Background

Over the last month, I have been working on this project as a part of the r/SoloDevelopment hosted Marathon Jam. The “theme” of the jam was to make meaningful progress on an existing (or new) project. It was a very exciting theme as most jams are exclusively built around new projects.

In an effort to document the state of the game at the start of the jam, I created a dev blog post. Feel free to read through it but here is the video I made to show what I had at that time.

In addition here are the goals I set out to achieve in the course of the game.

Goals

• Create an “endless mode” that randomizes lawns with items, houses, etc that focuses on a scoring system over the requirements in the existing levels
• Use the existing levels as tutorials for the new endless mode
• Update the UI to adopt a more phone app style than a web portal aesthetic (story related)
• Implement a dialog system to use as a framing for each tutorial level

Stretch Goals

• Tweak some of the tutorial levels
• Add a bunch of additional items and houses for the endless mode

Postmortem

Purely based on the above goals it was mostly a success as you can see in the video below, which mimics the one above.

Here were some of the goals I did get done.

Revamped Main Menu

I really like the way the “Phone App” gig-work aesthetic worked out. It was the change I worked on the most and I think it shows.

Endless mode

Randomly generated levels in the “Job Mode” complete with scoring:

Tutorial Levels

I think these work fine as is, but with the missing dialogue system,it doesn’t have the same impact I was hoping for. As a temporary measure, I did add these “Aunt Nancy’s Tips” which at least gives some context.

Missing

Of the goals I set out to do the only one I didn’t get to was the dialogue. It is a big miss, but I am happy I removed it from scope. It gave me more opportunities to sit with the changes I did make and iterate on them.

Conclusion

Overall I think this Jam was a success, I accomplished a lot of what I wanted to do, and while it is still not a complete game, I feel much closer to one.