Fish School has simple rules with maddeningly complex solutions.
It's a completely new puzzle game where your goal is to get all the
different colors of fish into their own schools by pushing entire rows
and columns of fish at a time. The tricky part is you
must do it for all of the colors at the same time. It starts out easy
with just two colors of fish, but gets gradually harder by adding a new
color of fish at each new level.
A training mode is included so you can learn some of the
necessary tricks and
techniques on a gentle learning curve before heading out to set your own
personal records for either time or number of moves.
With the registered version, your best times and best number of moves
per level are stored so
you can play
to beat your own high scores or brag to your friends about your elite fish
schooling skills.
Fish School does not require DirectX to run. It works best on
systems with at least a middle-of-the-road graphics card where it
can reach a good frame rate, but will run on pretty much any windows
system.
Recommended minimums for best playability are a 400 MHz CPU and
an accelerated 3D graphics card (since those cards handle 2D images faster
as well).
Should you have older hardware, the game will dynamically adjust
some visual details to maintain a better frame rate.
So, how exactly did I come up with this idea? It's pretty
strange, actually. It was shortly after Christmas 2003, and we had
some of those candy bead necklaces sitting around that hadn't all
been given to the kids. I noticed that some colors came in bunches,
and others were spread out. I got to wondering how you could score
such a necklace, where you could eat certain beads out to get larger
sets of adjacent colors to match. (I was a bit bored at the in-law's
house.)
From there the idea went into the back of my head for a couple of
months, popping out occasionally to transform a little bit more,
then recede back into the shadows. It migrated from a linear set to
a 2D grid. I tried several themes, all
of which were miserable. What could I use for the little colored
bits that need to match up? Then the theme of Fish School popped out
and changed it form a quirky idea to something that could really appeal to puzzle gamers.
From there, all it took were some suggestions from friends on how
to make it more friendly and usable, and voila! Fish School was
born.
Version 1.0: Initial release.
Version 1.1: Updated so the executable contains version
information, and removed an unneeded registration menu item after
the game is already registered.
Version 1.2: Included an extra DLL for those who don't have it on
their system.
Version 1.3: Orders placed through the web store were having
difficulties.
Version 1.4: Made it completely free, with just a web page launch
at the end to list sponsors and show you other things you may want
to try out.
Free
Game!
