Post mortem devlog on the jam!

Hello everyone!

So the voting period is over and the game jam is now fully over! This game was made in 30 days with the help of @mer_yilmz on twitter who made the wonderful sounds, found sounds, and was overall responsible for how wonderful it sounds. 

So let's talk about what I thought worked, what didn't, and what's next!

First thing that worked out was my team! I teamed up with Omer who is a very active member of the audio game community as a sound designer and the results were better than I could have ever dreamed of. He was incredibly helpful giving insight both as someone who plays a lot of audio games, and as an incredibly experienced audio engineer. The game sounds wonderful and I'm so happy he agreed to join my team!

Second thing that worked, the vibes! The vibe of the game is truly relaxing. Wandering around, speaking to the soft spoken NPC's, picking fruit, planting instrument themed plants, everyone seems to agree that it was so relaxing. Combined with the amazing atmospheric sounds of day turning to night, it really does just feel relaxing.

Third thing that worked was the progress! Being able to buy upgrades and progress in relationships is something I adore in games, and in the end it worked out wonderfully. So the more you played, the more you unlocked. To me this is the key to any farm life sim game. The feeling of progress. I hope to expand on this!

Fourth thing that I liked, was how I did the roads. It was a new approach, but through the power of different foot steps from Omer it seemed like navigation was straight forward for most folks once all the bugs were ironed out. So I'm going to keep to that style, and maybe even add more special navigation steps. The biggest confusion seemed to be at certain crossroads it was hard to tell when to turn, so making a unique step for cross roads is something I want to look into for sure!

So let's talk about what didn't work, and how I hope to do things differently!

First thing that didn't work, was the first four versions of the game at the end of the jam. Simply put, I didn't put enough time into the game given how complicated it was, and used the first 2-3 days of the voting period to fix major bugs. They were all over the place!  But I guess this is the nature of jams of course. But without any dead lines besides the ones I set for myself, I hope this won't happen again and future versions will be much better!

Second thing, was tutorial. I initially put everything in the read me file, but that was a bit of disaster. I didn't cover everything because I forgot little things that were important, it also wasn't obvious what was important or not to players. During the voting period I made an audio recording of myself playing and explaining what I'm doing, and the confusion stopped after that! So I think I may just include game recordings of myself playing in the future inside the game itself.

Third thing was cooking. If you played the game, you asked yourself why cooking is even there when you can sleep for free and get all your energy back. To that question, I have no answer. Even now the cooking is pointless I realized. Sometimes in jams you just kind of throw things in because other games in that genre have them, and it just ended up there. I think the most important thing to add to make cooking a nice feature of the game is make it so you can take food with you. So you can cook a big meal, then spend a longer time out fishing because you can eat as needed.

Fourth thing was foraging. Simply the way I set it up it was difficult to find the foraged goods except walking back and forth, and that's not super fun. I have some plans to change it entirely and reward people who push farther and farther from spawn with more goodies. 

So with those out of the way, what's the plan going forward?

My main big project is still TierraMon! But with how much fun I had making this game, and how excited people were for this, I would be remiss to not keep working on it. So here's a list of things I think I'll add, before I call this project "finished"!

1. Tutorial recordings for each task included inside of the game! That way by quickly going through the tutorial menu you'll get a narrated tutorial along with the in game sound effects to perfectly explain what's going on. Having these easily accessible will make a huge difference I think.

2. Forage rework. This will mean making it easier to find what you want, and making sure the player gets rewarded the longer they spend out foraging. The farther you go from the beaten path, the better the rewards should be since it'll be less picked over after all!

3. Ability to eat while out and about and cooking overhaul! So you make food at home, then can eat while out in the field to restore energy. As part of this food will be changed drastically and which you cook with will matter a lot more.

4.  Upgrades to your house! Increasing your maximum stamina, increasing effectiveness of your cooking pot, and things of that nature come to mind. 

5. Making the days matter. Simple events that happen every 10 days, or rainy/dry seasons that impact other actions. Right now sleeping 100 days then playing makes no difference than just playing form day 1. I want to change that! 

6. More people to talk too. Right now there are only characters in town that lead to an ending. But there should be a few more, even just that talk to you, sell small things, or just apologize when you run into them.

7.  The final one is simple animals! Getting a cow/chicken that you can get food from every day, perhaps hunting in the foraging area, and maybe dogs and cats that wander your farm and give a bonus for keeping it safe are all wonderful ideas. I hope to have at least some simple animals.

8. Rework all the balance and keep bug squashing! The amounts healed/sell prices were picked pretty random for the jam, so I'm going to put a lot of thought into how I want the balance of everything to interact with each other!

So there's all my thoughts on it! It was such a great time, and I'm really proud of this entry. Getting third place with such amazing folks entering it felt fantastic, and I'm excited to work on this more and keep getting better!

For smaller updates follow me on twitter:https://twitter.com/EricbombDev

And have fun gamers!