Greenfinger! postmortem

heheh, i mentioned i wanted to do game jams this year, but i bet you didn't expect to see one so soon ;)

how the heck this happened

back in november i was chatting with chunderfins (the super cool animator i hired for BAD END THEATER) about working on more games together, and he mentioned he had been talking to npckc (another good pal!) and Miragey (who i hadn't met before) about doing the next ludum dare when it came around. Miragey brought in his friend and comusician, jummbus, since they had jammed together before... and we suddenly had a team of 5 all-rounders (each of us can do all the parts of gamedev but still have different strengths within that haha).

once the theme got announced (this time it was HARVEST!) we started brainstorming what kind of game to make. between the 5 of us, we could've picked ren'py, unity, or gamemaker studio as the engine to work with... but once jummbus mentioned it would be easy for him to make a rhythm game, we all got really excited and he started putting it together in gamemaker.

kc was on a plane for the first 12 hours of the jam, but the rest of the team hung out in a voice chat to screenshare and brainstorm how we wanted the game to look, and what it'd be about. the ska theme came from chunderfins (as u might recall, ska was mentioned in his guest strip for another piece of candy!), and the setting was something we all came up with together. we wanted the farm to be in the city, because it felt unique and more fitting for our ska farmers. artichoke was chosen as the most ska-feeling vegetable (i don't have a better explanation, it just fit!)

basically, we all had fun making the first thing that came to mind. the time pressure kept the scope small, and i'm super proud and impressed that we could put everything together before the deadline!

finishing a whole game in 72 hours

i drew up a cute little schedule before the jam started, so we'd have a frame of reference for what we should be aiming for each day.

(i made it very appealing to look at, so that we would actually want to look at it...)

we split our discord into channels by discipline (art, code, music, etc) and Miragey started a trello board so we could track tasks. as the details got ironed out, i set up a notion page with all the basic project info, like the story premise and character concepts, and a list of stuff we'd need to make.

we decided to do 3 songs since 2 is too few and 4 is too many. the story was very easy to structure around that format (with a short cutscene for every song) and i suggested having 3 endings like in rhythm heaven--you get a different result for getting low, average, and high scores! we ran out of time for doing illustrations for all 3, so we prioritized the art for the best ending instead. all the decisions for the game came very easily!! (i don't think we ever argued over anything lol, it was a very chill vibe.)

we did a mix of voice chats and text each day while we worked on the game. everyone was pretty self-directed in finding stuff to do--we're all scattered across different time zones, but we were very good about asking others for things we needed in advance. it's something that i think just comes with experience! this wasn't anyone's first-ever game, so we all had a good idea of what to expect :)

dividing up tasks

i really enjoy organizing things, so i quickly became the person keeping our trello board updated during the whole project. it felt really great to do work that was useful for other people figuring out what they could tackle next! it kept everything moving very smoothly <3

jummbus and Miragey made most of the game design decisions, jummbus handled all the programming, and Miragey and chunderfins worked together on the music. so i focused on drawing the characters and writing a general outline for the story! Miragey laid a lot of the groundwork for me to base my concept art around (like doodles of our little ska farmer in the mockup above), so i had a very easy time figuring out what our characters should look like. he helped decide the general color palette too! having background art to work off of made it super easy to finalize the colors for the cast (i'm so grateful!!)

since i had my hands full with the character art, npckc wrote the whole script on day 2! they brought a lot of life to the original concept, and i think it turned out super great and cute and funny ;o; (i love our game...) OH, and to make the scripting process easier, i added the character busts to notion in a little grid so kc could reference them while they wrote!

i added new expressions as the final script took form. that's usually how i work with my own scripts too--i'd draw some basic all-purpose ones to start, then get more specific for key lines of dialogue. it was really fun for me getting to do the art for someone else's script, so i'm glad our roles turned out this way!!

some of the art assets were passed between multiple people--Miragey helped color the title illustration, and chunderfins did the final lines+colors for the skartichokes in rhythm game portions. it was really nice to have so many artists in one team--chunderfins did the cool-looking UI text, and kc did a bunch of the UI design and assets too (like the textbox and score screen!) they put together the itch.io page very effortlessly. (i was so impressed...!)

but none of this could've happened without jummbus!!! he made the whole game work and made it look so JUICY too!!!!!!! it makes me want to try gamemaker for real someday... (i've had it for a long time, but haven't managed to make anything with it before...) anyway, it felt like we all put in a massive effort and ended up with something really cool in the end...!

WE MADE A REAL RHYTHM GAME!!!!

i've wanted to work on a cute rhythm game like this for YEARS, and even though it's small, it's like a dream come true ;o; last year i was pretty resigned to never doing a collab project ever again, so i'm... really really glad... that i could make a fun little game with my good good friends, and even 2 NEW friends...!!! wow.... ;m;

also i think we had our final build ready 16 hours before the deadline... so uh... this was probably the smoothest a group project has EVER GONE for me!!!!!! i was really glad to be a part of it ;_;

anyway, enough crying faces. we're thinking of making more games together in the future, so i hope we get the opportunity to do that! it was really fun to take a break from solo dev work to do something like this... i feel very energized...

thanks for reading <3