It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if you've done something enough times, you'll somehow be good at making estimates about it. SurviFarm was our 7th Ludum Dare game, so we were pretty confident that we could pull of the survival game/farming hybrid -- and mostly we did -- but I can't help thinking a bit smaller scope would have lead into a more polished product.

I'm happy with the overall design of the game. In the context of a stone age hunter-gatherer transitioning to a farmer, the genre hybrid makes a lot of sense. The exploration and collecting resources is fun enough, and the mood is suitably whimsical.

The art style choice was spot on and made a lot of sense timewise, as for the most part, it was very fast to produce. The player character and the boar were the most time consuming due to the number of animations, and that's something we have to take into account in future Dares: animating even a very low-poly character is a long process. Other than that, I think we nailed the indie low-poly style very well, and the game looks pretty good.

The Neolithic theme turned out to be a bit too ascetic on the art side and in retrospect a more fantastical setting might perhaps have inspired more visible conflicts between the two incompatible genres.

The part of the game most suffering from the lack of time was the farming and crafting. We didn't have enough time to actually make it worth your while, or add any continuity to it (although farming actually made little sense to the Neolithic hunter-gatherers in the short term, so I guess it's realistic in a way).

As the weekend went along, the genres started to feel maybe a bit too compatible, so we decided to throw in another curveball: the trivia mechanic. It was fast and easy to implement, even if the number of questions ended up lacking. It gives the game an edugamish feel, which I think suits the theme very well. I mean, what's a more incompatible genre with anything than an educational game?

On Monday night, we ran into a wall of build problems. Getting the WebGL build out of Unity took over an hour and in the end, the culprit ended up being a water shader. Curiously enough, we'd been able to make working builds with the same shader multiple times during the weekend -- it was just the actual, final build that didn't work. Due to this and some other issues, the final build ended up looking a bit less good as the development versions. We will upload Windows and Mac builds, which look more like the game is actually supposed to look.

Overall, I'm a little conflicted about the result. It has a lot of potential and the core gameplay works well enough. It's not the best game we've done on Ludum Dare, but it stands on its own and we had fun making it.

You can play the game here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/survifarm