This will be for documenting our adventures in the Greenlight 2023 Jam, making our very own tycoon game.
#Turtle Tycoon
fervent barn
So this game is one @slim knot @cinder snow and I, are making for the https://itch.io/jam/greenlight-jam. The jam is about 5 weeks long, but it is a bit unusual in that it is divided into mini jam "sprints". So at the end of the first one, you are supposed to have a concept, at the end of the second a prototype, etc... I don't have a detailed dev log I can post, but I take a lot of screen shots of art to share with my team mates as I went. I will post some of those and then going forward maybe try to write how things are going every few days 🙂
fervent barn
This first batch of art was done in excallidraw so that I could start thinking about what the idea would be. They had several diversifiers that I liked, including: "It's new to me", "Peacefully better together", "Grow", and possibly "Everything is interactive".
We hadn't really made a tycoon before, and making a living one that could grow and was fun to play with other people seemed doable. We wanted a type of game that could be played for several hours, since we haven't really made any larger games on dot big bang yet.
The turtle was literally just the first thing that occurred to me, as a growing thing to have a tycoon on... and boo and zaz were fine with it so we ran with it. The first week of the jam was for the concept, but it was a really really crazy RL week so I went into it knowing it wouldn't be anything fancy game doc wise.
That first week we did some really basic tests of things like scale and shell design, and boo did a test of laying out hexes with code.
Here is boo's hex test thing. This will be used to put the machines onto the shell.
This one is the scale test to figure out how big the machine spots had to be, and the sizes of the different turtle growth stages.
This was a paint over that was made for the doc, just to show the general vibe we were going for.
If you want to read the actual doc, you can do so here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hQlBh_G41yJpOyE-tjHKhmgefO4eQBXh3t9cFzYrjp0/edit (but it is really just the fastest thing I could make, we had a house full of company and kids graduating from grade 7 and 12 that week).
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I should mention, this was all a spare time project so we were cramming this stuff in a few hours at a time where we could 🙂
In the second part of the jam, we needed to make a working prototype. That put a lot of pressure on booradley as the programmer for this one, but he got the guts of the game in. This is roughly the order he built stuff in over the week:
-hex layout
-tycoon ownership for players & npcs
-buying a machine
-logic to make machine produce
-currency UI (so he could see collected items)
-leveling up the turtle
-machines on npc tycoons
-basic UI for buying, upgrading, and collecting
-data as needed to test each feature that went in
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The first thing I did at the start of the prototype sprint was to double the resolution of my scale test shell and make it prettier. I needed to know the size of each spot to make the machines. The hex spot needs to light up when you stand on it, so it needs to be its own art so that we can change its color with emissive. That did complicate the shell design a bit. It needed to have a version of the shell with the spots on it so that we could use it as the source of the voxel collider, then we needed a second shell with the spots removed for the visuals.
I didn't actually have a design for the machines at the start of this week, I should have worked it out for the design doc but I just didn't have time and I wasn't really super worried about it. I knew I wanted it to be something cute, and preferably not mechanical in nature. I started with one of the shell spots as the base for the file and started messing around. This was the first version of that art:
I sort of liked them, so I decided to fill out the set so there was four stages of each. At this point I though I had something I liked so I made them into there own little files and started testing them in world.
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I still had no idea what the materials or resources would be so my temp names for this stuff were things like "Generator Pink1". Materials and currencies for these games are often typical things like metal, money, wood, stone, or food ingredients.
I kind of wanted it to be a little more whimsical though, and I realized colors would be pretty fun as things to produce. I also knew I would need a social motivation currency a little later on. The rest of the design finally clicked and I decided on currencies of rainbows and moonbeams. Real currencies are also just made up non-sense that we all give names and meanings to (even when their value is anchored to a real thing... that things worth is also just made up based on who wants what), so it amused me to make such intangible things into the currencies. It made sense in that context, and in a world of turtle homes in a little pond, for the players to be tiny fairies. The machine outputs that get turned into rainbows could be colors then.
Since I finally had the full game world in my head, I changed the colors on the initial generators to match the theme changes and then made the player homes (for the first spot on the turtle) and the color mixers for producing rainbows.
*Since red and green will both be currencies, we will have to be sure that the UI has at least text accommodation for people with color blindness.
Next I had to start thinking about UI, so I brainstormed some currency/material icons and then painted the icons to represent the machines. I really hope the machines don't change much, because doing those tiny icons was hard, lol.
Zaz's job this sprint was to start figuring out some NPC stuff, it didn't need to be done for the prototype (we can just use placeholders) but they will need looks and dialogs. I gave zaz a potential concept, this amazingly bad paint over:
They are working on some very very big wings, lol: https://dotbigbang.com/voxelobjectviewer/20b12920b13d42fb87e41f88a2c3fbd3/bigger-wing-left and some very nice wiggle antennas https://dotbigbang.com/game/3a7441df11604b63a806b1ea1b65ce47/zaz-npc-viewer---remix
We got the prototype in on time today (minus a minor mistake with the submission form), and it is playable... though its kind of hard to understand what is going on since the UI isn't done. These are the play instructions for now:
Right now there is no proper UI or feedback, but basically there are 8 turtle spots. They are taken by npcs if there is no player for that spot. When you first start you will have a very very tiny turtle with an arrow over it.
-Stand on the spot on its back to buy your first home
-Stand on the stop with your home to collect "rainbows" to buy more things (the button is a book that says "collect" or "ready"
-Stand on the spot on the turtles head to upgrade your turtle and unlock more spots.
-Stand on empty spots to add color making machines. (The full set isn't in yet, so there are just a few machines to pick from.
-Costs are not written on things, sorry about that. You will need to collect rainbows quite a few times to unlock/upgrade stuff 🙂
There is a turtle in the corner that has all the machine art out to look at 🙂
https://dotbigbang.com/game/4576bac7c454478393cbfe376cafbdc2/tt---turtle-tycoon-wip-unfinished
fervent barn
The rest of this weekend was not super productive for me at least, there was just a lot going on in RL and we were pretty burnt out after hitting that saturday morning deadline. At some point this weekend I animated the butterfly wings so it wouldn't look so odd just sitting there in space. Tonight I ripped all the color out of the baskets of the generators so that I could move the art to its own file. That will allow us to animate the baskets filling up as the generators work.
In this video, the basket fills have been added back to the templates as a second (and sometimes third) voxel component.
Boo has spent a fair bit of time cleaning up the UI and fixing issues from the prototype. He also had to remix the game and make all the scripts and templates into "V2" versions so that we could leave the original prototype untouched for the jam voting.
fervent barn
I thought I would record a little video to show Boo's start at juicing. Its amazing how having the bouncing animation makes it feel better to play. I think I should probably do the UI art next XD
fervent barn
So this week has gone really really slow, its just too hot to be able to focus well. But I have been working mostly on UI related issues. First I made a serries of really quick sketches in gimp to figure out what buttons I actually needed. Then I started messing around in the voxel editor to actually build some parts. Many of these will change as we actually play and test, so the goal of this is mostly to get something with the right placements that is readable and then go from there.
Tonight I finally got something that seemed mostly ok for the main screen, the one that will come up when you stand on one of your generators. I have exported the pieces so hopefully we can start putting them in tomorrow.
Boo was working on playing spawning and getting swimming working. He also added the social currency collection (moonbeams) and added the collection effects.
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Tonight Boo got the layout of the UI into the game (not functioning yet) and we realized that the UI was going to have to be shifted for mobile players and tiny resolutions like the itch page. So I made a variation that should work.
I also replaced the original background with some nicer art, its still really low res but it should be good enough if I don't have time to get back to it. (Shoutout to @stray onyx for the palm trees, they are lovely.)
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The cooler weather today is really helping my brain. I managed to blast through a bunch more UI art after doing the background, and Boo has managed to implement a lot of it as well.
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This morning I managed to make a couple skins for the yellow generator. I need so many of these machines, lol. I am supposed to go out to a games meet up this afternoon though, so I probably won't get more done until later tonight.
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It ended up taking me the rest of the weekend to get through all the new skins, while I was doing that Boo got all the various UI screens in. We still have a lot to get done this week and its going to be very challenging to try and cram it into our evenings.
I really don't have time right now to draw an icon for each of those generator skins, so instead I just have a single icon per set. It should be ok for now, because when you are on the hex of a generator, you can see both their base generator icon and their set icon.
fervent barn
We have had a very busy real life week, so we haven't had a time for a tone of work. But we did get a fair bit done in terms of making the game an actual playable thing. We put in a lot of initial data for things like the skins and rebirth stuff, along with replacing all the tycoon/hex/machine upgrade data with a first actual balance pass. It will still probably have to shift a lot, but its playable now. The main thing that has had no balance at all is the skins, but that is partly because we are not finished with the neighbor visit stuff, I want to make sure that is pretty painless before I set the costs. (Visiting neighbors is how you get moonbeams for the cosmetics.)
Boo has fixed a lot of little bugs and data issues that came up along the way, and we have made a fairly good sized list to try and tackle during polish week.
Its fun to have the skins in, that combined with the generator rotation lets you control the visuals of your turtle a bit. I really want to do a lot more skins and machines, but our focus at this point will probably be filling out some of the unfinished things like the npcs and doing the polish. (I have some npc tycoons in, but they don't have good dialog or nicely laid out turtles.)
fervent barn
Still going super slow for me, just too hot and tired after work lately. But Boo has fixed a lot of little bugs that popped up in our testing, and is starting to clean up some of the little polish issues. Last night, I took the wings that zaz did and painted 7 variations of them. That was sort of interesting, since they are higher rez that what I normally do on dot big bang, so I had to paint them with my pen and use reference instead of just making something up. (Though they are very loose interpretations of real patterns, lol.)
We are definitely to the part of the project that I find difficult as well, the polish and bug chasing just feel sooo incremental XD
fervent barn
Forgot to post again, but we picked away at more little stuff last night. Boo tracked down what we thought was a bug in the spawning logic... but instead we just had 2 turtle spawners stacked in the same spot XD
I finished the last of the fairy wings off, and then I designed a set of emotes... they still need some UI work tonight when I get back to it after work 🙂
I replaced some of the more "negative" emojis with some more options people could give to compliment other tycoons.
fervent barn
So, I wasn't going to post this because its not exciting to look at.... but if you are feeling the slog at the end of one of your projects then maybe this is helpful to see. The part of the project we are at now is just slowly picking off things that need various types of "polish". That can cover a lot of things like improved usability, improved UI, better feeling progression, pretty effects, more sound, settings control, help screens, etc... I basically make a task list of everything that comes up so we don't miss important stuff, and as we do these things we cross them off and move them to the bottom of the doc (we probably have about as much crossed off as is visible in the picture).
This list never really empties, even when we launch there will be bugs we couldn't fix for some reason or items we really wanted to add but just didn't have the time for. But the list will be much shorter when we launch, we try to sort roughly by priority so the most important things get done.
If you are having trouble getting through this phase of something you are working on, don't feel bad about that! It is hard to just keep doing the work when you have already solved all the fun problems and made the cool art. This is part of why Boo and I like game jams so much, they force us to just get what we can done quickly... otherwise this part of the project can drag on and its hard to say when its "done". If you don't have a deadline to work for, then I suggest just picking one that sounds reasonable and making yourself work at least a little bit every day that isn't insane in your RL. If you tell that deadline to other people, they can help pester you and keep you moving forward 🙂
fervent barn
Tonight I made the icons for the bottom of the screen (emote, home, cosmetics), experimented with several types of water surface, and built the art for the merchant store. Booradley was mostly working on mobile UI and hover states for buttons this evening. But now its time for bed, so I will get back to this after work tomorrow 🙂
fervent barn
Worked a bunch more tonight, but nothing pretty to show. Boo is mostly working on UI fixes and trying to get the cosmetic wings in. I have been making lots of tiny odds and ends (mostly UI related) and messing with things like water and fog. I am hoping to get a bit of an underwater enviroment and some more lily pads in tomorrow, not sure if I will have time though as I have a lot of RL errands I need to do.
fervent barn
So, I did not manage to get the underwater stuff in... or the lily pads. But we did fix lots of tiny UI and usiblity stuff, as well as making the gameplay video and itch page so our game is officially submitted. Its possible that we will make a few more small changes before the deadline tomorrow, but its risky at this point so it won't be anything major XD
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If you want to play the 3 different versions we made for the jam, here they are:
https://dotbigbang.com/game/4576bac7c454478393cbfe376cafbdc2/tt---turtle-tycoon-prototype
https://dotbigbang.com/game/6bcfa5b39f5149e68b6bed4721ecc65d/tt---turtle-tycoon-unfinished
https://dotbigbang.com/game/0570dfd96d104f94a0090760cd3633fe/tt---turtle-tycoon-polish
