{"author_link":"\/users\/doot","author_name":"Doot","author_uid":"doot","comments":[],"epoch":1665339081,"event":"LD51","format":"md","ldjam_node_id":309764,"likes":13,"metadata":{"p_key":"169173","p_author":"Doot","p_authorkey":"1183602","p_urlkey":"396936","p_title":"Poda Wants a Statue - Designing and prototyping","p_cat":"LDJam ","p_event":"LD51","p_time":"1665339081","p_likes":"13","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":"1183602","us_name":"Doot","us_username":"doot","event_start":"1664496000","event_key":"114","event_name":"Ludum Dare 51"},"node":{"_collation":{"body_sanitizer":"TextUtils::SanitizeHTML via existing importer","event":"LD51","removed_author":false},"_superparent":296586,"_trust":1,"author":183602,"body":"![Banner_2.png](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f15.png)\n\nHey fellow jammers \u2728\n\nI wanted to share a few things on how we designed and built Poda Wants a Statue around prototyping. I love reading post mortems and dev stories here, so here is me giving back to this wonderful community!\n\n## The idea\n\nBefore starting any prototype, we needed a game idea. Among a lot of out-of-scope or just plain weird ideas, one of them felt cool: a job dating game where you have 10 seconds to say the best corporate bs with an autocomplete interface.\nIt felt a bit too much like something we knew we could do as we already explored the \u201cfun game with silly words that makes funny sentences\u201d in a previous game we made: [Welcome Googoo](https:\/\/dodoot.itch.io\/welcome-googoo).\n\nThen, in the middle of our ideation session, something happened.  \n**Blibloop** *~ looking outside the window with a \u201cwoke up 2 hours ago and still sleeping\u201d look on her face and coffee in her hands*: \u201cHey wait wait I have something\u2026\u201d  \n**Me**: \u201c\u2026 ?\u201d  \n**Blibloop**: \u201cPicture this: there is a bear or something, maybe a panda, and every 10 seconds he shakes everything!\u201d  \n**Me**: \u201cOk cool, what\u2019s the game?\u201d  \n**Blibloop**: \u201cOh\u2026 Idk \ud83e\udd37\u200d\u2640\ufe0f\u201d  \n\nA few walks around the park later, and me refusing to do a puzzle game because damn puzzle games are so freakin\u2019 hard to make, we settled on something pretty similar to what the game turned out to be in the end: a small god game where you assign workers to either collecting resources or making a statue, and every so often everything gets shuffled. A management game for a jam, nice! That\u2019s definitely easier to do than a puzzle game, right? *\u2026 right?* \ud83e\udd72\n\nhere is a very cool and understandable design scribble by Blibloop.\n![PostMortem1.jpg](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f17.jpg)\n\n## Technical prototype\n\nSecond half of the first day already, let\u2019s start!\n\nBlibloop focused on choosing an art style, Zakku researched references and started a first draft of music, and I worked on a technical prototype: Am I able to code some functional state machines for our workers AI? Can I do a resource and upgrade system? How is the Panda system going to work? How to make drag and drop in Unity?\n\n**Here is our Day 1 prototype** \ud83d\udda5\ufe0f\n![PostMortem1.gif](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f19.gif)\n\nWe tested this one ourselves, and here were the learnings:  \n- Everything seems doable, but not easy. The workers state machine is already complex, and they don\u2019t have pathfinding yet.\n- Current drag and drop system with OnMouseDown and OnMouseUp is a nightmare. Leads to a lot of bugs and clunky controls.\n- 10 seconds for the panda shake seems a bit extreme. in the final version, it's closer to 20 seconds!\n- Is this understandable by a player? (*spoiler - it was NOT*)\n\n## Feature complete prototype\n\nAfter a good night of sleep, let\u2019s start day 2! \n\nAs with any Ludum Dare we made, this is the day when we want to be able to make other people playtest the game and give us some feedback.\n\nTo do that, we needed something that was:  \n- a bit less buggy and clunky: I had to rework the drag and drop from the ground up. I might explain this in another post later!  \n- with all the features that we currently intended to put in the game: As you could see in the previous gif, we were still missing upgrades!  \n- a bit more self-explanatory. Playtesting is a bit useless if playtesters don\u2019t even understand what to do or how to play I guess.  \n\n**Here is our Day 1.5 prototype** \ud83d\udc3c\n![ezgif.com-gif-maker.gif](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f1c.gif)\n\nWe had friends at our place in the afternoon for teatime, so we made them test our prototype! Here is what we learned:  \n- The game is NOT self-explanatory at all yet. A lot of things were misunderstood or not understood: What are the rabbits doing? What\u2019s my resource count? How do upgrades work? How do I get gold? What is the panda doing? Nobody understood they could drag and drop resources too.\n- Once they understood, the game seems fun but completely unbalanced. Road is busted, building upgrade (they only updated speed and didn\u2019t gave more resources are useless), Poda shaking a random number of bunnies is confusing and unfair.\n- The game doesn\u2019t seem to have too many bugs! That's at least a success with all those somewhat complex AIs \ud83c\udfc5\n\nHere is an attempt by my brother to break it \ud83d\udc07\n![PostMortem2.jpg](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f1a.jpg)\n\n## Asset complete prototype\n\nSo here we are on the last day, with a game that is impossible to understand! Turns out making a management game is not only hard to code, but mostly hard to design so people understand how to play and what to do!\n\nWe started by implementing all the beautiful visuals and sounds Blibloop and Zakku did, and then spent a lot of time working on the clearest possible UI and on adding a lot of visuals to help the player: White indicators for idle bunnies and clickable resources, blue overlays on everything you can interact with, big chunky arrows on were you can drop what you have in hand, game intro and Poda\u2019s prompts to set and remind the goal, small animations on every bunny state, and a lot more!\n\nWe kept asking friends to playtest through the day, and their feedback helped a lot!  \n- They are not sure when a button is clickable? Let\u2019s darken it even more and change text color when it\u2019s not! \n- Having upgrades available right from the starts makes it information heavy? Let\u2019s push that to a bit later! \n- They feel let down without a cool ending animation? Ok let\u2019s prioritize that then.\n\n## Final jam version\n\n**And that\u2019s about how we came up with what we have today** \u2728\n\n![ezgif.com-gif-maker (1).gif](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f1d.gif)\n\n**Now it\u2019s time your time to tell us what you feel is great or what could be done better!**\n\nThanks to all the wonderful people who already tried the game, here is what we learned so far:\n- Everyone seems to love the art and music! Huge congrats to Blibloop (@dodidouda) and Zakku (@zakku) \ud83d\udc96\n- It seems like people understand the game quickly enough! That\u2019s something we are really really happy about, since it was the part we spent the most time on \u2728\n- Not a single bug found! I believe that's a first for me, on my most complex jam game \ud83e\uddd1\u200d\ud83d\udcbb\n- Some people feel Poda is too annoying during late game. It becomes almost impossible to put all your bunnies back to work and gather all resources again before they throws another tantrum! That was actually a design decision but it seems it's not liked by some, so we are already thinking on solutions.\n- Dragging a lot of resources is painful. We are thinking on what could make this easier!\n- There are some small visual things we need to fix, like order layers for the bunnies that is sometimes wrong!\n\nHere is the game if you want to try it and leave your feedback!\n# [Play Poda Wants a Statue here!](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/51\/poda-wants-a-statue)\n\n### How about you? Do you prototype and playtest a lot during game jams?","comments":3,"comments-timestamp":"2022-10-17T18:19:58Z","created":"2022-10-09T17:35:38Z","files":[],"files-timestamp":0,"id":309764,"love":13,"love-timestamp":"2022-10-09T22:17:33Z","meta":[],"modified":"2022-10-17T18:19:58Z","name":"Poda Wants a Statue - Designing and prototyping","node-timestamp":"2022-10-09T18:11:21Z","parent":296784,"parents":[1,5,9,296586,296784],"path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/51\/poda-wants-a-statue\/poda-wants-a-statue-designing-and-prototyping","published":"2022-10-09T18:11:21Z","scope":"public","slug":"poda-wants-a-statue-designing-and-prototyping","subsubtype":"","subtype":"","type":"post","version":965668},"node_metadata":{"n_key":"309764","n_urlkey":"396936","n_parent":"296784","n_path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/51\/poda-wants-a-statue\/poda-wants-a-statue-designing-and-prototyping","n_slug":"poda-wants-a-statue-designing-an","n_type":"post","n_subtype":"","n_subsubtype":"","n_author":"183602","n_created":"1665336938","n_modified":"1666030798","n_version":"965668","n_status":"WAYBACK"},"source_url":"https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/51\/poda-wants-a-statue\/poda-wants-a-statue-designing-and-prototyping","text":"![Banner_2.png](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f15.png)\n\nHey fellow jammers \u2728\n\nI wanted to share a few things on how we designed and built Poda Wants a Statue around prototyping. I love reading post mortems and dev stories here, so here is me giving back to this wonderful community!\n\n## The idea\n\nBefore starting any prototype, we needed a game idea. Among a lot of out-of-scope or just plain weird ideas, one of them felt cool: a job dating game where you have 10 seconds to say the best corporate bs with an autocomplete interface.\nIt felt a bit too much like something we knew we could do as we already explored the \u201cfun game with silly words that makes funny sentences\u201d in a previous game we made: [Welcome Googoo](https:\/\/dodoot.itch.io\/welcome-googoo).\n\nThen, in the middle of our ideation session, something happened.  \n**Blibloop** *~ looking outside the window with a \u201cwoke up 2 hours ago and still sleeping\u201d look on her face and coffee in her hands*: \u201cHey wait wait I have something\u2026\u201d  \n**Me**: \u201c\u2026 ?\u201d  \n**Blibloop**: \u201cPicture this: there is a bear or something, maybe a panda, and every 10 seconds he shakes everything!\u201d  \n**Me**: \u201cOk cool, what\u2019s the game?\u201d  \n**Blibloop**: \u201cOh\u2026 Idk \ud83e\udd37\u200d\u2640\ufe0f\u201d  \n\nA few walks around the park later, and me refusing to do a puzzle game because damn puzzle games are so freakin\u2019 hard to make, we settled on something pretty similar to what the game turned out to be in the end: a small god game where you assign workers to either collecting resources or making a statue, and every so often everything gets shuffled. A management game for a jam, nice! That\u2019s definitely easier to do than a puzzle game, right? *\u2026 right?* \ud83e\udd72\n\nhere is a very cool and understandable design scribble by Blibloop.\n![PostMortem1.jpg](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f17.jpg)\n\n## Technical prototype\n\nSecond half of the first day already, let\u2019s start!\n\nBlibloop focused on choosing an art style, Zakku researched references and started a first draft of music, and I worked on a technical prototype: Am I able to code some functional state machines for our workers AI? Can I do a resource and upgrade system? How is the Panda system going to work? How to make drag and drop in Unity?\n\n**Here is our Day 1 prototype** \ud83d\udda5\ufe0f\n![PostMortem1.gif](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f19.gif)\n\nWe tested this one ourselves, and here were the learnings:  \n- Everything seems doable, but not easy. The workers state machine is already complex, and they don\u2019t have pathfinding yet.\n- Current drag and drop system with OnMouseDown and OnMouseUp is a nightmare. Leads to a lot of bugs and clunky controls.\n- 10 seconds for the panda shake seems a bit extreme. in the final version, it's closer to 20 seconds!\n- Is this understandable by a player? (*spoiler - it was NOT*)\n\n## Feature complete prototype\n\nAfter a good night of sleep, let\u2019s start day 2! \n\nAs with any Ludum Dare we made, this is the day when we want to be able to make other people playtest the game and give us some feedback.\n\nTo do that, we needed something that was:  \n- a bit less buggy and clunky: I had to rework the drag and drop from the ground up. I might explain this in another post later!  \n- with all the features that we currently intended to put in the game: As you could see in the previous gif, we were still missing upgrades!  \n- a bit more self-explanatory. Playtesting is a bit useless if playtesters don\u2019t even understand what to do or how to play I guess.  \n\n**Here is our Day 1.5 prototype** \ud83d\udc3c\n![ezgif.com-gif-maker.gif](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f1c.gif)\n\nWe had friends at our place in the afternoon for teatime, so we made them test our prototype! Here is what we learned:  \n- The game is NOT self-explanatory at all yet. A lot of things were misunderstood or not understood: What are the rabbits doing? What\u2019s my resource count? How do upgrades work? How do I get gold? What is the panda doing? Nobody understood they could drag and drop resources too.\n- Once they understood, the game seems fun but completely unbalanced. Road is busted, building upgrade (they only updated speed and didn\u2019t gave more resources are useless), Poda shaking a random number of bunnies is confusing and unfair.\n- The game doesn\u2019t seem to have too many bugs! That's at least a success with all those somewhat complex AIs \ud83c\udfc5\n\nHere is an attempt by my brother to break it \ud83d\udc07\n![PostMortem2.jpg](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f1a.jpg)\n\n## Asset complete prototype\n\nSo here we are on the last day, with a game that is impossible to understand! Turns out making a management game is not only hard to code, but mostly hard to design so people understand how to play and what to do!\n\nWe started by implementing all the beautiful visuals and sounds Blibloop and Zakku did, and then spent a lot of time working on the clearest possible UI and on adding a lot of visuals to help the player: White indicators for idle bunnies and clickable resources, blue overlays on everything you can interact with, big chunky arrows on were you can drop what you have in hand, game intro and Poda\u2019s prompts to set and remind the goal, small animations on every bunny state, and a lot more!\n\nWe kept asking friends to playtest through the day, and their feedback helped a lot!  \n- They are not sure when a button is clickable? Let\u2019s darken it even more and change text color when it\u2019s not! \n- Having upgrades available right from the starts makes it information heavy? Let\u2019s push that to a bit later! \n- They feel let down without a cool ending animation? Ok let\u2019s prioritize that then.\n\n## Final jam version\n\n**And that\u2019s about how we came up with what we have today** \u2728\n\n![ezgif.com-gif-maker (1).gif](\/\/\/raw\/23d\/c2\/z\/52f1d.gif)\n\n**Now it\u2019s time your time to tell us what you feel is great or what could be done better!**\n\nThanks to all the wonderful people who already tried the game, here is what we learned so far:\n- Everyone seems to love the art and music! Huge congrats to Blibloop (@dodidouda) and Zakku (@zakku) \ud83d\udc96\n- It seems like people understand the game quickly enough! That\u2019s something we are really really happy about, since it was the part we spent the most time on \u2728\n- Not a single bug found! I believe that's a first for me, on my most complex jam game \ud83e\uddd1\u200d\ud83d\udcbb\n- Some people feel Poda is too annoying during late game. It becomes almost impossible to put all your bunnies back to work and gather all resources again before they throws another tantrum! That was actually a design decision but it seems it's not liked by some, so we are already thinking on solutions.\n- Dragging a lot of resources is painful. We are thinking on what could make this easier!\n- There are some small visual things we need to fix, like order layers for the bunnies that is sometimes wrong!\n\nHere is the game if you want to try it and leave your feedback!\n# [Play Poda Wants a Statue here!](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/51\/poda-wants-a-statue)\n\n### How about you? Do you prototype and playtest a lot during game jams?","title":"Poda Wants a Statue - Designing and prototyping","wayback_source":[]}