Thanks for taking the time to give feedback on all of our submissions. I had a lot of fun working on my submission, and I look forward to next time.
Let me start off with the usual opening: obviously this is a prototype, it is unfinished, so it's hard to judge. Please don't take anything about the score to heart - it's simply hard to give points to prototypes when there is little gameplay to go off of.
That's fine, It's expected with the current state of it. I was hoping to get some more art and sound in the end, but I'm not an artists, so I didn't expect to earn high points on those scores compared to other submissions. There was a few things that ended up taking a bit longer than expected, and it turns out I also had a lot of other family/friends obligations landed in the jam window, so I didn't have a lot of the time I originally planned.
The timing on the Jam was both good and bad for me. I was able to use this as an experiment that I get to take what I learned back to some other things I've been working on. But also if I had a few more months before the start I would have had a better starting off point as there's a few things I was in the middle of learning, that I had to make due with, and make work, Instead of having a more complete understanding on it.
However, as you probably found out pretty quickly, making Pikmin is hard! Having a bunch of little lemmings running around is not the easiest thing to create as a designer.it's a pain to design around, it's worse to test, and it's a type of game that can easily lead to player frustration when mechanics aren't polished to a sheen.
Actually I found the coordination of all the entities wasn't too bad, some things had to be polished more to feel right than I initially thought. But the parts I've found the hardest, that I'm still working on, are:
- 3D game programming side. which would have been difficult still in a smaller scoped game. Such as ground collision and 3d rotation. I spent a decent chunk of time trying to go down some of those paths which I had to cut out later for time. Even the simple thing like the mouse aiming took quite a while, where I'm doing a lot of 'interesting' math to try to make it work with a more free camera, that I'm still not fully happy with it's current state.
-Finding design decisions to make it more unique and more than a reskin of Pikmin in the end. It feels like they did a really good job in designing Pikmin, where it mechanically very simple, but the player can opt into difficulty by multitasking. Everything I've tried so far to add or remove takes away from that aspect of the game I want to preserve, and I still don't quite have an answer for that.
In game jams, one of the first things I talk about with people is "make sure you choose your scope wisely."As a solo developer, tackling something as big as pikmin in a limited window of time is a monumental task.It's no wonder that this is a prototype: there's just a lot of things that need to be implemented and tested in order to reach a minimum viable product candidate build.
Yeah, I'm fine with how it ended out in the end. I ended up using this project as a way to experiment with issues I was having in other projects, that I was hitting some paralysis on. It would have been nice to get a more complete project out. But I needed the complexity of these interacting entities to really answer some of the issues I was having, and a simpler game wouldn't have given me those answers.
I figure the idea at least has enough merit to it that it's worth continuing on, where often an unfinished jam game stays unfinished. and it fits what the spirit of game jams to me, which is mostly to get people into the hobby, and having a complete submission is more secondary.This was a big part of the reason I went solo. I knew it was going to be a bit of a long shot, and I didn't want to drag some unsuspecting artist looking for a group into my crazy idea. Again, the scope also included that I started without an existing engine, and every time I made a web build,there was a few things that would always not compile, even though it compiles fine to binary.
In this particular case, you have to ask yourself: what's one small piece of Pikmin we -More fantasy theme than biology could make that could be fun?One direction youcould take, for example, is focusing on a single character that's directed by the player in the third-person.That way you don't have to worry about representing the player on the screen, nor the hundreds of little guys,but you still have to make all of the directional movement commands.Moving a small person around a big environment with mouse click direction could be the perfect avenue to creating a compelling experience.It's also something that could be more approachable as a solo designer in a limited-time window.And, most importantly, building that basic prototype gives you the blocks to expand in a Pikmin-like direction later.If you wanted to add in the hundreds of little guys after the movement system is sound with one, you could.When you know how it works with one, you'll have an idea of how to make it work with more than one.
That probably would have worked a bit better in the end. While I didn't spend too much time on scaling my system to work with the army of guys. It slowed down other parts of development, where I was trying to solve both problems at once, instead of more additive. Plus there's a lot of work into the system, That I wasn't fully able to show off, because left out the more unpolished parts
And as well as predetermining the design into a larger scope, instead of following the design to naturally to where it goes. I'll try to keep that in mind for future projects, and as I work on this one more, as designing games tends to be where I get stuck spinning my wheels. and it sounds like from this is a reason could be, because I'm likely starting too much in a local minimum in the design space, and every direction has a gradient telling me to turn back. Which tends to be a common issue I run into on previous attempts into gamedev.
