Post Jam Mortem

Project GrowWild ... because it the Game progressed in wild growing way....

14 days of a GameJam, acutaly my first real GameJam, where I worked solo on one project 100% focus on it.

At the beginning of the Jam I had a very clear idea of makin a farming game, ... because nature and stuff you know? 

Well, then I got my assets together and looked what I can do... "StarDew Valley" has also farming... just a small part of the game but it is there ;) - and they have caves with monsters! so.... lets make a cave where you find Items.

The next day I was making a inventorysystem for  my game because - who knows what I will do with the Items? Sell them sounds like an Idea, so a CoinCounter + Icon with animation, spawned in the corner of the UI.... looks nice... 

The following day the Battlesystem with Brakeys Turnbased tutorial was born... I made it realy bad at first, like no grafics at all, then I put in the nice visuals and - finished ... 1 enemy, 1 player  2 healtbars - attack heal escape button .... very boring I thought but maybe more enemies later!

So I started working on the code of the farm... I need the fields to be called via click... so tutorial for clicking was watched an implemented. Worked very nice - could I make it that my character (not existing) follow the mouse click? Another tutorial.... 

3 Days later I could Click-To-Move in a empty cave and I could click all the buttons and the Farm to get a DebugLine.

did I mention weather? I made some weather fx too - like sunny cloudy and rain... it will make your plants waterd... maybe

now to the farming part...  how about a RANDOM CAVE?! Nice I have done random stuff I can do it! Made some prefabs to spawn left and right of the cave and on it some random enemy spawner ! NICE  works splendit just that the always spawn new when leaving the scene - for battles leaving the cave etc. so I had to make a savesystem.... for 1 ingame day ... what a pain - did you know that playerprefs with the same name can be loaded in 2 different  Scripts? Me not, so I struggled a day befor I could finaly find my mistake an all enemyspawner and loots spawner and cave and PLANTS (at the farm I didn t make) got IDs so I can add them to their saveKey.... 

weekend - lets make the farm.. I don t have a clue how to do it ... so I prepared a script at the first or second day with the parameters I though would be cool like: needs water, or not ; grow time modification, how big is the plant, how much loot.... oh loot.... 

back in the cave I made my enemys drop loot, I made the GameManager save the enemy I encounter and the loot stay in all the scenes so I can port them over and the I made the same for the inventory so I can load in Items.... well that worked smoother then I thought.

Sunday weekend...  Plants... they need water,  seeds and be looted...  so I tried around very hard, I made my system way to complex and asked a friend of mine for help, he deconstructed everything with me so I got to the point of telling him what I realy want and then it was very easy: Plants age - the age goes up if water is there - the water is a simple integer with a NEED everyday that is subtracted of the current water if there is 0 or less the plant don't age - the state is depending on the age and if its finished growing then .... how about I make the dog petable? sounds nice no ? 

Appropos Sound, my friend Zombiesoft (Assetstore Stuff) made a nice SoundManager very easy to implement, listend all the music I have and so I bought 30€ of sounds and music on the store, just to use 3 Songs and free CC0 SoundFX at the end.... well done, sounds nice - how about a Intro and a Outro scene? - playtesting - everything works fine, how about the savesystem ... broken as expacted - lets rework that ... took about a day more, then FINALY I gave the game to a friend (Owlrrex) and my girlfriend (Lya). She played it and said: well the Plants can t be harvested, the enemys don t despawn when I kill them and Owlrrex said: there is a bug you  can play a day, get back to menu start new again and your items are kept from the prefeous run.... well Reworking every point they told me took another day, so FINALY I could make the plants ready to Play -> plant, watering, growing, harvesting, empty and repeat.

Then I though, how should I tell players what to do and made a canvas for the tutorial, its a simple text tutorial... was boring as hell and the fight was boring as hell and my game had no ending ... so I made a quest system, throw out the moneysystem cause no shop was implemented till this point, then I thought about a better battlesystem like in Final Fantasy with flashy attacks and anim.... wait a second ... I m playing ff14 and the criticle manouvers request a buttonsmash event, very simple to redo, so I made a buttonsmash event into my battle system which worked totaly fine from the get go (after 5 attempts) and then I made the Tutorial inte 5 parts where you click through them to get to know everything. and it was done.... NOOO  The tutorial was boring, I was looking at the Jam page and though... this little dude of the jam, I make this game for the Jam... I ripped him of the text (pixelt him after the image in krita) made a 4 frame animation and put him on my tutorial texts, wiggling around its so adorable!  - Finishing touches on the credits and the TitleScreen. 
Then I pixeld the Icon, I think that worked out very well and it fits the game perfect. 

There are some days left, but I would featurecreep until the end if I go on from here on.

Looking back on the Journey through the Jam I made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot of new things and found out that my focus in GameMaking is on makeing a good feeling, I don t care so much about the perfect grafic or special features, it s all about the "How do you feel when you play the game, is is anoying? then I don t like it - is it pleasing, perfect"  Audio and GameFlow are very important, and I highly suggest to everyone, to make your audio very early in the game, it changes the feel of the game a lot.

Thanks for reading so far, and I wish you a good day!