Introduction
So I recently entered my game "Nothing Strange About This Farming Simulator" into the 1st Indie Tales Game Jam hosted by Adam C Younis. This Jam took place over the weekend of July 9-11th, 2021, and the theme of the jam was "One Room".
Now, originally I was not even going to enter the jam in any capacity, since I worked weekend nights every weekend, but because of a disagreement I had with my boss, and a strong desire to take my game design career more seriously, I had quit my job just one day prior to the start of the jam, and decided to enter in order to get my mind off of the situation.
Back in June I had decided to enter the massive GMTK Game Jam, but because of poor planning, I failed to submit a game, after putting in approximately 17 hours of work. During that Game Jam I decided that I would stay up all night in order to put forward my absolute best effort, this lead to me feeling quite horrible the next day, both due to a lack of sleep and massive disappointment because of a failure to submit anything. Essentially, I blamed my own lack of experience in planning, scope, and capability, for the failure.
This game jam I decided to have a different approach. I decided before I began that I would NOT sacrifice my mental or physical health in any way to complete the project, as this would not be a sustainable direction moving forward. I also wanted to make sure that I submitted something, no matter what, so I would have a Portfolio piece, and so that I could join into the indie gaming community in some way. Because of this, I decided before the Jam began, that I would disqualify myself from the main prize, in order to remove my own competitive and self-destructive nature, so that I could participate in the Jam in a more healthy way. I brought on two of my close friends to help with the project, instantly disqualifying myself because of team size. I also decided that I would use some premade assets (namely the bunny sprite and tile set), so that I could focus more on the technical side of things for my submission.
I am still very much a beginner game designer, still working on completing my Associate's Degree in game design at a local community college. I had no notion that I could ever win this competition in the first place, so I was happy to simply work on a Prototype, and wanted to participate in this Jam in particular, because Adam's videos had been such a valuable asset to me in learning Aseprite and to be a better artist in general. Essentially, I wanted to add 1 more submission to his Jam, so that it was as successful as possible.
Fast-forwarding to the end of the Jam, I was able to submit my game before midnight on Sunday, whilst getting my full eight hours of sleep, and eating relatively well throughout the weekend. The game was not perfect (as game jam games tend to be), and not in the state the team had initially planned it to be, but it was submitted, and I was VERY happy with the product.
Now, my personal stretch goal on top of submitting, and maintaining my health, was to make a game that people would not only play, but complete. So I was thrilled to see that many of the people who played the game, were not only enjoying it, but were even reaching the end screen! This was a dream come true for me!
This is where things got even better for me. Once the ranking glitch which prevented us from rating each others game's was fixed, Adam decided to stream himself playing the first set of games randomly on his channel. Not only that, but he wasn't filtering for eligible winners (yet). I had my hopes that he would land on my game to play, but understood that the odds would be low that he would come across it.
However, luck was in my favor and it actually came up as one of the first games he reviewed on his stream, so I was able to see his reaction live! I decided not to let him know that I was watching him live, because I wanted to see his reaction to the game as unfiltered as possible. To my absolute delight, he didn't immediately turn off the game in disgust, and actually reached the end screen! I NEVER expected him to play my game, because of the fact that I was inherently disqualified from the prize, but the fact that he took it a step further and actually completed the game, ranked and left a comment for me, was my absolute dream! After this he started filtering for qualifying games only, so I really did hit the jackpot, metaphorically, by getting to see his reaction.
Before I go further into this blog post, where I will go in depth into some of the issues with my game, and how I will fix them, I would like to say THANK YOU SO MUCH to Adam, and his community for playing my game, providing feedback, and for making great games to make this Jam successful! Good luck to everyone who is competing for 1st place, I will be playing, rating, and leaving feedback on many of your games over the next week under my Itch account Zachu. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me, and I hope that this community continues to thrive and grow.
Responding to the Criticism
The Positive
As I stated earlier, I was lucky enough to receive criticism from Adam himself, and I will be responding to it here.
To see his full reaction to my game, you can watch this excerpt from his Twitch stream. But I will provide an image of his rating and comment for your reference.
His response was essentially a microcosm of the greater response to my game, and I found his summation and score very fair. Once again thank you so much for taking the time to check out my game, even though I only participated and did not qualify for the prize. Before I go into the negative feedback (which has prompted me to write this blog in the first place) I will cover some of what worked well. Additionally, from this point on I will be discussing specific game mechanics in my game, which may not make sense unless you play it, so if you are still interested I would recommend playing my game, which is linked at the beginning of the document. My hope by writing all of this, is that I can put into words the essence of the mistakes I made, and try to learn from them myself, and if anybody else reads this, hopefully they can get some value from it as well.
I was quite happy to see that the hectic feel of the game translated well over into the final submission. The original idea was to have the game be about quick decision making, and running around a small map quickly. The Dash mechanic, which allows you to dash in a straight line but recoils when colliding with objects or walls, lends itself well to the frenzied feel of the game. The image in my head when we were in the planning phase was of dashing around trying to catch a rabbit in your real life garden, which would be quite hectic indeed.
Players were often surprised when the turnips grew and then started walking around. This was our goal, to catch players off guard with the realization that, not only will they have to juggle the pots, they will also have to babysit their grown plants as well. This is part of the humor of the game, and is ultimately, our core concept. Originally we had planned to have two other plants, but because of the time limitation, they were cut. If the game develops past a polished prototype, this will probably be the first new feature implemented. However, we received a lot of praise on this aspect of the game, and are very grateful that it went over well.
The core gameplay loop was also something that people seemed to be able to latch onto quite well, and I think delivered a fair bit of variety and complexity. As the game goes on, people get more comfortable with the concept, and begin using multiple pots simultaneously. If a plant needs time to grow, most players immediately recognized that the best thing to do was to leave it and begin work on the next plant, this was the intended mechanic and I believe it translated well. Additionally, many players noticed that if you got multiple plants that needed the same thing to grow (e.g. multiple "Music" needs) the best thing to do was group them together and complete the task. This allowed the player to protect the turnips while also progressing the growth of multiple plants. Lastly, when the players would get near the goal, (10 grown turnips) I noticed that their gameplay pace would drastically increase in order to push the game to the finish. To me this indicated a desire to complete the game, paired with an increase of player skill. This was certainly a desired outcome, the game gets harder to play as you play it, but the player is also getting more skilled. In the next version I will capitalize on this by implementing a time attack mode, where the goal is to grow more turnips in a limited time, I think that this would push the strengths of the gameplay while appealing to players who are enjoying the experience.
We were given a lot of praise generally in the area of aesthetic, which I was also quite happy about. I think a strong part of this is the music and general sound design, which made the game feel a lot better to play, though in the next version the volume will be boosted considerably. Many people noted that the volume levels were too low, and I wish this is something we could have caught during the jam, but we didn't consider that not everyone would be using external speakers or headphones, additionally, we had our volume turned up to max while mixing audio, and mixed for that, when we should have mixed for mid-level audio. This is a mistake I will definitely not be making again. Despite this, there are a variety of sound effects and several songs which were all made by one of our team members, and I think that aspect of the game is one of its strongest points. The dynamic changing of the music through the boombox (which is necessary to do to progress the game) worked really well and is something I will probably implement in further games. To be specific though there were only 2 songs during actual game-play, because they are changed constantly, they don't get boring throughout the duration of play. There was also some music theory reasons that allowed the songs to be changed back and forth without having too much dissonance, but that is not my area of expertise, so I will not comment on it much. Additionally, the title song and end screen song fit quite nicely into the games aesthetic.
The visuals of the game are where we get some mixed responses, which is understandable because of the use of mixed art. At first, when coding the game I used premade assets for almost every element, and then changed things as the jam went on. Because we were already disqualified for our team size, I did not stress the importance of swapping every premade asset for custom art. This lead to the rabbits and the tile set still being outsourced from assets that existed prior to the jam. In the next two weeks we plan on replacing this art with custom work so that we can truly call the game fully our own. Going forward in future jams, especially ones where I intend on competing, I will be sure to only include art that was made within the allotted time period, even if it means that other aspects of the game will be simpler. However, despite this, people generally liked the look of the game, and didn't struggle too much with recognizing things, which ultimately was a positive for our game.
Now that I have covered what worked, I will discuss what did not work.
Responding to the Criticism
The Negative
Firstly, as noted by Adam and several others, the instructions were unclear / not good enough. Here is an image of the in game screen that appears after the tile screen.
As you can see, this is less than ideal. It is a bit ugly and far too much on screen text, leaving the player potentially overwhelmed with information. This screen was accessible at any time by walking over to the book in the center of the room, but most players did not return to check it out to try and get more info, which is understandable. I failed to include the controls on this page, which lead to much confusion about how to pick things up, much more on that later. This is a complete oversight on my end because I thought everyone would have to click on the game page to play it, where I listed the controls. I did not realize that people could play the game directly from the Jam page, thereby completely missing the controls. This however is simply an excuse, as all games should explain the controls within the game itself, this will absolutely be remedied in the next patch, and I am sure would help more people have a positive experience with the game.
We also lost some points on the execution on creative expression of the theme, which is fair because of another oversight on our end. The game was meant to take place in a Greenhouse, but because we failed to create our own tile set, the game looked more like an open farm. On a technical level the entire game is indeed in only one room, but we should have prioritized this problem, and therefore it is understandable that we got a below average score.
Some people also noticed the collision on the fences around the middle weren't clear, this is understandable since I was using a tile based collision system, there are multiple ways to address this, which I will experiment with and ultimately do my best to improve.
There were some visual glitches caused by the turnips spawning inside of collision tiles, I am not totally sure how to fix this issue at this time, but I will do my best to look into it. There was also another issue with visual tearing because of an improper resolution size.
Finally, by far the most common feedback I have heard from everybody after launching the game, was that the pickup mechanic didn't work well. The reason for this can actually be broken down into two separate mechanics, one of which I feel conflicted about, while the other is clearly a failure on my end. Firstly lets discuss that one, as it is a simple fix when stems from an even simpler issue.
In an attempt to illustrate this I have provided two screenshots from the game below to to show the problem.
In the picture on the right, the player is eligible to pick up the pot by pressing space. But in the picture on the left, the player is not. I think most players would agree that, in either screenshot the farmer should be able to pick up the pot, but because of a coding oversight, they are not. The reason for this, is that the way my code was written, the player draws a straight, short line from the base of their feet, directly in front of them, and if that line collides with a pot, then the pot is lifted. In the image on the left, the pot is one pixel to high on the y axis to be picked up. I have drawn on these images to further demonstrate this, for those who may not understand what I mean.
This way by far, the biggest facepalm moment I had during the entire jam. In retrospect, it is such a simple problem to fix. I could have the line be drawn from the center of the players origin, which would allow the player to more easily line up with the pot from the side. Or I could have the game draw a rectangle and check anything in that rectangle. To be clear THIS IS A COMPLETE ROOKIE MISTAKE and I absolutely deserve to have lost points over it. When I was coding the game I knew this was how the game worked, and therefore, never had a problem picking up pots and throwing them. Ultimately, this is a failure of not having anybody test the game at an earlier stage of development, where an issue like this would have undoubtedly been caught, and fixed easily.
However, an interesting observation that I made, is that, this mechanical failure lead to another issue that people had with the game, which was actually an intended feature. This being that the dash and pick up were all on the same button. People would not be lined up with the side of pots, and would dash into or past them, which then would force the player to readjust in order to try again, when people first started playing, this would happen multiple times, usually after a few minutes of play, this would no longer be a major issue, however, the game is so short that even a few minutes of adjusting to this can severely affect a players enjoyment of the game.
As stated earlier, this was actually an intended mechanic … with the rabbits and grown turnips. I think that watching the game is more fun than playing it, for this reason. It IS funny that the player is bashing into walls and dashing around while struggling to save their crops. I think even people who played the game could understand this. However, this comedy does not apply to the stationary pots, which suffered from the same problem. It wasn't fun for players to not be able to pick up the pots which were just sitting on the floor, and it doesn't make sense from a design perspective for the player to struggle with this. I still believe that having the dash and pickup on the same button is a good mechanic, but the player should never struggle to pick up the pots. I think that a better explanation, especially of the controls, would have mitigated this issue, and that had I programmed a more sensible pick up mechanism, I would have received a much higher mechanical score.
In Conclusion
All in all, I am extremely happy with the response to my game, and I learned a lot from the experience. I was very pleased to be able to submit a game, even though there were some major problems. This was very much a learning experience for me and my team, and I hope that next time, I will do better! As far as the future of "Nothing Strange About This Farming Simulator", I plan on fixing the issues explained above once the voting period for the jam is over in order to have a stronger portfolio piece, and a more fun game for people to play. If there continues to be interest in the game after that point, there is a possibility of further development on the project, a lot of people, including Adam, indicated that there may be more potential to this game, and we may decide to build it out a bit more.
Thank you so much to the entire Adam C Younis community for such a great jam! the community is wonderful to be a part of and I hope that we can all become stronger developers together! Thank you to everyone who played my game, it means a lot to me, and one last thank you to Adam personally, for hosting the jam, and playing my game on stream!
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