Reflection

I have a lifelong love of gaming. In fact, I can credit my love of gaming as a child as one of the primary factors that got me into the realm of computers and programming in the first place. I spent many long hours in my youth creating small games in QBasic and a game-creation system called ZZT, which inspired the graphical style of Smuhley!

I have made a variety of small mobile games for fun but this was the first time I went the extra mile and gave the game a fully-fledged release with deployment to the Google Play Store. Let's just say I learned a lot from the experience: learning about deploying to the Google Play Store was nearly as complex as creating the game itself! Optimizing the game for different devices was a tricky process: it's not the same as responsive web-design, that's for sure!

The game was created in GameMaker:Studio, utilizing the proprietary GML language. My education and experience with object-oriented principles seriously comes in handy when developing in this environment.

The game itself has not become particularly popular, but I consider it a success. Fun sidenote: the game was originally going to be entitled "Sploot", but I discovered at the eleventh hour that another game with that title exists, a VR game where you're a seagull that poops on stuff. No kidding.