Game Design - a switch turned on

I'll start by saying that the Brackeys 2024.2 jam has been incredible! I have played so many amazing  games, and I got some honest, genuine feedback on Hurricane Watch that was really nice to see. The Brackeys community clearly cares and is invested in games.

I'm also super happy that the game got rated a bunch (thank you everyone) and has been briefly near the top of "popular" for the jam. I think it's sitting at around 20th or so now, but in any case, I am super happy with the result. My expectations were definitely very low, considering the game lacked any shiny graphics or music. Despite all that, I think some people found it genuinely fun to play - which honestly fills me with joy.

I'd like to share just a small anecdote from this project that was really insightful for me - it's about my relationship with game design in making games.

I approached this game jam knowing that I wanted to focus on design first. Based on a combination of discussions I had had with other designers, and listening to certain podcasts, I was really motivated to make a "Pong + real-time strategy" game. This had also been motivated by my recreation of pong (which I rant about here).

When the theme for the Brackeys jam came out the idea came to me almost immediately to do a hurricanes (not a huge suprise). Shortly after, I imagined them bouncing around a map like a ball (a play-tester very accurately pointed out that what I ended up making was closer to a tornado... but I digress). I thought this should fit pretty well with "calm before the storm", along with my desire to emulate some of the fun inherent in Pong.

I wrote almost everything out on paper. The mechanics, the phases (building phase, storm phase, and payment/destruction totals), some UI/UX, the list goes on. It was an interesting experience that required more patience compared to what I am used to. And let me say that I never do that.

In the past, I have always started by making some sketches, or a few diagrams, and then just jumped right into coding, more or less abandoning the pen-on-paper design process. For better or worse, I have pretty much always made games that way.

This time was different, however. This time I planned like crazy. I thought everything out. Then I programmed.

And I programmed.

And programmed.

And programmed some more.

Like an insane person. For about 4 days straight (I made some sprites in Aseprite during brief moments of sanity).

Then I had an "aha" moment . It was about 4 AM in the morning. I had been play-testing for hours, finding issues, tweaking the code - and repeat. Bleary eyed, I discovered I was actually enjoying playing the game I was making.

As insane as it sounds, enjoying playing the game that you are making (and not just the creation process) is an incredibly satisfying thing to have happen. It accelerates the process. It provides motivation. I knew where I was going. I wanted the strategy to have at least some complexity to it, some difficulty. I knew that the average play time might be less than 5 minutes. So I was headed for this target of trying to make Hurricane Watch fun, a little challenging, and rewarding.

I will mention that I started with the game being way too difficult. That was part of the many hours of play-testing until 4 AM in the morning. Not only was I fighting bugs, but I was fighting parameters in the game that hadn't been tuned. At first, you would have like $10,000 starting out, and no matter how hard you tried, at the end of the first round you could only get $6,000 or $7,000. Eventually I got the numbers to a point where if you really knew what you were doing, you could get a snowball effect going fast, and after 5 or 6 rounds you could have $50k or more.

I got my partner to playtest it, and bless her soul, she gave me feedback on maybe a dozen things that improved the game significantly (the entire "cow herding" mechanic is thanks to her). After this it kind of rolled down hill. I got a little bit more play testing in from family and friends, patched some more small things, then submitted it.

I have been playing my own game, almost every day, even since the jam. And I'm still enjoying it. I think we should all, as designers, strive to love the games we play.

Sadly, I did not get time to do music, but I'm still really happy with the result.

Thanks again to everyone who play tested and contributed to the jam! It's been awesome!

-Mike