Dev Thoughts: Starting from Scratch

As college kicked into full force for me in fall 2018, development slowed down. We did spend a lot of our free time planning and talking about the game, but not a lot of time actually executing anything. At the end of the summer, I felt like something was off. I didn't like the direction my art, or the game, was heading in. It looked...okay? But it didn't make any sense. So we had a meeting. A lot of them.

📌 Issue #1: It was scattered

When we started this project in May, we were honestly not expecting much to come of it. We thought, "we'll do this project in our free time, and release it eventually somewhere and see what happens". I wasn't anticipating the attention and love it would get through social media, and we've become exponentially more invested in snacko since then. Through that process, we realized we didn't really know what our game was. That's a problem...because we're making it. We sat down one day over dinner one day and talked through it: "what's the hook?" 

📌 Issue #2: It had no glue

Before that point, we had no narrative, no central mechanic or selling feature, or real world-building to inform my art choices. The project was falling apart, and we knew it. That night, we came up with a few prompts: Rebuild, Guild, Shipwreck, and Adventurer. Rebuild and Guild were more focused on NPC interaction, quests, and farming. Shipwreck and Adventurer were more focused on crafting and dungeons. In the end, Rebuild felt the most interesting to us; in prompt Rebuild, our central theme was the player rebuilding a town. The main way progress would be shown would be through unlockable architecture and decorations that could be placed freely by the player on a grid system. We wanted to focus on customization, and give the player a good sense of being a "mayor" of sorts - deciding where things went, promoting your town and trying to pull in new residents, and keeping everyone happy. With our new main mechanic thought out, we started brainstorming the narrative.

📌 Issue #3: There was 0 world-building

I think there's a lot of misconception with games that pure games don't need "a story", or a narrative. It's easy to pick up the mindset of, "as long as it's fun, who cares?" That mindset is false, though. Even something as simple as Pacman had a narrative. Narrative doesn't necessarily mean branching paths, or an epic following 4 heroes out to save the world and their romantic lives. Narrative, to me, simply means "motivation". Why should the player care? Why should the player feel compelled to press buttons for 30+ hours? Why is the player doing what they are doing? Without these questions answered, the art and the way the world was laid out made no sense, and the gameplay was suffering because of it. Since our prompt was "Rebuild", we had to come up with a reason why Momo was rebuilding a town. Many ideas were thrown across the dinner table that night, including:

• Momo's humans abandoned her and she started a village with feral cats (this was rejected because it was too sad for us)
• Momo is an adventurer who discovered an abandoned island, and tries to set up a trading post/town there (needed more work to have narrative believable)
• The country used to have towns, but they split up due to a tragic event; Momo wishes to revive the practice of having a tight-knit community again (we went with this)

In our quick prompts, I also listed what I think the type of art style would suit it best, and what would make that particular prompt hard to execute. This helped narrow in on my reference gathering and research once we decided on one. Sadly, this also meant I had to get rid of a lot of my old assets, like the convenience store.

📌 Addressing these issues

It all boiled down to this: the game was inconsistent, had no direction, and had no meat to hold it all together. We scrapped almost everything asides from core mechanics like movement, farming, etc. Although it was hard removing almost 200 assets from source control, 4 months later, I can say I don't regret a bit of it. Our project started out as us doing whatever we wanted to. I wanted to make an ATM, now there's an ATM. I wanted to make cloth banners advertising ramen, I made cloth banners advertising ramen. Did it make sense why this gameplay was in this sort of world? Nope. But I wanted to make the asset. 

Even after the redesign, I still find myself struggling to keep within the style. For example, the earliest revision of the storage box was, well, a storage box. How else am I supposed to make a storage and shipping box? They look the same in all the other farming games!

And then I realized: we're not making "just another" farming game. We're making a farming game with cats. I could get away with so much!

So I made a hollowed out log with a nub and a leaf as the storage box.

Old storage box can be seen in the back:

New storage box:

As long as the style looked like it belonged in the world, as long as it was believable enough in construction and its purpose was read clearly, it was OK. Once I embraced that, the game started to meld together.

📌 TL;DR

1. Have a good idea of what your game is about, and what will drive the player before you start making the game, or a least before you make any serious assets.
2. Reference collecting is game development. Research, research, research! The more you expose yourself to, the more solid your references, the easier time you will have down the line.
3. Stop yourself often and ask: "does this make sense? Did I do this because I want to, or because I should?" It's amazing how many decisions you make with bias that are detrimental to the project!
4. Consistency > realism. If it doesn't look right, even if you're technically correct, you're still wrong. Sorry.