Circle Island - Hectic Game Jam 6
On the weekend I attended Hectic Game Jam 6. I’ve recently been jamming with my Buddy, Pal, Chum Achebit, but he is so packed with Dungeon League work that he wasn’t able to go with me this time. At first I wasn’t going to go because I had no artist to work with, but I realised that I was getting quite confident in my new 3D skills so I decided to have a crack at it solo.
The results were Circle Island, a survival puzzle game that requires the player to maintain the ecosystem to be able to survive and escape the island.
I noticed there were a lot of survival games that saw players destroying the environments and the ecosystems were never a consideration for players. I wanted to make a game that challenged this concept and shape the player’s natural thinking in this game scenario.
The scope seemed huge, and my first hurdle appeared almost instantly. How would the eco system work, and how much work will it take to implement. I approached this problem with a pen and paper, and simply wrote up my ecosystem rules and started doing the maths for each day cycle. I quickly took note that I should try to keep it simple and not have too many factors. Limiting the amount of animals was important, I didn’t have enough time to model and animate a zoo.
The ecosystem calculator works like so:
1. Remove anything the player consumed.
2. Remove anything the ecosystem consumed.
Fox > Rabbit > Berry Bush > Tree
3. Run regeneration rules for remaining elements.
4. Create the new day with the new counts.
At first the ecosystem was falling a part almost instantly or it was just too strong. I had to make sure that if the player didn’t do anything to it, it would never break. To control the numbers more I created factors that would restrict certain elements from blowing out. Plants and rocks had a set amount of spots they could appear at, if there were no more spots no more elements could spawn. As for the animals the amount of trees alive determined the total count of foxes that could be on the field, and because trees were controlled by a set amount of spots this also controlled foxes. Rabbits were controlled by the bushes available, if there was nothing to eat they would start to die off.
When I was happy with the results of the ecosystem calculator. I dived straight into the core mechanics and AI, with the plan to finish them before going to sleep. The AI development didn’t have to be to advance as their behaviours and actions weren’t going to directly effect the ecosystem, that was being done in the ecosystem calculator. So the AI just had to pretend they were doing their thing. With a simple random check to see if they would eat food or roam, and if the player got too close to foxes they would chase and attack the player. I completed this work just before 3am.
- Different cubes represent trees, rocks, and berry bushes.
- blue spheres represented possible element points.
- Wired gizmo cubes were the zones that the AI could roam in.
- The spheres in the cubes were the different AI (foxes and rabbits).
- pink sphere is the player
The next morning, I decided to put my focus in completing the game flow before I touched art. For me art is a lot easier to do in the early hours of the morning when you’re brain dead, and because I had a lot of work left to do I thought It would be better to prepare myself for the all nighter.
I’m no 3D artist let alone a 2D artist so when it came to building the interface for the game, I was sitting around scratching my head trying to decide whether or not I was going to attempt to draw an interface. I ended up using 3D objects to represent the crafting items and shaped the game to provide player feedback through text from the player’s character and other events. A lazy approach but also a time saving one!
Please excuse the low res image.
It was about 3pm Saturday when I had my Alpha going. It was the full functional game excluding all the pretty stuff. The next Long haul was the art and polish. I’m glad I had an early start to the modelling because it is my weakest point, It also had the highest risk factor of blowing out time out of all my tasks.
I know I was rushing but I was making so many dumb mistakes, and I just wasn’t happy with any of the work I was producing. I didn’t have time to keep remaking models or to fine tune all of them so I kept telling myself that it would look great once it was in game. To keep a positive attitude I kept rendering shots in Blender of the scene, and oh man they made me happy! It definitely kept me on track and inspired me to keep pushing out content.
After a long haul of modelling I completed all of the static objects, player character, animals and their animations at about 3am Sunday morning. Of course this when the bug fixing starts, and because It was already so late I decided to keep wizarding on into the morning and fix everything.
One of my favourite bugs were when bushes were consumed by the player, all of the rabbits would run over and endlessly eat the invisible point where the bush use to be. Thankfully it was a reasonably quick fix.
The game was almost there at this point. I just had a bit of polish to do and I even had a chance to add some ‘nice-to-haves’, but I thought first I should get some play testing in. This is where I ran into problems based on my interface design decision. Only I knew how to play the game, no one else did. So I started trying to put as much information and tips in the game as possible without spelling out exactly what the player should do.
Here in a very subtle way I am explaining to the player that all they need is wood to create a boat.
The whole experience was nerve racking at first because I wanted to really produce something great. At the end I was very happy with my game. I totally surprised myself with how much I can complete by myself. I think that mapping out my project and designating my hours to tasks was a very helpful, as it helped me understand when I was falling behind and when I had to pick up my pace.
I learnt a lot from this Jam, especially with my design decisions and reminding myself of the player’s experience and how they will view my game. My game is still missing some good polish and user feedback which ruins the experience a bit, but I have taken note of what is retracting the gameplay and why I missed it.
I’ll be totally surprised if anyone is still reading this messy post by this point! But if you have thank you for reading. You can check out the game at the link bellow and don’t forget to watch the time lapse video of the development at the top of the post.
A huge thank you to Hectic Game Jam! Those guys really do organise a great Jam, one of the best I think! I planning on coming back, maybe working with a random team next time.
CircleIsland.Skeledurr.net
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