Post Game Jam Review

Inspiration

With the jam theme of "noodle", co-incidentally, I'd recently watched a series about asian food stalls, and about how cutthroat an arena it can be. I thought it'd make the perfect setting for a game, and I wanted to be able to reflect the struggles of an independent stall owner having to win over those who are more likely to trust brands. 

Maybe not the most imaginative interpretation of the theme, but I'd set my mind on what I wanted to create.

The Good Times

Going back to that previous sentence, I had a clear vision of what I wanted the game to be.

I had two mockups of how I felt I could present the game, the first was kind of first person, when you have the ingredients laid out in front of you and you serve people coming to your stall one-by-one.

Evidently, I went with the second, as I felt it reflected the hustle and bustle of a street stall better and I wanted the player to feel the need to attract customers over, rather than being handed them. And mechnically, I managed to achieve exactly what I set out for, what's there is feature complete, though I could do with some polish and a better UI.

In terms of art, I wanted to go with something... Unpolished, something to reflect that this isn't some sterilized chain restaurant.  While I'm not a great artist, I think what I put together reflects that well enough and you can tell what things are... That's an accomplishment enough for me.

While it is a weekly game jam I was entered, I opened Unity for the first time with 3.5 days to go... This led to a few stressful points where I was convinced I had no chance of finishing, but felt if I took anything out, there wasn't any point submitting it. In the end I only stayed up til 1am once and managed to get everything implemented somehow.

And The Bad...

For a game where I wanted the narrative to be the focus, this doesn't really even remotely reflect that. In fact there's only really one conversation in the game, which I'm not sure counts as a story.

I gave myself so much work to do with the mechanics that I just left no time for the dialog. I could have removed some things, like the meal prep and buying ingredients completely, and I think there might be something to that. But I also didn't want the player to just be reading reams of text, I wanted to give the player some sense of ownership of that world.

For example I half-programmed the customers having preferences and reacting to what you cooked for them, like being upset if you just gave them a bunch of chillis. This is something I just had no time for, which is why the customers just react with a :| face after eating. The sprites for happy and angry are there, just not used in the game :) 

On the topic of art, prior to me completely redo-ing the art the night before the deadline, I wasn't happy at all with how the game looked, so I figured if the game at least "functioned" well, that'd be the best place for my focus. Finally, for a game jam where there's an unknown amount of entries, I wasn't sure a long form, slow-paced story would actually be the best thing to enter, expecting, or requiring, people to spend time with my game to get the most out of it.

I think if I failed at one particular thing;, it was not deciding what I wanted the game to be. I spent all the time doing game mechanics for something I wanted to be story centric.

For The Future

I think what I've learned for future jams is; to pick a single mechanic or system. If adding anything else, making sure it compliments that mechanic rather than being a separate entity.

And So...

All in all, I'm actually really pleased with the game, it turned out almost exactly as I envisioned. It also gives me a solid framework to continue development of the game, as outside of the "elderly man" event, everything was written to be reusable.

The following are areas I hope to build on and put together a more polished version of the game;

• Actual dialog - I want to implement a range of NPCs, and its up to the player who they befriend (however that ends up being implemented)
• Customers conversing - I want to highlight the social element of the stall, though you'd also need to convince them to leave eventually since they're taking up seats...
• Adapt the meal prep or remove it - I'm happy that I managed to implement it, but I think it could do with reworking to something that better evokes actually preparing a meal.
• Story - While the player is given a screen of text to try and set up the world, I think there's better ways of going about that (something that doesn't look like it was rushed!)