Day 10

The day is complete! I realized about an hour in today tinkering that there's a million little things to add. So I decided to let it be finished here. I'm happy with my entry.  So let's look at how the game landed, key take aways, and thoughts for next time!

Bird Catcher is a small story about a young kid who's home alone.  They find a suspicious net in the forest and discover a frog they first encounter can talk.  The game is meant to be a fairly chill SNES like experience but without those pesky random battles.

I was inspired by Pokemon Go Pikachu during early development, particularly the idea of catching a variety of monsters without random, and building high combo's to find rarer critters. I lacked the time and resources for unique monsters I ended up keeping the birds which were the placeholders. Other inspirations while prototyping were Earthbound and Spirited Away.

The theme of the Jam felt very easy to get a little too dark then I wanted to for this, so I had planned on a Earthbound approach where it's a little cute/funny but still has something good (hopefully) to say. The frog helped keep the game feeling whimsical and preventing from getting a little too serious while the player starts wondering if this kid has been abandoned. Was the frog real? Maybe. But I'm pleased with the tone the game landed on.

Learnings and Objectives:

This game jam was largely an exercise of focused learning and time management. I made a plan, a schedule, and executed. I wanted to understand in a time box how much was reasonable to get done working on games after work. The scope and schedule worked out pretty well, though I ended up having an extra day I'd initially thought thanks to a surprise wellness day.  3 days finding a fun gameplay loop,  one day integrating art/animations from itch/other sources,  2 days of level design and narrative,  4 days of polish and play testing. Big thanks to my friends playing early builds! I had something playable by Thursday but on Friday I think I threw together a cut scenes with the frog and gave the game a sense of progression/and ending.

What was the learning focus?

Godot programming in general, I was still fairly rusty and relearning a lot of things, so I really wanted to find a flow for prototyping's games.  I was very actively avoiding doing art and audio for most of the week just to stay focused on my goals. The other major objective was to try my hand at game design. 

State charts, state charts, state charts. Really good use of time investing in learning them during this project, I was able to keep the code fairly predictable/easy to debug. There's only one game breaking bug I didn't have time to fix I know of, which is honestly way better then usual game jam's for me.  It also let me recreate many snes staples like interactable,  my first AI, and creating a pretty engaging modular simon says mini

Tilemap programming was probably the most frustrated I got in the process, but I'm glad I went for it as it really helped for my final day "I probably shouldn't do this" moment. Did you notice birds can spawn when you're in tall grass? A little nod to Pokemon obvious, it's random so it's possible to have missed it even though I made you run through a lot of it to get to the deeper forest zone. That logic is all made by reading the current tile data the player is standing on, scanning the surrounding 9 tiles that are marked as "spawnable" and loads a critter in "flee" mode. 

I tried my best to make the game intuitive and easy to understand. I was fairly deliberate about structuring a tutorial without a tutorial. There's actually a wasd tutorial if the player doesn't move in the first 2 seconds but it never shows after you've moved, I also played around with camera focus and tracking to hint at what the player should do.  There isn't much to the house beyond being a very nice asset I found on itch.  I tried to make an interesting forest by having a path to funnel players through while looking like the space is a large interesting place. I made some general rules for decorating out of bounds area's to make things visually interesting, and dabbled a little in animations with the water. Though I was really regretting not learning tweens in godot, the animations was something I actively didn't dive in as I felt it distracted from my goal of programming and level design though.

I actually play tested this time! This is my third time doing a jam with Godot and for what ever reason, every time I do not have something playable. Kinda why I had a strict schedule, but also. I really wanted this to be at least a little fun. So I blocked off a few days to get feedback and try to iterate my game design and keep practicing that aspect as well. My earliest play tester and rubber duck rightly picked apart some aspects of my prototype I'd grown used to and I think the game is in a much better place for it. Thanks Joel!

Fun Facts and Hail Mary's

I didn't have a game name till like lunch hour today. I was really hoping to have time to make Ghibli-esque forest spirits but there just wasn't time. That's ok birds are cool too.

I forgot to set a font.

I threw out the entire 3rd scene, the bigger forest level and remade it from the ground up. The previous version had a lot of vision and bird catching frustrations. This new one is a lot more interesting visually and provides a less frustrating. Thank you tilemap scripting's that let me paint in the spawning zones.  I think that would have been far to risky and required to much extra testing to trash the level the day of the deadline.

Final Score:

I put in a total of 54 hours, probably like 12 coffee's, 4 playtest builds and one moment of reconsidering my life choices. Now this is a personal thing, but I think this was too much time while also working spent. I felt burnt out on Tuesday and Thursday but the 10 day deadline pushed me to over do it a bit. The great thing is now I have a pretty good idea of what's more feasible for side game dev in terms of hours and what can be done in a time box. I used this jam's devlog as a little journal of what kind of task I did for how long. This will serve as a great baseline and I have a "pretty complete" game under my belt.

If you played Bird Catcher please let me know how your experience was!