KUMO. post-mortem
After an overwhelming amount of people (250+) playing and liking my tiny gardening game I figured I'd talk about how I made KUMO. a tiny bit.
So I wasn't sure I could join the jam at first, since I had to work all weekend and I thought the Compo times were the only option. Luckily I had the entire Monday off so I had about 12 hours to cook something up.
1 Hour in
I've been experimenting with different approaches to game-design lately, this time I focused more on mood and art rather than mechanics, what I usually do. Luckily the theme allowed me to try my hand in something like that.
As for programming, I cobbled together some code snippets from previous projects to create what you see in the gif above, within a single hour. All basic controls were already in place by then, which meant I could focus on procedural generation (something I've been getting into only lately) and granting me tons of time to tweak art and audio.
5 Hours in
Practically finished. Tweaks on "seed" generation amount, tweaks on seed positioning, tweaks on colours, tweaks on particles. This was basically the entire design process; tweaking everything until it felt nice and relaxing. I've never taken the time to do this properly before, usually stopping at 2 or 3 passes on "gamefeel". However I think it bore fruit, as I read the comments and feedback. Once I ported it to WebGL, it had some draw order glitches that looked horrible. I forced in some fixes a few minutes before uploading and now the sun passes behind grass which made it look worse, but I didn't have enough energy left to fix it.
Takeaways
- Take your time tweaking the focus of your game...
- Even if the scope/amount of content suffers for it.
- Take a few prolonged hours for making builds,
- and the problems that come with them.
- LD is tons of fun!
See you next year!