So it’s kind of overdue, but today I wanted to write up a postmortem about our crane herding simulator, Senbazuru, which was made for a 2 week gamejam with the theme “harness the wind”. I worked with two of my friends - Lucinius, a programmer, and @JojojoGame, an artist - while I mainly did music and took on a minor programming role. 

Gameplay summary:

You are a wind spirit tasked with moving a flock of paper cranes through each level. You do this using the wind to push, pull, and generally direct the cranes, avoiding hazards and navigating through the levels. Your spirit has different ways in which wind can be emitted, including lines, freehand, auras, and more!

What went right:

Game design and scope: It took us a whole day to brainstorm ideas and flesh out a couple of candidates. We all had different ideas and directions of where to go, but we settled on something that really fit the theme and was achievable within the 2 week time period. We came up with some pretty interesting ideas actually, but in the end, ideas are VERY cheap, and it’s the implementation that determines whether a game is successful or not. Lucinius had the basic gameplay engine up in a day which was fantastic, and we were able to go from there. @JojojoGame was our project lead and was able to communicate with Lucinius and myself what the overall style of gameplay/music should be and provide examples for us to work off.

Project management: Project management software is great, but only when people actually use it! When it is not used consistently, it often ends up being more work to track and manage progress, and it often falls to a couple of people to open and close tasks for the rest with no real benefit (in fact, it often means those productive enough to warrant use of such software have their time eaten up). Here, however, all of us used and regularly updated our Trello board - especially for myself and Lucinius, where it was especially important to see what had been finished so we did not duplicate programming work, and to track bugs and debug functionality that needed to be removed before submission. Just as an aside, in our first gamejam game we neglected to take out the level skip button, and the only person who made a video of that game somehow immediately found and pressed that button before realising what was happening, and then was confronted by the boss (whoops…)! 

Version control: This was the first time I had stepped into using version control in Gamemaker with another person. This meant having to pull more often and resolve merge conflicts (scary!) which neither of us had done before. Despite the initial learning curve, I think Lucinius and I both felt that the use of Bitbucket/Sourcetree was invaluable, and could work on systems fairly independently without much risk. There are some quirks when using version control with Gamemaker - like the level editor and main project file - but for the most part it was fairly smooth. Similar to project management software, source control works when it is used frequently and we can be confident that we have the latest code. 

Music: I learnt piano when I was younger so I had a very very basic idea of music theory and could read sheet music. But because I had nominated myself to do all the tracks and sound effects for this game, it forced me to sit down and learn a solid basis for proper music theory and learn a real digital audio workstation which I’ve always wanted to do. I deferred any questions I had (I had a lot) to this guy right here, and he basically carried me by not only answering my questions, but recommending me plugins and critiquing my music. All in all, I learnt a lot and am much more confident in producing music!

Not only that, but because I had two variants of each song (one normal theme and one battle theme), I learnt how to synchronise tracks in Gamemaker and have them fade smoothly from one song to the other depending on your distance to hazards. The code I used there I can repurpose for my own game, because the plan is to have exploration and battle variants of some tracks. 

What went wrong:

Tutorial: I can’t emphasise how last-minute the tutorial was, and it really brought the game down as noted by the jam reviewers. We did have quite a complex control scheme (cycling between modes and left+right click to do stuff), and the tutorial that I had written up was long-winded, text-heavy, and all-around confusing. Given more time I would have liked to do visual instructions plus obstacles in the tutorial level that forced you to learn the controls, but it really demonstrated to me the importance of instructing players in a straightforward, but thorough manner.

Work commitments: @JojojoGame and myself both work full-time and thus were really only able to work sporadically on the game. This wasn’t too bad for me because I was only doing the music/sfx and a bit of programming in terms of the audio manager and game flow, but @JojojoGame was doing ALL of the art and ALL of the level design, which, as you can imagine, takes a lot of time. I think in future I will try to push an external level designer (one that can be imported directly into Gamemaker, like Tiled), so that anyone who doesn’t own Gamemaker will better be able to visualise and design thier levels.

UI: It’s obvious when UI is an afterthought and here, it really was - we had basic icons for which wind style you were using, and a crane counter thrown together in a few minutes, but that was really it. Good UI is essential to the enjoyment of any game, and even though we had a really fun game, it doesn’t help much if the player is confused on what to do. I would have liked to see all form icons visible with control indicators to show how to swap, a customisable camera zoom, crane indicators for lost/offscreen cranes, and effects for the beginning of the level’s cranes spawning in and the end of level exit.

Level design: Due to the aforementioned work/time requirements, we didn’t really design any levels that took advantage of the wind form mechanics we had developed. We were planning for moving hazards, hazards that follow you, and fire/water effects on the cranes which would have necessitated using some other styles. Designing levels is hard, and each unique obstacle requires extra art, programming, and sound!

Final thoughts:

Overall, the game itself could have been better, but I was still happy with what we were able to accomplish, and all three of us really learnt a lot. We’re still debating whether or not to move forward with polishing the game and potentially releasing it, but I feel like interest levels weren’t that high as far as I could tell, so I think we’ll have to either polish what we have and get proper feedback!