As we approach spring break and the mid point of the semester, there is a lot to consider in terms of where our game is with about 8 weeks remaining to work on and polish it. There has also been a lot of changes since the beginning of the semester, and even since the last development blog I wrote about two weeks ago. Therefore, I want to lay that all out here and see where the game may need to head moving forward.
Current State
Right now, the game is, I believe, in a decent position. Our game, Planetary Planter, is about a space farmer who grows planets, stars and other celestial bodies in order to put them into constellations and unlock a narrative and story to learn about said farmer. The intended experience for this game is generally peaceful, explorative and to move at your own pace enjoying the world and environment. This, I believe, makes sense for a game like ours and the gameplay certainly seems tailored to that experience. The platforms we have in mind for release are the Nintendo Switch and Steam for the PC, both of which seem like good locations for this style of game. Otherwise things are quite similar to the previous update, still similar market for the game and the team member count remains at 14.
Achievements
As for my contributions specifically, there is not much as of right now that I have worked on that is actually in the game build. The first five weeks or so of the semester I was creating a temperature system for the planet that would have impacts on plant growth and plant spawning in an area, but that was scrapped from the game and abandoned. This past week and upcoming week I have been helping with the constellations and solar systems, organizing them into shapes and making sure they are all filled out with unique planets and stars accordingly. This has not been a difficult task but it is a very time consuming one. In the future I need to work on and complete the AI thief mechanic, which is going to be my primary contribution to the game now that the temperature mechanic is not going to be included. The way this AI thief will work is that it will roam around a certain area, walking around and just basically wandering in this zone. When the player enters into this area, and is close enough to the AI, the AI thief will stop wandering and move towards the player, taking an item from the player if the thief catches them. This mechanic should add some variety and flavor to the game experience and make the world more dynamic for the player.
What Went Right
So far, I think that the team has made good progress on accomplishing what we set out to get done. We are a week and a half or two weeks from the end of the alpha stage, and there is some tightness in terms of what may actually be accomplishable by then, but things are generally pretty close. We also have improved a lot on team communication and organization, although there is still room to improve in these areas as well. In the first few weeks there were multiple times where the designers were dropping new information on me in the middle of the class out of nowhere, but things have become more clear as we have started to have more interdisciplinary meetings. I think weekly testing has been somewhat helpful as well.
What Went Wrong
The primary factor causing issues with our game, in my mind, has been managing our scope. We had problematic scope and vision issues early on in the game, with three planned biomes and 12 constellations and a massive map among other things. We have cut it down some, but I think it could still stand to be trimmed more, for our sake and also for the sake of people playing our game. It could be that farming games are not generally my type of game, but I cannot picture, in our current game state, any player sitting through the game long enough to complete all 10 constellations and 77 solar systems. This would require hours on hours of growing plants and putting them into the solar systems without much else to do in the game while you wait. The player can explore some, but otherwise they basically just walk around or sit and wait and I think that will become boring quickly.
What Needs to Change
For what needs to change with our game, this is actually a somewhat tricky question to answer. Given our current position in the development timeline, systems are going to be basically done within a few weeks, which limits to some extent the amount of changes that we can make. In terms of what we can make adjustments on, continuing to improve communication would be good. Daily scrum reporting what has been accomplished could be more clear from some people, and communicating changes and adjustments to anything needs to continue. I doubt it will occur, but trimming down the amount of constellations and solar systems might be good for the game in terms of maintaining player appeal.
Professional Growth
Finally, I want to discuss how this experience has helped me so far. I think this has been pretty useful in learning how a larger team functions and seeing how communication and team organization works for more people, which could be really helpful in the future. It has given me more experience in having more of a niche specified role as well, having a specific thing to really focus on and try to improve, basically a very programming heavy role. For improvements, I could definitely be better sometimes at estimating task hours and handling the task system overall. I am not very great at predicting the hours something will take sometimes, and part of that is from taking on tasks I did not originally anticipate, but it also could be a bit better planned out.
Conclusion
Overall, the game is in a pretty decent place. There is still work to do and plenty of progress to make, but considering our scope and goals things seem to be moving along solidly. It will be a bit strange to see how things develop as programming transitions more to polish and bug fixing rather than new system development, as that will be a new experience for me as well. It definitely will be something for me to track and discuss in blogs in the future.
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