led by the mechanics.

Which is awesome stuff. We need people like that in game creation. This sort of play is what leads to new shiny things, even more so than from those that try and wodge innovation in at every turn with little regard to whether it’s actually good or not.

It’s why Playpen is in its own quiet way more revolutionary than Spore.

Yeah, fuck it – I said it.

Sure, Spore puts user generated content to the forefront, it gives you the tools, it lets you create and it lets you create wonderfully and easily. Once that creation is done though, there’s little of use nor ornament beyond showing off your creature or house in Sporepedia. With Playpen, what the user creates is tied to the world. It is the world. And the next user can come along and change that world. All power is handed over to the creator and anyone who loads Playpen can be the creator, editor and controller of what happens in Playpen. Anarchy and order co-exist with often wonderful results.

That’s important. That’s more forward thinking than the no doubt neutered by marketing concerns beast that Spore became.

But I digress. I digress lots.

So yeah, wot Farbs does isn’t wot I does. I love and appreciate that stuff that wot Farbs does. I wouldn’t have accepted the challenge if I didn’t. I wouldn’t want an easy ride, there’d be no fun there.

Wot I do, generally, is play in someone else’s playground and do a bit of hair ruffling. I started out as a remaker, after all. Someone who takes an old game and drags it up to date. It’s what I enjoy doing more than anything.

There’s this thing with remaking though. Generally, there’s two schools of thought. One that a remake should be 1:1, faults, flaws and all. The second school of thought, the one that I subscribe to, is that when remaking a game it’s your chance to truly drag it up to date. In a lot of cases, the games that get remade are between 25 and 30 years old and in their original state have all the flaws that come with a medium feeling its way out of the void. There’s mistakes made, some of them understandable, some of them as boggling then as they are today. As the mice in Bagpuss would say, we will we will fix it.

The logical next step is to apply that mentality to your own work.

Wot I do, or at least what I try and do is to make games that could have existed 25-30 years ago but really, we can only make now. Be that in the visuals or in the mechanical department.

So you have a traditional template, something expected and you take what that template entails and mess around with it and hope that something different pops out at the end of it. And that’s what I’ve done here.

You’ll have played Fish Fish Bang Bang before, sort of. You haven’t played it in SYNSO and you haven’t played it in Fishie Fishie but you’ll have likely played it in one form or another before. Yet it’s spiritually a part of both. I’ve discussed the reasoning behind this before, it still stands.

So, what is Fish Fish Bang Bang?

It’s Bedlam.

Or at least, Bedlam was the starting point for what I wanted to make. The template I’ve abused to shape around my whims.

What else is it? It’s part Space Giraffe.

The two largest inspirations I have for wot I do are Llamasoft and Vidkidz. In some way, everything I do can be traced back somewhere to what they’ve already done. For visual inspiration, I wanted a level of visual overkill tied to what the player does. It’s what Space Giraffe does crazily good.

It’s partly Popcap.

After a bit of a personality implant into the sprites Farbs supplied, it’s the natural stylistic fit for something that errs towards the more casual end of the spectrum. As I’ve recently admitted though, as the development went further along the game became less and less casual as it took on a life of its own. That’s cool, that’s a natural evolution. Some of the Popcap influence is still visible amongst the chaos.

It’s partly Aliens. Best not to ask about that, though.

Add some Fishie Fishie and some SYNSO to taste.

Cook for four weeks on full power.

Stir before serving.

Your FishFishBangBang is now ready to eat.

Sort of…

As is the way with working to a very restrictive and tight deadline, somewhere down the line stuff has to give. Things that were sitting pretty high up on your feature list get crossed off or moved down in favour of things vastly more important if you want to get a fully playable game out there.

I’ve only ended up with 20 stages. Ideally I wanted at least 30 and I wanted them to contain more than they actually do. There’s only 4 different things you’ll encounter across the game and I’ve got ideas drafted out for quite a few more.

The pacing isn’t quite perfect. It works, sure, but right now and partially due to the fact that before yesterday no-one else but me and my 6 year old had actually played it, I’m not sure if it ramps up too slowly or not. This is something I’ll no doubt discover once it’s out in the wild.

It’s got no options whatsoever. Also, what was to be my primary game mode isn’t, instead replaced with the SYNSO one-life mode I discussed in an earlier post. For what it is, this seemed like the more sensible option to go for launch with.

I wanted individual level scores. The game actually needs individual level scores to work properly on the level I want it to. I don’t have the time to bung this in if I’m to make the deadline though.

Yet, it plays well. I’ve spent a stupid amount of time just playing it and that’s my barometer for whether something is working or not. If I actually want to play it and I’m not sick of it after a day, it’s doing well. All the missing stuff and stuff I wanted to put in but ran out of time for, that can come over the next week or so.

Today, for my final hour, I’ll just be putting some wrapping paper around things. Doing a final check through for crashes and disaster scenarios then uploading it to Chez Farbs to go into storage until Fish Squid Time Machine emerges from peer review.

And I shall be using the time between now and then to add all these things and hopefully more to get the game out of this I wanted to make, as fully fleshed out as I originally planned.

It’s been fun and I’ve enjoyed taking on something a little bit different, learning a few new things (with no small amount of help from Mike Meyer, your other IK combatant), new and more effective ways to get what I want out of my head and onto the screen. I’ll be enjoying the sweet taste of victory far more though.

Indie Kombat is only the beginning for Fish Fish Bang Bang. Onwards we march, onwards to victory!