VeggieStew

[veggiestewgames]

News Flash - GGJ 2018 Timelapse

Watch how we made our game "News Flash" during Global Game Jam 2018! The theme for the jam this year was "Transmission", and this was how we interpreted it. ...

Made a timelapse of how our Global Game Jam 2018 went! :D

The music in the game can also now be found here.

[veggiestewgames]

Hello! We participated in this year's Global Game Jam and created a little 2-player game! Battle with your friends as you find out who's the fastest intergalactic TV translator in the world.

You can play it here: https://veggiestew.itch.io/news-flash

Sorry for the long absence; We'll post more about what we've been doing soon! <3

[veggiestewgames]

ESGS 2017 Postmortem

Last weekend, we went to this year’s E-Sports and Gaming Summit (ESGS) and exhibited Farmer Fran! The convention was definitely a lot bigger this year, and we had tons of fun meeting familiar faces and watching others play our game. If you want to know how we prepared for the event and how it went, read on!

Sign-ups for the Indie Arena opened a few months before ESGS. We were planning to show a certain game for this year but were too busy to prepare it, so we decided to present our already-finished one, Farmer Fran, instead. As we were waiting for a confirmation on that, we also entered the game at Game On just in case we weren’t picked in the former.

We got confirmed on both, with Game On telling us that we were a finalist and Indie Arena notifying us shortly after. This caused a problem with us having two separate booths, which was resolved easily thanks to the quick response of the organizers. We managed to still have our booth at the Indie Arena (which was in a good position, being at the front and all, circled at the image above) which was nice. 

The location of the Indie Arena as a whole is at the corner, which (mostly) only made people go to it if all the other parts of the event is crowded. I’m not sure if it’s the same for other conventions, but that seemed to be the case on this one. The booths at the deeper end were having trouble getting noticed as well, with some going at the front of the arena to advertise, and some even roaming around the event with signs over their heads.

Confirmation for both booths were sent quite late (two weeks or so before the event), so we didn’t have much time to prepare. We already have a game to show though (unlike rushing to make one like last year :P), so preparation was actually a little more relaxed than last time.

This time, we tried having more things to give away. We had 20 posters, 40 mini posters, and ~300 bookmarks which costs $30 overall. We self-printed the flyers, buying printer ink and paper which cost $32 (I got to print ~180 colored, and twice that for black and white ones). I would have been able to print a lot more colored ones if I had the printing settings correct at the start, and bought 2 colored printer ink instead of 1 colored and 1 black. We also had ~100 pins made for $0.2/piece, with the store accidentally making a few more for us (heh). We could have printed a few less of the pins and all those, since we still have some left after the event still (Next time, it might be better to just have posters and/or pins, with business cards that could also function as a flyer for the game). Lastly, we had 10 shirts for ourselves for around $40. Shirts are always nice. We love shirts. (All in all, that’s a total of $122.)

For the booth itself (which was free), we just grabbed some random tablecloth we have that might look good with the booth poster. We also had a speaker this time instead of just headphones, for (hopefully) attracting attention while the trailer plays (when the game is idle). I think having both (or even just the headphones) might have been better though. The game is better experienced by hearing the sounds, and with the event being generally noisy overall, it kind of ruins the mood for the game.

Travel costs is the most expensive part of having a booth this year. We tried going home for each day (since it’s more comfortable resting in your own home after), which cost us around $110. Oof. I couldn’t post in social media at all during the event because of the tiredness and all the traveling. It got harder to entertain people as the days went by as well, especially on the last one. There’s the terrible traffic as well. Definitely better to stay somewhere nearby. 

The printing of our booth poster (and those of a few others as well) provided by the Indie Arena was delayed, which made it a bit harder to gain attention. We were told that it would arrive at noon on the first day, but we never saw it for the whole duration of the event. Maybe we could have printed our own.. oh well. We just sticked our little poster at the wall on the last day. :P

Instead of creating a demo specifically for the event, we just showcased the whole game (which has an hour or more of play time). People who weren’t into it (either because of the atmosphere, the slow start, the overall length, or it not being their thing) stops at the first day, with those liking it stopping at around the third or fourth. It was surprising how in each day, there would always be a few who actually decided to finish the game during the event itself! 

I didn’t leave the booth as much this time, and I actually got to talk to a few developers which was nice. Overall, it was a fun experience meeting other people and hearing their reactions to the game, seeing how the industry (especially in the country) is progressing, and generally being inspired by all these video games. Makes you feel good inside.

Special thanks to The Three Borketeers team and ToadieTechnika for helping us out during the event, and the people who organized ESGS for another amazing convention. <3

- Arwyn

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[veggiestewgames]

Thank you to everyone who visited our booth and played Farmer Fran at this year's ESGS!

It has been an amazing 3 days, watching people's reactions and hearing their thoughts about our game. To the few who actually finished the entirety of it during the event, we salute you for your patience and hard work. ;D

We will be posting a little more about our experience next time. For now, you can look at more pictures over here. We hope you enjoyed the event as well! <3

[veggiestewgames]

Think you can grow the mice's shop with one controller alone? ;)

Play Double Delights on Itch.io!

[veggiestewgames]

We're playing old-school now. :P

Play Double Delights on Itch.io!

[veggiestewgames]

We will be showcasing Farmer Fran on ESGS this weekend! 

If you haven’t had the chance to play it yet, you can find us at the Indie Arena. Come say hi, and you might get some free things as well! ;)

[veggiestewgames]

When you align yourselves properly, houses dance for you! ;D

Play Double Delights on Itch.io!

[veggiestewgames]

"Where did my partner go?"

Play Double Delights on Itch.io!

[veggiestewgames]

When shops literally grow when you buy from them. #NotABug

Play Double Delights on Itch.io!

[veggiestewgames]

Farmer Fran Thoughts Part 2: Scenes and Dialogues

Hello! Here is the other part of the Farmer Fran postmortem-like, which talks about how rooms and dialogues are handled in the game, and some problems that we encountered with them. 

If you haven’t played the game yet, you can find it here! Come back here once you did. ;) Well then, let’s continue!

Scenes

I rarely use more than one scene for everything in our games, so I wanted to try using them for the game’s rooms. The problem with using it in this kind of game is that the player has to switch rooms lots of times, and seeing the transition for that gets repetitive after a while. Separate scenes might be better for bigger levels.. or if you’d want to isolate a certain part of the game (like a UI or the player object; something that persists between levels?) from everything else. I did the latter for Farmer Fran, loading the player character to the starting room or a room told by the save file (if any).

I used edge colliders for the environment and the triggers for going to the other rooms, and circle colliders for everything else. It felt a little weird when walking towards sharp corners. I could’ve made the edges flat to smoothen things out.

For the camera, I had 2 objects in each scene that serve as bounds to the camera, limiting its movement inside them. The camera follows the character once they go a certain distance away from the current position the camera is tracking. For the zooming in/out effect on dialogues, I just changed its field of view.

I didn’t have any pathfinding for the character movement. It was basically just a “click here and I slowly go there’ kind of thing. This caused a little problem on a few rooms, which had the character running to colliders when going to a point. Several solutions to this would be ( A ) to design the rooms with those in mind, not having colliders that would block the movement, ( B ) to have a collider near the problem area that, when clicked, redirects the character to move to a certain point first before going to the actual wanted point, or ( C ) to simply have a pathfinding system, which sounded a bit too much for what I want to do.

The rooms to the left of the starting room was actually locked at first, only being able to go in them once you did the mayor’s errand. We decided to open it up instantly since going to the pond to the farthest right tend to be a little frustrating, and it wasn’t quite obvious that you can go to the left of your house once you finish the said errand.

(Also, this is the lazy way of giving players the option to end the day quickly without making a UI for it. :P)

Dialogues

I used Yarn and Yarn Spinner for the game’s dialogues. I had two files: one for handling when an interactable appears, checking what time and day it is (and flags triggered by the player’s actions) and showing/hiding it based on those, and the other containing the actual dialogues that interactables say.

I dabbled a little with Fungus a few years ago (it might have improved now, but I haven’t tried it in a long while), and I feel like I have better control with this one. It’s easy to add your own commands and queries in it. I had ones that check the day, time, item amount, character visibility, and times talked with someone. It does get a little cluttered when checking multiple things though. It might be a good idea to have macro commands/queries for future games.

Etc.

Interaction sometimes bugs out and still runs even if the character is far from the interactable clicked. This might be because movement always happens as long as the cursor is held down, even when clicking on interactables. It must be confusing it. I wasn’t sure how to detect if the cursor is on an interactable or not when the cursor is held down. A way to solve this would be having the interactables throw an event when hovered upon and when exited, then only running the movement code when nothing is hovered on.

As I watched people play our game, I saw some having trouble with their cursor going out of the screen when navigating to the edges of rooms to go to a different one. An option to have the cursor be locked inside the screen for these kinds of games might be good.

The game can sometimes have idle time when you finish tending to your crops early and you’ve already talked to the townsfolk. You end up just waiting for the time to change while running around the area. One way to make the waiting a little more fun is to have things moving around rooms that react to your actions, like chickens or frogs, or even just random leaves flowing by the wind. 

Thank you for reading! That’s about it on Farmer Fran for now. If you have some thoughts or questions about anything, feel free to tell us over here or at our social media places! <3

- Arwyn

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[veggiestewgames]

We joined Games and Politics Game Jam recently! We made a game in around 24 hours called Double Delights, where you have to share a controller with someone and spread word about your shop.

One of you serves the customers inside your shop, and try to entice animals outside to visit by giving them foods based on their mood! The other cooks the food inside the shop, while buying and managing the ingredients used to prepare them.

Play it here!

[veggiestewgames]

Farmer Fran Thoughts Part 1: Interactions and Effects

Hello! We released Farmer Fran a week or so ago. If you haven't played it yet, you can try it out here! Here is its trailer, too. (If you'd like to listen to the game's music, you can find it here! All these links.)

I'd like to write some thoughts about a few things while I worked on the game- something of a postmortem, if you will. It's mostly for me to remember them for future games, but I figure it might be of use to someone out there, too!

This postmortem-like post will be divided into two parts. the first one (this one!) will mainly be talking about the interaction and effects in the game, So.. let's get on it!

Movement/Interaction

We planned to make a point-and-click for the recently-concluded Ludum Dare since we wanted to make one soon, and it'll be a good way to test a little prototype of the system that I made for that. It went pretty well, with me realizing a few interesting (and maybe obvious) things.

Allowing player movement by clicking AND with WASD/arrow keys might have been confusing. Clicking on an interactable moves the character to it, and moving with keyboard controls while that happens would cancel the movement. This might have been okay with a controller, having the analog stick do cursor movement.. but that's a different thing.

There's too much clicking to do for planting.. or it feels tiresome after a while at least. The hoe, plant, and water process might have worked on something like Harvest Moon since the planting part was a bit easier (and there's less of a worry about the in-game time). The zooming effect that happens while doing those three for each plot might have made it boring and repetitive too, instead of being a little relaxing. Either toning down that zooming, or maybe removing the hoe part completely could make it slightly better.. (or ｅｙｅｃａｎｄｉｅｓ)

When clicking on interactables, I had their dialogues run once the player's character ends their movement. This, however, introduced a bug wherein the dialogues ran even with the character still being far away from it. I thought it was because of the amount of threshold for how near the character should be from the interactable before the dialogue runs, but that wasn't the case. The system running the dialogues must be getting confused, since I still have the character moving to the position where the player clicked, when the clicked interactable should already be giving the destination point for the character.

I should either make sure that movement into an interactable is taken into account properly in the movement code (making it stop normal movement before doing movement to an interactable, and stopping interactable movement when the player wants to move normally), or have something clickable at the back of all interactables that tell the character to move to the clicked point.

I also had text objects attached on every interactable. Having to move some of them a little because of dialogues getting cut off the screen was definitely inefficient. Some way to only need one text object and making it go to the desired position would be nice. Something like.. having the interactables contain an offset (from their position) for its positioning, and the text object being aware of the edges of the screen perhaps?

I wanted to try out drag-and-dropping items to interactables to use them, but decided to drop (heh) that for the game jam (still didn't get to finish though, whoops). Doing that would probably make me have to deal with things like closing the inventory menu with the item persisting and cancelling movement when an item is held by the cursor. That's something to try for next time.

Being able to move and click on interactables during transitions was a problem. I had the interactables' interactability turn off whenever a transition or dialogue happens, but somehow still didn't turn off on transitions. What I did was just instantly have a transparent Image on the whole screen whenever a transition happens. I should probably solve that properly next time.

Effects

I tested out the eyecandy shader that I created in the interactables and transitions. It didn't seem to work on UI objects if the Canvas is set to Overlay, since the alpha is set to fade when getting closer to the camera (to avoid blocking the view). The code that animates them was a little all over the place, too. I should have a central script that contains all those animations instead.. and also have an option to only have an angled texture instead of one that rotates forever.

I noticed that colors of the gradient tint over the whole sprite flicker sometimes. That's something to keep in mind for future fixing. There's also the part where its animation jumps a little when transitioning from one room to the next, but that's caused by the short pause when loading a scene.. which is another thing to practice and fix so it loads properly.

I had the bouncing effect on interactables done in script, which caused their colliders to change in size as well.. making overlapping interactable colliders a little awkward. I'd like to try doing this effect in the shader itself sometime.

The game had stars and confettis whenever the day ends or an errand is completed. At first, they were completely hidden by the sprites and transitions. Good thing you can change the layer order for particle systems. It might be a good idea to have a separate sorting layer for particles.

Etc.

Balancing the points given by crops was a little complicated. Progress towards the completion of harvested crops felt slow at the first few days, and too much at the final ones. Being able to simulate the crops the player has at certain days would be nice for easier balancing.

When we tried the game on a Mac machine (Thank you to Dejeru for helping us with this! <3), the UI got all blown up, and the sprites with my effects were nowhere to be found.

I didn't want the camera to resize for different screen resolutions, since that would show unwanted parts of rooms and complicate the way of going through them (since that depended on the current aspect ratio). What I did was add black borders for different aspect ratios using this script. With a little tweaking, I can also allow resizing of the screen using that.

Dealing with shader problems is a first, so fixing the effects part took a while. I tried things like having the shaders in the Resources folder, or making them always included in builds via the Graphics Settings. What ultimately fixed it, however, is setting the Graphics API for Mac in the Build Settings to check for OpenGLCore first instead of Metal, since the shader didn't support that. I got that fixed now at least, so all is well.

Thank you for reading! Congratulations on reading all those midnight ramblings. The next part would be about the dialogue system and the rooms. If you have some thoughts or questions about something in here, feel free to tell us over here or at our social media places! <3

- Arwyn

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[veggiestewgames]

If you liked Farmer Fran's music, you can listen to it right here!

And if you haven't played it yet, you can try it out over here. :) 

[veggiestewgames]

And it’s out! Here is a trailer for our short point-and-click farming game, Farmer Fran. Save the town from an upcoming storm by— well, farming! :D

Play it here: https://veggiestew.itch.io/farmer-fran

[veggiestewgames]

Showing off the day/night cycle for Screenshot Saturday! Harvesting some cabbages in the afternoon. :)

[veggiestewgames]

Roaming around town and chatting with the mayor. :)