Quick Thoughts:

I saw the rest of the people posting these things called postmortem and I thought to myself, "Why? Did somebody die?" I realized shortly after what they were saying so I went to dictionary.com to see if that was a proper use of the word ( I honestly thought I was stupid for thinking it could only mean death.) You can read the actual definition yourself here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/postmortem?s=t but it does in fact mean "after an event". So... yeah I was stupid!

I would have gotten to this sooner, but I was really just tired from the previous weeks events and wanted a few days to myself before going back to anything related to dev work, blogs, or even art! More or less I jammed out to Dota2 for 5 hours and then spent time with my wife.

[color=rgb(0,128,0)]PRE-CONTEST:[/color]

Concept:

Slicer had been talking about doing a contest again in GameDev Chat. Interested, I looked up some possible theme options as that was the topic of discussion. I suggested we do a farm theme as it would allow for the use of some free assets on a fairly popular site I know. This way everybody would have some art for their stuff. Slicer agreed that he would think it over but he ultimately said that the idea would be approved by the judges. I had it set in my mind that I wanted to submit a farm related project and I told slicer from the start "Farm or BUST". This choice mostly hurt us when it came to the theme but honestly our farm was toy related anyway....(they are chibi avatars) so meh!

Prep Work:

Slicer had announced that people could work on the core of the engine the week prior. We wanted to take full advantage of this and so we started work on the core engine. Some of our team members had not used unity in forever ( myself included ); while others would be so well versed they would carry us through the development process (Goss). We were able to get the UI core stuff in place as well as tune the shaders to match the style of game we wanted. ByteTroll was able to get the state machine working as well as develop the prototype for the behavior system. Sadly, both of those systems were rather complex and took so much time to actually add in during the week of the even they did not get displayed.

Engine of Choice:

As some of the other people have stated already, I feel for those of you who did not make your games in an engine. The fact that you coded all that you did in a week speaks volumes to your ability. Rest assured though, Unity has its downfalls and we found EVERY ONE OF THEM! So, if you have not guessed our engine of choice was Unity. This would allow me to produce art fast enough to get it in the game. At the same time the coders could focus on game content rather than making the core engine elements needed to even show a game.

This did come with a downside. Unity is very much based off of the concept of a prefab. This concept works when you are the only person in a project, but when you add 2 more people you get conflict issues. Throw that on top of having people who use a MAC vs people who use a PC and you get a whole mess of issues. At one point (Day 5) we accidentally jacked up the entire program directory and had to redo some portions of the code/art. So, even with a core engine in place there are still headaches involved.

[color=rgb(0,128,128)]CONTEST WEEK:[/color]

Day One: ART

I wanted to really put a strong foot forward on the first day. To do this I wanted to show off some of the graphical art that we had in place. I did purchase a content pack for about $60, but the rest of the art was all done by me. To match our game theme of simple art I had to create a character with a decent cartoon skin. The fun part came when trying to rig and setup everything for unity.

**NOTE** Unity has a specific bone count and layout for objects to be understood as a "humanoid".

I was not aware of this requirement so when I imported my character we were getting some seriously jacked animations. This meant that instead of using some of the unity provided basic animations I would have to hand create them myself or redo the control rig. Either option men wasted time on art that could have been better put to adding in more art. With such limited time (I work from 0400 till 1530 each day) after work I really had to try and find a happy balance.

How, you ask? Well the first plan was to create a model that could be used in many ways. This means that one model with 5 different textures could look different but still be the same model. It is for this reason that the soldier, the old man, and the boy all look fairly close in body type build and in frame size. However, this simple tricked saved me time of redoing animations, reworking control rigs, as well as fixing up each custom unit with a UVMap and custom texture. All in all I feel the choice was a smart one.

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THE NEGATIVE:

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Learning Curve:

The only real problem we ran into was the learning curve for those of us who had not used unity. I had to learn some things about the art that took a bit of time and rework. Byte and goss and to figure out why some of their code was magically just "poofing" into thin air. Art stuff would be updated and in me doing so I would unlink some scripts from the main character and everything would break. We wasted about a days worth of time trying to resolve, fix, and solidify stuff that occurred due to lack of knowledge with the tool.

Scope of the Project:

This is probably something you hear quite often in gameJams. People create to big of a scope for the short duration of time allowed. We are no stranger to this as I said "We are experts in our fields we should be able to burn through this!". Sadly, however true that might be, life gets in the way. Goss had to work during the day time much like myself. ByteTroll had school that entire week so the level of time we could spend really limited what we could push out. I feel that given three more days you would have seen a much different product. However, that is part of the point of this event is to pick your battles that you know you can win and avoid the ones that will waste your time. If I had to do it again... I would make a game where the farmer would punt the cunt into different baskets... simple, easy, and FUN!

LONG EVENT:

While we all say "We didnt have enough time" I am 100% certain most of us wouldn't want it. 7 Days is a long time to go with limited sleep and stress related to completing a product that you want to be loved! Goss, Byte, and I really felt the pain of this at the end of the week. On an unrelated note, such a long event fosters the concept of "We can do it another day". I found this to be something that plagued us fairly often. We would get to a point where a snag would come up and it would be late. At that point the phrase would be "lets do it another day" until you were out of days. It is easy to forget the measurement of time until you have those last few precious moments to get whatever you can into the game.

WHAT GOT CUT:

Due to time constraints and the complexity of some of the systems the following stuff got cut:

• Stash system (store items and have them calculated for a score)
  
• Help menu in game ( so you could see what you needed to do)
  
• Animal storing and feeding ( tomagachi type code )
  
• More than 2 types of seeds, we had 5
  
• Travel to the town/market for buying selling of goods
  
• The wife ( she was going to nag you but no go )
  
• The introduction ( this was a scene where your grandfather explained to you to not be a toymaker )
  
• The Hostile enemy ( on the way to the village the hostile enemy would try to take your goods )
  
• Smooth Day Night Rotation ( it was working before we added time stamping for crops, after that it got jacked )
  

[color=rgb(0,128,128)]THE POSITIVE:[/color]

ART:

I am not just saying this because I am the artist, I think our art was top notch. We had a nice solid smooth design and we were able to keep within the confinement of what was needed for the style we had chosen. If you followed the blogs you would see me wasting time away with my doodles, and honestly I have not had this much creating are in years. I fond a new wealth of knowledge while creating the assets needed for this game and I will forever be grateful for that.

MUSIC:

We had originally contracted a composer to work with us. Slicer quickly shot that down and reminded me that the contest only allowed for 4 people. I had to fire the guy but remembered some of the work he had done for me for RuinValor. So I went into my stash of old music and pulled out three sound clips that would work for promo videos, in game, and for the night scene. Sadly, due to time restrictions I was only able to add in the main theme music to the game. I found this to be the hardest part since without a real sound guy to do this part you are forced to buy or make up some really shitty music. I did, however, make the sounds for our farm animals! In local testing my friends told me "Dude that cat sounds real... same with the pig! Who did them?" I did not raise my hand despite knowing the real answer.

CODE:

The coding portion of the game actually went well. Goss knocked out scripts like it was nobodies business. ByteTroll was hard at work with the behavior system so most of the work that we were doing got done. The scope got to us and limited what we really could have put in given enough time. All in all the code was easy and simple to put in place.

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FINAL THOUGHTS:

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Would I do this again? most certainly. I would however like to see the team numbers increased to at least 4. I feel that you really need a sound guy to make things happen and using an entire spot for a sound guy is a bit of a waste (since all they can do is sound). At best you hope for a sound guy who can code... which is not common. In the future I think the scope will play a bigger part of the type of game we create compared to what we "planned". Lastly, we are going to keep the same team members so that we are familiar with one another work style. Before this competition I had only talked with ByteTroll in passing... now it would be safe to say that I could call him bro and not feel odd about it! WOOT!

I am very impressed with some of the other submissions. Even more so, I am impressed that despite people having limited time they still tried to participate. This shows that this community has something that most lack, drive and ambition. So BZ for all of those who joined in. Anyway... time to get back to work.

We are going to be turning this game into a real project. If you are interested in working with us please contact me via a PM or through email.