This was my first attempt ever at making a game, and the start of a game development partnership with Tima Peshin. It was largely inspired by my summer trip abroad to Singapore in 2015 where I saw Cladophora balls in a pet store and decided to look into them.

 

The player plays as the eponymous ball of moss, growing in size each time it consumes an object on the seafloor. Rather than growing infinitely, the algae ball is constantly pursued by an algae hungry goldfish which nibbles at the marimo, causing it to decrease in size. The marimo can propel itself for a short amount of time using bubbles that appear randomly in the water.

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Tima coded the game in Xcode and I made the assets in Photoshop. I experimented with Xcode for the first time in 2015 to design UIs for iPhone applications. We made the joint decision to test Xcode’s capabilities by attempting to make a game within the SDK.

 

The vision I had for this game and its gameplay was more along the lines of an interactive children’s picture book, with new environments and levels linked by cinematic transitions and a fairly linear progression. Developing this game was a learning experience in how to storyboard to properly convey ideas to teammates. It was left unfinished because we could not accomplish enough in Xcode with regards to gameplay. My team and I learnt to create comprehensive plans and use better game development environments (like Unreal and Unity) efficiently in the future because of this. We'll stick to using Xcode for hackathons.

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This game is not currently available for download.