Note: Connor Lafferty is the Managing Editor of The Daily Campus and Colbi Loranger is an Associate Managing Editor for The Daily Campus.
A new productivity app titled, “A Fish In Sea” was launched by UConn student Connor Lafferty, with the help of fellow student Colbi Loranger. The title is available on the Apple App Store and launched Thursday, Oct. 9.
“A Fish In Sea,” a play on words for “efficiency,” is a game centered on a to-do list. The game is themed around a pirate ship, with players first greeted by the character Captain John. As users complete tasks on their to-do lists, they are awarded “bait coins” which can be used in fishing minigames. Currency from selling the fish earned from these minigames can be used to buy avatars, pets and decorations for the ship.
“[A Fish In Sea] makes you excited to do your tasks and not just have them be something you need to do; now you can gamify them,” Lafferty said, “I always like trying to gamify things in life.”
Lafferty, a fifth-semester student, first came up with the idea for his app two years ago. He explained that his official work took about a year and a half, with artist Loranger joining him in the process about a year in.
Both Lafferty and Loranger pronounced “Fishy Timing” to be their favorite minigame out of the four available. This game is the first users are prompted with after completing their initial tasks, with the goal of the minigame being aiming a fishing rod to hit the center of a fish.
The app is fun and simple to use. However, the creation process was not so simple for the two students. Lafferty, a computer science and digital media design major, explained that the coding he completed for the game was almost entirely self-taught.
The process was lengthy and time consuming, with Lafferty constantly scrapping ideas and reworking the app.
“Making the game over such a long period of time was difficult because it’s not easy to keep track of what you were thinking of a week ago, let alone six months ago, when you revisit a system that’s now got a bug in it because you updated another system,” Lafferty said.
Loranger faced some challenges, too. As an art major concentrating in illustration and animation typically drawing character art and illustrative work, she was new to pixel and sprite art, which is what the app is comprised of.
“I had never done that before,” Loranger said. “But it was really cool to learn.”
Loranger noted that her favorite characters to design were the rats that users can sell their fish to. There are different rats on each island and Loranger finds them “really cute.”
“A Fish In Sea” is a unique app, with its inspiration being ‘homegrown,’ Lafferty said.
“A lot of the [productivity apps] that were on the market weren’t really calling my name. They weren’t super fun because they didn’t have game mechanics,” Lafferty said. “It was just you finish a task: you get XP. Right, cool. But you didn’t get any hit of dopamine.”
Putting the excitement into task completion is what Lafferty ultimately strives for with his app.
“A Fish In Sea” has already reached over 100 users in its first week of release. Lafferty hopes to add the app to the Google Play Store soon, as well as implement updates to the app with a potential feature of multiplayer down the road.
The aim of the app may be particularly intriguing to students who have endless tasks to complete.
“It’s a fun game to play that helps you get things done,” Lafferty said.
Lafferty aspires for a future career in game design, with “A Fish In Sea” being his first released app added to his portfolio. Loranger is now considering a similar path. The two are proud of their work having finally been released after almost two years in development.