Rapidly Developing Fish Feeder: How I Created A Facebook Game in 6 Days

Alternatively, the title of this post could be "This is the greatest and best game in the world....tribute."

Let's try to get back into this blogging thing with a little discussion on my latest game: Fish Feeder. Did I really create the game in six days? You bet. Pretty much soup to nuts, but there are a few details that statement leaves out. I'll get to those.

Let's start with the motivation. Why did I climb that mountain (okay, it was more like a hill)? Because it was there. Last week, a friend of mine pointed me to the ingenious satire called Cow Clicker. A guy named Ian Bogost created that little gem. He's an academic in addition to a game designer and has a very well articulated deconstruction of FarmVille and the making of Cow Clicker (is that what an academic would say?) on his blog. Back to my friend. She posed the question of why I didn't do something like that. In the great tradition of Facebook games, I set out to pay tribute to his work.

Where to start. Farm animals, cities, pets, fish....aha! Fish! A little like a pet and a lot like a fish. There are many successful fish games out there that embody the click mania that Ian satirizes. Happy Aquarium by Crowdstar being the game that exploded last summer/fall and companies like Zynga quickly copied. I'll do sort of a fish/Cow Clicker mash-up.

The game. Not a real big reason to innovate here. Ian did a marvelous job of capturing the essence of many of these games and you can read his blog post as to the reasoning and detail there. Most people don't realize the difficulty in creating a solid design - even a simple one. Making decisions is hard and slows down any process. The more people you add, the harder the decisions become and the slower your process goes. I've got one person and an example to work from. Let's go code.

Going to need a number of things - everything from users to fish to products to friends to a way to track points (# of fish feedings) to payments....starts to add up even for a simple game. Fortunately, I've got systems for all this stuff. In comes Big Top Life. I created another game called Big Top Life and it already has ways to manage all these things. Don't get me wrong, some customization is necessary and there are always issues when working through Facebook's api. However, having an existing code base saved me weeks of time both from a coding and testing perspective. My favorite moment was when I hadn't written a line of code in Fish Feeder for purchasing new fish and I clicked on the Buy button and, voila!, I had a new fish added to my account.

Infrastructure. Servers and databases and DNS, oh my. Already got all this. Thanks again Big Top Life.

Art. Give me craigslist and 48 hours and magic happens. I have to say the fish turned out better than I could have hoped. Samantha, you are totally awesome!

 

Payment processing. I used Trialpay for Big Top Life. Ian is using Spare Change. I quite liked the integration points Spare Change allows and didn't feel like investigating whether Trialpay offers the same functionality. Spare Change is doing it in Cow Clicker, I can figure out how to do it in Fish Feeder. Setting it up and getting the details sorted was pretty painless - probably less than four hours all in - but again I was able to leverage some code and learning from my experience with Trialpay and Big Top Life.

There you have it a new Facebook game in six days. Go feed some fish!

An interesting side note to this whole process - there was a great talk at GDC this year: "Rapidly Developing FarmVille: How We Created And Scaled A #1 Facebook Game In 5 Weeks". The talk was presented by Amitt Mahajan who was the lead developer on the game. I didn't believe the timeframe when I heard it. All of my colleagues were skeptical. I've changed my mind after going through this process. They were working off existing designs (other farm games on Facebook) which saved them a lot of time. If they also started with a decent codebase, had the right expertise on their team (obviously they did) and were driven, decisive and cohesive, I'm surprised it took them that long ;-).

Comments

[michigan charter fishing]

The more people you add the harder the decisions become and the slower your process goes,I liked your blog it’s very interesting, your information had helped me very much, Please keep on posting the related information regarding this Article.

[facebook applications]

Nice, and thanks for sharing this info with us.
Good Luck!

[garmin]

Just wondering how you made the game?

[Facebook App]

FramVille game created within 7 days only.Any body create game in one week but that game is nice according to the users mind.

[Supra Skytop]

DO DO DO.... THE ONE DESIRE,DON'T WANNA HEAR YOU SAY.....

[David]

Wow! in 6 days? Hmm, you must be one of the best programmers, which I think you are. I hope you'll make more of these games. And i think that you'll earn a lot of money.

[Driver San Francisco]

Your blog contains unique and verity content. You have professional content writer abilities. Designing and posting of this blog is really impressive.

[Ujang Goldfish]

Wow... I am so happy. Thanks for this info. I will to do it.