From Zero to Scatterhoard: a Post-Jam Post-Mortem, part 1: Gameplay and Graphics

Hey all! Valerio a.k.a. Pixel Bubble here. The Great Autumn Game Jam 2021 was over  weeks ago and I'm still overwhelmed with the positive response I got for this small game. It was a labor of love that challenged me in different ways, and I'm quite proud of the fact that I was able to deliver it. I also never wrote a devlog or a post-mortem before, so I figured I'd try and write a bit about the game, the design/development process and the overall experience.

English is not my main language so please bear with me!

Scatterhoard was made for the Great Autumn Game Jam 2021 hosted by Firith Studio. As an avid fan of Goodgis' YouTube content, I was excited to learn about the jam. Being my first jam, I was also pretty scared. But the jam ran from the 1st to the 21st of september, and I figured I had enough time to focus on it and make something I enjoyed.

The generous duration also gave me the chance to learn using the Godot Engine, which I tried very long ago (I think it was still version 2.x) but couldn't really get into, as it was not as mature as it is now. You think learning a new engine during a jam is a mistake? Stay tuned for Part 2, where I ramble about the development process.

Entering the jam meant committing to complete the project and deliver a full game, a task I kept failing at (mainly because of bad scope management). But I loved the theme (autumn is my favorite season after all) and I felt ready for the challenge, so I took a deep breath and entered my very first jam.

Gathering some ideas

As soon as the jam started, I begun brainstorming for game ideas. I made a list of possible core gameplay mechanics, with sub-themes and possibly a twist. I came up with about 7-8 ideas, which I thought was pretty decent. I then proceeded to rank them based on:

• How fun would the game be for the player
• The game scope and development difficulty in relation to the jam duration and having to learn the engine
• How much I liked the tought of developing it
• Compatibility with the Day/Night bonus mechanic

I ended up with a couple of candidates, and I gave it a night's rest to think about it.

In the end, I chose to develop a "Stealth/Puzzle game about saving food for winter during day, and surviving during the night".

The design & core gameplay mechanic

So with the idea set in stone (or rather, on an excel spreadsheet) I started prototyping the game. I used an extremely sophisticated and advanced technology known as "Pen and Paper".

I already had my mind set on using a simple tileset on a grid, so I drew a grid on a sheet of paper and cut some small squares that I could use to quickly move the pieces. (Pro tip: DO NOT attempt to use this technology in a drafty place unless you really like picking up small pieces of paper from the ground.)

My initial idea was to make a game that was about hoarding by day, and going back to the base at night while avoiding dangers (predators). I had half an idea about using squirrels but nothing was off the table yet.

While playing with the idea I quickly realized that it would not have worked very well without some clever environmental puzzles/mechanics. It would also have a bigger scope than I anticipated, especially for level design.

That's when the gameplay gradually started gravitating towards a simpler "Sokoban-like" design, where the goal was to just push the food on designated spots. I also decided that the player would be a squirrel hoarding acorns.

This is when I started coding the game. Pen and paper was cute and all but having a working prototype allowed me to better refine the gameplay.

The second iteration was much closer to the final product, with some major differences:

• I wanted to introduce both day and night predators, with different line of sight mechanics. In particular, I thought about having a fox with a radius-based sight (as opposed to the owls' straight line).
• The initial day/night cycle was based on the player movement: every 5 (or other suitable number of) steps night would turn into day and day into night.

I soon realized that I had to simplify even more. The movement-based day/night cycle felt weird and uninteresting, and having to deal with predators both day and night was tedious and felt like overusing the same mechanic in a boring way. I even thought about adding rodents, basically "acorn predators" that would ruin your day by eating the acorn if it was pushed in their line of sight while they were awake.

So I changed things. I came up with another way to manipulate the day/night cycle, namely burying an acorn. This simple change shifted the gameplay in a much more interesting direction, giving the player more control over the cycle. The rest of the mechanics kinda just clicked together, and I had what I felt was a decent gameplay loop.

I later refined and simplified the "acorn predator" idea and came up with the Vines That Retire During The Night And Block The Acorns From Passing (yes it's the official name, shut up). It was functionally similar but simpler and less cluttering. Except for the name of course.

Graphics design

From the moment I settled on the game idea, I envisioned a grid-based gameplay with a single tileset to simplify asset creation. So I fired up Aseprite and started making a simple grass tileset. I decided on a 16x16 tile size because it would give me plenty of room for smaller details but is also small enough to keep the production fast and simple.

The first version of the tileset was a "RPG-ish floating grass island" kinda thing. The difference between day and night was more apparent because the background would represent the sky, so it would be much brighter during the day. I reworked it later and switched to the better-looking forest-y setting, but it worked well enough during development. I also created a set of placeholders for the various sprites that would later be replaced with the final versions.

As soon as I started feeling satisfied with the advancement of coding, I started working on the sprites, as I personally cannot code for too long without having somewhat decent-looking graphics.

I went with a simple cartoonyish cute style as I felt it was the best fit for the theme and tone I wanted to convey. It also works really well with absurd elements such as giant self-burying acorns.

While pixeling the player sprite I went a little overboard and created a walk animation. This ended up being a waste of time I could have spent on something else. It was a simple 3 frames movement, with the tail waving and all. But it didn't fit the movement type and speed of the player, and looked very weird. I used it for a while and even tried to fix it, but in the end I chose to cut it and go with a simpler, easier to read "hop", made using Godot's in-built animation system.

Showing off the weird walk animation that ended up being cut

I stopped pixeling when I had enough elements. I imported those early versions of the player, acorn, objective and owl sprites in Godot and started focusing on level design. I later pixeled and added a placeholder for the vines, that used two sprites (one for the front and one for the back).

The sprites and tilesets were refined and/or redone altogether during the last week, when the gameplay was set in stone and the levels were mostly done. The early versions were "good enough", but I had the time and wanted to make something nicer, with animations and a bit more polish. I kept animations simple and short.

During the final days I created some sprites, such as pumpkins and mushrooms, to act as solid objects in place of holes in the level. Finally, I made some small decorative elements like leaves on the ground and the small mushrooms.

Overall, working on the grapics for Scatterhoard was fun and I am pretty satisfied with the results. I still would have loved to get some more animations done, the owl attack/player death in particular, as well as a better player walk and some environmental animated goodness.

Coming up next: development, level design, and more

I don't like long and tedious blog posts, and this has been both of them already, so I'll split this into multiple parts. In Part 2 I will talk a bit about the development and the level design process. Stay tuned!