Journal Entry #2

Greetings everyone! Long time no see. I'm sorry for that but some other work needed to be done before this. But now I can finally present you my finished design. Behold!

24.05.2021 - Finishing the game design - 6 hours

Last time I presented you some concepts of the levels without description. So all I had to do was write the description. Overall it was not that hard. I just had to write all the text down and put it to the pictures in some good looking way. You can check the final design here:

Levels

• Town (+ general information about the game)
• Forest
• Farm
• Field
• Orchard
• Lake
• Island

UI

• Inventory

But when I was doing that I stumbled upon a few things that bothers me. I think I could divide them into two categories:

Game Design Leaks

• Trading
  • One of the things the game relies on is the trading system. You gather some raw resources from the world and then you can trade them for something else. I mention this in the design, but it lacks the exact trade ratios like 2 apples + 1 flour and apple pie from the cake shop is yours. I feel like this should be included in the desing but I currently have no idea how these ratios will be set. I think this should be playtested first and changed accordingly. Because now I haven't completely clear idea how quickly you will be able to gather resources. And I don't want it to feel like you need to grind the resources in order to get something nor that it's really easy to get something.

Game Design Scrapyard

Oh well. I feel like this game idea was too ambitious for the amount of time I have for the implementation. Maybe I just overthinked this, who knows. But these are the ideas that I had to scrap.

• Saloon
  • As you can notice in the Town there is a saloon. At the start I thought that you will be able to enter it and enjoy some drinks at the bar. Because of the time pressure I didn't delivered its concept in the previous journal entry and now I think it's probably best to just abandon it since I already have a lot of levels that I will have to implement.
• Tutorial
  • Another level design which concept was missing in the previous journal entry. The idea was to introduce the game controls and some background story to the player via this level. The initial idea was that it's summer and you are escaping the hot, busy and crowded city in order to get some rest and relax at your cottage in the countyside. But since the game is already big enough I scraped this idea.
• Weather
  • At first I thought it would be cool to have multiple types like rain, wind, maybe hailstorm and so on. In the final design I mention just the rain. Sorry other types of weather. I feel like creating something like wind which should also affect players physics is too much time consuming to implement.
• More NPC
  • At first I thought that it would be nice to also have some other NPCs that are not traders or anything. You can just talk to them and they will share some story with you. But I think that as of now I already have enough NPCs so adding more of them would just steal the precious time that I could spent on implementing other things in the game.
• Saving
  • In the previous journal entry I mentioned that I will implement saving in this game. Even at the start I knew it's pretty wild idea since the 2D Game Kit doesn't support something like that. And that is also the main reason I didn't included it to the final design. I still feel that it shoud be there but since I have no idea how to implemet such thing I omitted it for now. If I will have some spare time I will definitely include this but I think that it's quite improbable.

At the end I'm kind of satisfied with the design. I really like the core game idea but I feel that I bite off more than I can chew. And I'm also afraid that the design is still missing some information that I accidentally omitted. (The fact that I had to revisit the design thrice during writing this journal entry and add some more information is not helping at all. :D)

Now the next part of this project can start. Implementation. But just before that I think I will have to search the depths of the sea internet in order to find some appropriate art. But more on that next time. ;)