Sophomore aerospace engineering major Joshua Kupras ended 2022 with a huge accomplishment—a fishing game app he programed was released on the Apple App Store. The game app, Fish Fish Idle, was released for download in December and allows players to catch over 800 fish combos from beautiful and unique locations all while listening to a calming soundtrack.
Joshua Kupras
Fish Fish Idle was created by Polar White LLC, a gaming development company Kupras started working for as a freelancer during his first year at UT.
“I decided to freelance some of my programming skills on Fiverr and they became a client for a fishing prototype,” said Kupras. “I completed the freelance work for them, and they liked it so much they wanted to keep working with me and move forward with the game, and eventually I ended up migrating over to working twenty hours a week for them.”
Kupras spent the past year and half working on the fishing app and was responsible for all the program coding.
“Since I was the most experienced in Unity on our team, I covered essentially all of the coding until it was in such a polished state that the rest of the team was able to take over with their strengths,” said Kupras.
Coding included the gameplay, saving and loading system, and user interface. Through the gameplay programming, Kupras could directly change the feel of what was going on and how it played out.
Considering Kupras hasn’t had any formal training in programing, being able to do all the coding was a great feat. Most of his knowledge is self-taught by watching tutorials and learning from mistakes he’s made on personal projects.
“Professional learning on programming is not required,” said Kupras. “You only need a good grasp of what you are doing to be effective. About seventy percent of actual time spent programming is fixing yours or someone else’s bugs, so knowing where to look for help is paramount.”
For now, Kupras plans to continue in this line of work and hopes to work on another game with Polar White LLC but isn’t sure the direction he will take.
“I have a few personal projects, mostly just for fun, but as an aerospace major the expectation is that aerospace internships are my main work experience, but defying expectations is fun,” said Kupras.