Jam Submission Post Mortem

Tapple – Jam Post Mortem

By Carly Meyerhardt

Made for Weekly Game Jam #211: Gravity

Introduction

Design began Monday afternoon when I saw the theme, “Gravity,” and immediately, admittedly unoriginally, thought “Apples!” and then “Catching Apples! . . . In a basket, above the players head, and the player has to tap the tree to get the apples to fall (with gravity)” and the silly working title “Tapple” was born. Development began Tuesday afternoon. Submission was Thursday morning.

For this game, I took on the roles of Game Designer, all-around Audio Person, and Art Generalist. This is the first project I released where (a) I wasn’t the lead programmer, and (b) I worked with another programmer. This was a very worthwhile experience for my growth as a game developer:

• I flexed my Game Design skills, hitting the GDD hard with a Trello board and development stage planning.
• I relinquished the programming role for an art-focused role, which allowed me to really focus on the other side of the coin. (Mind you, I still wrote code for animations, audio, and vfx 😊)
• I gained practice with collaborating using version control tools and followed a practice of checkouts.

Game Design

The game design came easy to me, the mechanics were so simple: catch apples and turn them in! I could definitely see the game being completed in two days. I quickly threw my ideas into a Trello board, made a mock proof of concept, had stages planned for MVP and Post-MVP with stretch goals. The next day, I presented what I had to Kyle, the lead programmer & developer, and we were off!

Acting as Game Designer/Project manager enabled me to have a vision for the game and execute the vision, leveraging the resources I had available. The developer I worked with was great at attacking each module as it was planned out. I was so pleased that I could turn away from the progress of the project to focus on the art and look back and see everything put together.

Audio (Designer, Artist, Programmer)

For the audio design, if you notice, I chose to trigger additional layers of the music (the drums track) based on whether the player had apples in their basket. I wanted to solidify the feeling that having apples is awesome, and when you have no apples, life is just not as fun. Catching the apples can be quite challenging so having the extra reward of music for doing well was perfect for my liking. Admittedly, the drums track consisted of auto-generated percussion from GarageBand, so I really don’t want credit for that.

To get the leaves rustling sound FX, I was out and about at 11:30pm rustling bushes in my neighborhood, hoping to miss the daytime noise of my earlier recordings. Although the cricket sounds I recorded were beautiful, they weren’t right for this game, so I didn’t have an ambience track ready for the jam submission.

For the music, I grabbed a work in progress that didn’t make it into a previous project. I cleaned it up a little, extended it so it could play on repeat. Afterwards, I broke out the drum layer from the base layer to facilitate the design.

I use the same Pipa instrument in GarageBand for the win/lose sound FX.

Art (Environment, Characters, UI)

I’m getting more and more comfortable working in blender. Recently, I did an art jam where I had to use a limited color palette. I enjoyed the experience of limitation so much that I chose to do the same thing for this game. This gave some consistency to the game in terms of colors and saved me from having to heavily texture the materials or agonize over which color to use. I ended up with a low-poly, flat-textured 3D environment with some hand painted 2D/UI features.

I had no plan for character models. I had many trials for the characters. I ended up making a bunny for the NPC, which makes less sense when you consider the game is about APPLES not something stereotypical like carrots, but… details!

In this game, the Player cannot pick up apples off the ground, so to logically answer the question “Why can’t the player just pick up that apple and turn it in?” it made no sense for the player character to have arms. I narrowed my focus to models that didn’t have (usable) arms.  The characters I experimented with included two different armless robots, a hovering basket (no character model), and an Ostrich, which was my favorite choice, however, I ended up with a Spider Robot character.

Conclusion

I’m very proud of the how the visual experience turned out for the limited timetable. I wish I had added some ambient particle FX in the scene because it’s very static with no animations save for the terrain details. I could have had animated clouds, or added pollen PFX, PostFX would have been nice too, All post-MVP work now! I will have to really drill down on my Scene Lighting/PostFX skills next time. Light baking will improve performance greatly and give me those ambient lit features I feel I am missing.

Overall, I’m really happy with the improvement I made in creating the Game Design, compared to my last project, Primal Might. This time, I was really determined to plan out the stages of development in a logical way so there wasn’t an opportunity to build support for a feature that wasn’t fully designed or planned for the current pass.