Game post-mortem

Hey there! Here I'll speak mostly about the narrative experience I wanted to create with this game, and how I kind of miserably failed :)

So yeah, just wanted to go over the idea I had behind the game, since I feel like what I submitted for the jam, while functionally a game, doesn't live up to the idea and story I had in mind when I first started working on it.

The original idea:

As this is an animal crossing x survival mix, I originally wanted to tell the story of a character so reliant on her friends that her survival starts to be entirely dependent of their approval / affection. As you would go on and do the tasks, the heart bar would take more and more space in the need bar. The point was to make the food / drink items feel useless really early on.

Here's where it gets interesting though, the fun bar would have been the only one that can override other needs. Each time you talk to the NPCs, your heart bar decreases since you don't get proper social interactions, and there's no way to refill it, seriously crippling your stamina the longer you play. At some point, the only way to keep up with the timer would be to focus on fun items in order to override the empty affection bar and keep the stamina high enough to run the errands. After a while, the game would start spawning pickups with a more sinister meaning that would give a huge fun boost, like a pile of white powder.

If you want to keep up, you just can't ignore those; the idea was to make the player disregard the implications of taking drugs because they're just so focused on winning the game, just like the main character will disregard her basic needs and do whatever she can to keep going because she's so focused on winning her peers' affection. Just like in the current game, the true ending would only be achievable by taking a step back and not partaking in this endless cycle, and have the main character walk her own path and build her own, sustainable sense of self-esteem.

What I ended up with:

The essential idea is still here: the game tells you to run errands for NPCs in order to become worthy enough to get away with a favorable judgement. For every judgement you succeed at (which is a scenario that seems unlikely to happen even once, as I didn't playtest this at all, and the initial timer is wayyy too short for everyone I've seen playing it), the quest amount increases while the time you have decreases, until it becomes humanly impossible to do so. The only way to "win" the game is to walk down a small path located south-west of your spawn location, which will trigger an event that tells you you managed to escape from the influence of the queen and grew the courage to, literally, walk down your own path.

Post-mortem thoughts:

I think I would've been able to implement this properly if I had organized myself better, but my original scope was even bigger, and there are a few things I experimented with that ended up taking a huge chunk of time away (for instance at first I went with having the game take place on a spherical planet, symbolizing how the main character's world revolves entirely around other peoples, but had to scrap it as I couldn't get the camera and movement to behave).

Some changes I could've made to the game that weren't a huge time sink:

• Stop the timer when in dialogues. This is a major oversight that forces to completely give up on one of the aspect of the game to enjoy the other. Besides, this is fairly easy thing to do as there's already a public inDialogue bool that the timer could've checked to see if it was allowed to count down or not.
• Make replaying the game easier. A game over currently means the game closing on itself, I should've just reloaded the scene, or added buttons to do so, which would've been pretty quick to do too.
• Instead of something interesting but requiring additional tolerance / efforts from the player, make sure the base gameplay is fun. I believe I ignored those 2 pretty big flaws above because I wanted the core experience to make you question the entire game loop and look for an alternative way to play,  but the biggest mistake overall is that I'm not clearly offering any alternative, making the whole thing feel frustrating, which in a way is what I was going for, but as there is no real reward at the end for breaking the loop, and no clear indication to reach this ending /  "reward", you just end up with a game that's merely a dull fetch quest. Ah well!

Final words:

In the end, I'm not really satisfied with the game, but I'm glad to have been able to submit something complete. I can always go back and implement everything I wrote here if I feel like it, and I've still learned a lot :) 

If you've read this far, well, thanks! Feel free to let me know what you thought of the complete idea, or post links to your own devlogs as well, I'd gladly read them.

Cheers,