Hey all — solo dev here, gamedev alongside a full-time job. Just shipped my first commercial title on Playgama: Hooked! Panya, a portrait HTML5 tap-timing fishing game.
Quick writeup on why Defold worked for me.
Why Defold
I’m learning Lua and learning to draw at the same time as building this, on limited hours. Defold’s robust engine and fast iteration loop meant I could spend that time on design and art instead of fighting the engine.
With the help from Druid and Monarch extensions, I didn’t have to write a UI framework or a screen manager from scratch. That’s real hours back for actual gameplay work.
And the fast iteration loop are very helpful to my workflow (I still remember how long it takes to build HTML5 build in Unity ). Made testing portal-specific stuff actually manageable solo.
Game’s live on Playgama now, still very early so no metrics worth sharing yet.
PS: Thanks for the amazing work from Defold Team, @britzl for Monarch, @Insality for Druid, @Pawel (you’re tutorial on Youtube rocks!) and other fellow gamedevs in here for the inspiration and knowledge
Congrats on your first release! It’s a fun game! I noticed a few things:
The game was released with Defold 1.12.1. It’s a pretty old version. There are some benefits to upgrading to 1.13.1
It looks like you uploaded a debug build, ie with console output from your game visible in the Chrome developer console.
Did you use any size optimization strategies (Optimizing size of a Defold game)? The game is 6.6MB or so, which is not too bad, but maybe you can reduce size further by excluding engine features you don’t need?
I think you should add keyboard controls. The Space key could be used to Reel in fish and to Cast Again.
Simple yet quite entertaining game. I noticed that the “Reel” button reacts to the click release rather than the initial press. Is this intended behavior?
Usually, this is the correct approach for UI elements, but for triggers in an action game (like a shoot button in an FPS), reacting to the press is generally preferred because it minimizes input lag.
When fishing for legendary fish, clicking when the hook is inside the thin, fast-moving “golden” area is too late, because the hook will have left the area by the time the mouse button is actually released. This actually pushed me toward holding the button down all the time and releasing it when the hook was in the “gold” area, rather than playing normally
If that was intended to make the game harder by requiring the player to anticipate the right moment and compensate for input lag (precisely, finger relase lag :D), then that’s OK. However, in my opinion, holding the button for too long should be prevented in some way in this case.
The Reel button’s wired to Druid’s on_click, and looking at the button API, there’s a separate on_pressed event. on_click seems to resolve on release rather than press (matches what you’re describing)
Switching the reel trigger to on_pressed should fix the lag you’re describing, and I’ll cap the max hold time too so holding the button down forever isn’t just a better strategy than playing normally.
This wasn’t intentional just used the default button callback without checking which event actually fires. Going into the next patch, appreciate you flagging it!
). Made testing portal-specific stuff actually manageable solo.
