Devlog

Devlog and post-mortem for my game: Cure The Cow!
Created for My First Game Jam: Summer 2022

Hi all! This is just a post-mortem for my game jam submission, including my thoughts and learning experiences through this jam. Just for some background, I just started game dev 2 months ago and this was the first game jam I had ever taken part in.

Going into this game jam, I had set a few goals and rules for myself in terms of what I wished to achieve:

1. Try out a new game genre. My previous few attempts at games were fairly similar genres, so I wanted to try something completely different to branch out, especially with the main point of this game jam being to learn new stuff.
2. Use a premade asset pack. I had always struggled with the art portion of making a game, especially with my subpar artistic skills. I have been working on improving it but in this game jam situation, I highly doubt that I would have enough time to come up with my own art assets.

When the theme for this jam was first announced (healing), I was drawing a blank. Originally, I had a couple of ideas for how to interpret healing, such as playing as a healer in a dungeon party where you have to manage your party's health or healing in a more abstract sense, like a game that was calming and healing. Unfortunately, none of the ideas really jumped out at me and seemed like it would be fun to make and play.

From watching a bunch of videos about coming up with game ideas, one point that constantly came up was taking a current game idea that you enjoy and adding your own twist. One game that was particularly popular this year was Wordle, where you have to guess the word of the day based on the clues provided. I decided to use Wordle as a base model but was still finding it hard to link it to the theme of healing. Luckily for me, on the day of the jam, I decided to browse through the itch.io asset store and came across the Sprout Lands asset pack (https://cupnooble.itch.io/sprout-lands-asset-pack). It immediately caught my eye and before long, the base concept of the game was formulated: Your cow is sick and you have to play small minigames to gather ingredients, which can then be used to play a Wordle-inspired puzzle to figure out the recipe for the medicine.

My Learnings:

This game took be about a total of 24 work hours to complete, spanning across 7 days (with a day in between where I took a break). Here are some of the things I have learnt through this journey:

1. Unity engine and its working parts. As this was the 1st time I was working with the Unity engine to make a proper game (I had fiddle with it once before to produce a small project), there was a huge learning curve to overcome, such as how to handle the different managers (game, UI, sound, etc.) and how to create multiple UI to support the various minigames.
2. The importance of game art. Whenever I was going to publish a game on Itch.io, it always felt incomplete and amateurish due to the art assets used. However, for this game jam, as I used a proper asset pack to create this game, I was immediately able to tell the difference good art can make. Not only was the creating process a lot more enjoyable and smooth sailing, the game direction and feel were also much clearer due to the art style already being defined. Furthermore, when I was done creating the game, it felt far more polished and refined as compared to my previous games too.
3. Planning the game assets to use before starting on the game. In an asset pack, you will need to choose the assets you want to use in your game and I learnt the importance of planning which to use the hard way. I had made the mistake of choosing the assets and names to use as I programmed the game, which resulted in some mishaps. For whatever reason, some of the names I had labelled the ingredients as was wrong (I guess I do not know my plants) and I only realized it after I made most of the game. This resulted in me having to dig through my code and changing the references and names to the correct ones. Furthermore, I chose a few assets that clashed, namely the tomatoes and apples. After I programmed them into the game, I realized that the assets themselves were too similar, and had to make some changes to the sprites themselves to differentiate them more. While these mistakes were not too hard to fix, it is important to note this down so as to prevent this mistakes from happening again in the future, especially with a game jam where we are not provided with as much time.

All in all, this was an eye-opening experience and I definitely learnt a lot from participating in this game jam. This was a great platform for game developers looking to try their hands in a game jam with its generous rules and time span. Thanks once again to ludowoods, Adrienne Lombardo and lysander for hosting this jam!