Ice Cream Social Post Mortem

ICS currently has two chapters based on an item pushing mechanic that allows the player to complete simple tasks for npcs.

Ethan's Notes:

Positive Notes:

• The overall feel of the game is unique and interesting. The player movement is very simple but satisfying
• Overall the game has very few bugs and glitches and worked as a foundation to expand to chapter 2 
• Our workflow was solid this year, we went from idea to implementation fairly fast for a two person team

Constructive feedback

• The game is a good start, but we could improve two aspects to make the experience better
  • Atmosphere: In the art and music department, we have a strong foundation but most moments in the game feel very still due to lack of animation and sound. If we pursue a direction where stillness is rewarded, staying still should be more inherently rewarding. 
    • There is a significant improvement between the first two chapters of the game. Chapter 2 features more looping background animations, falling leaves, and environmental depth. Chapter 3 could hypothetically continue this upward trend in the environmental details
  • Gameplay: for simple mechanics and gameplay to be worthwhile, we need to dial in the simple concept and make it as polished as possible. The gameplay also includes some hard-to-find mysteries, so we should make the mysteries more abundant so it's more likely to find them

Specific Bugs

• The falling leaf and shiver animation is missing
  • (Michael) - This wasn’t missing for me so I’m wondering why this happened…
• At the first block climb section, it is possible to teleport up one block height (this is probably because the block climb sequence moves the player up a block and can still be triggered after climbing once)
  • Some interesting things happen when you gain the extra block in height
    • You can walk above the ground across the whole level
• The grass tileset is now yellow for the entire game (should only be yellow in chapter 3)

Random Idea:

With the small petscop like discoveries and mechanics, it would be fun to eventually create a playthrough video similar to the petscop series, only ICS is a real game.

Michael's Notes:

It's a shame that we missed the deadline for the Cozy Autumn Game jam this year. The starting goal was to do this added level for that. But we both thought the deadline was Saturday at Midnight, not Saturday at 9am... So the Game was done in time, I just slept too late on Saturday to make the deadline. Even still, I'm happy with our progress and I still had a fun time working on the new chapter. 

Positive Notes:

• Revisiting this game was a fun way to practice solving problems and coming up with more flexible solutions for game design in Godot. I felt like this was one of the first times I was able to do all the work without going to any forums or YouTube tutorials. I was able to just use the Godot documentation and my experience from making other games before this to figure everything out on my own. I felt like this was a big step for me as a programmer. 
  • Also RIP to the Godot forum, that’s another reason I wasn’t able to go to any forums during the jam. I hope it’ll come back soon.
• I was able to create the weird game breaking puzzle ideas and I think they came through pretty well. They’re just difficult enough to figure out, but I’ll have to show it to more people to really know how intuitive they are. If most people don’t figure it out, that’s alright with me. I want this game to feel like it’s not suggesting too much of an uncanny vibe, so if you happen to see it, it’s really weird and off putting. 
• The system I used for the back-and-forth dialog between the player and the NPCs worked pretty well. I’m not sure if I like it more than just the standard text box at the bottom. Although it is more expressive, at the cost of it being difficult to position correctly. 
  • This is a really simplified version of the dialog system I was making for the Drone Game we’re working on. This game is much more linear with how the dialog works and there’s only one quest at a time so it didn’t need to be as complex.

Constructive feedback:

• The system I created for the dialog in this game made it really slow to import the dialog. Each line was a dictionary, so it got really old making a new dictionary for every single line. If this game had a lot more dialog, it would’ve been horrible. In the drone game, I’ll definitely make it so each interaction is its own dictionary (or maybe something easier if I can get away with it) instead of each line. Because I’m not sure if the drone will be able to speak in that game, so there’s no need to distinguish who is speaking, unless there’s an interaction with multiple NPCs at once…
• The speed the text is scrolling is the same no matter how long the text line is. This makes some text scroll by super fast and others slower. I think the value there needs to be mathematically derived by the length of what is being put into the text box. 

Specific Bugs:

• I forgot to fix the bug where the affirmation in the first level stops midway through a word. That’s because of how it used to work with the other affirmation. I just need to get rid of the pause I put in.
• The nature ambience doesn’t loop and it’s really a problem in the third level. To do all the ghost stuff after setting up movie night takes longer than the length of the ambience.