Food Under Development (or FUD for short) is probably one of my favorite projects i’ve worked on. it went so much better than pasta run too.
the team was the same as pasta run, me and my friend. despite all that, we still got a ton of ideas, and this time we approached the project better:
- actually allocate the entire weekend for the jam
- take it one step at a time
- prioritize well and do not be afraid of cutting features out
on top of that, we also met for the weekend at my place so that we actually could work together on the game. it made a huge difference just being there and being able to work on the other’s machine if need be
so, where do we go from here? weekend’s ready, supplies and snacks on hand, and brains ready. in france, the jam started the day before at around 9pm, which helped a ton.
day 0: brainstorming
the theme for this ludum dare was “harvest”. time to ask the age old question: what does it mean to “harvest”? we converged pretty quickly on the concept of managing a farm, planting and harvesting your ingredients, to then cook and serve. (get it? plant, harvest, cook and serve)
we had three main rooms initially:
- the dining hall: customers would come in and order food for you to prepare
- the kitchen/lab: prepare the food customers asked for, and engineer new seeds for your field
- the field: plant your ingredients to harvest and use later
the scope of the kitchen/lab part was pretty wild: storing seeds for use in the field, cooking ingredients into food to serve customers, and engineering seeds for use in the field.
engineering seeds? yeah, work on new seeds that would give you the food ready to serve, without having to go through all of the ingredients. helpful when there are more and more customers to serve and you need to optimize your time as much as possible.
we still weren’t sure then what kind of ingredients or cooking recipes to have, but the night came before we actually started to match ideas with what we knew to do with the tech we had.
day 1: scope cuts and game flow
saturday morning, 9am. time to get going. not even 15 minutes in that the first scope cuts are coming up.
- dining hall? cut, replaced by a list of orders to prepare and send off.
- seed management for the field? cut. owned seeds are infinite, new seeds found through morning luck and engineering.
with these ideas locked in place, we’re starting to think about the game flow. first idea for it, at least in our ideas doc? “ajkshdfljkad.” not gonna go far with that.
still, we got the idea of ordering gameplay features in order of priority, and decide what would count as a “minimum viable prototype” - something that would be complete enough to still be fun, but also well within reason for the allocated time of Two Days:
- plant and grow ingredients
- combine ingredients to create food
- manage both the field and the kitchen
- serve orders as they come
these 4 concepts looked solid as a base, but we still had a bunch of ideas we wanted to see in there:
- engineer new seeds
- an upgrade system (bigger field, faster growth, HUD elements maybe)
- awareness system regarding the state of the other room
- a day system
so we got to work! i don’t fully remember how it went unfortunately, but it was a lot of “try implementation, test implementation, repeat”. a few stupid and meme-grade things were made along the way, but no work’s been wasted. for example, this was made as a test to switch between the kitchen and the field:
in the meantime, my friend went to do the music and sound design of the game. with my laptop, a mic, and pretty much my entire apartment, he recorded a bunch of sounds: new order sound? that’s a knife tapping against a glass. there’s a fair amount of mouth sounds too.
i wanted the recipe system to be flexible enough to be able to add new ones without having to tinker with actual game code too much, so we ended up with a json list of ingredients and recipes. a bunch of stupid ahh recipes made it in like the big breakfast, and its cousin the big mistake.
day 2: finishing the base, some polish
not entirely sure what we ended day 1 on, but it doesn’t really matter when we were still in the middle of getting the MVP built. some features definitely ended up getting skipped cause wrapping them up by midday was going to be impossible.
the day system for example? haha, good luck with that. the game wasn’t designed to be able to load settings, or an objective or anything - just popping orders in while you’re cooking and serving food. re-engineering the game loop to accomodate for that was NOT going to work.
in the end, we ended up scrapping the entire “non-essential” part of our list, and started polishing it up starting sunday afternoon. we already had a solid-looking game loop, so we decided to call it a day to adding feature and started testing full runs to see where we could improve the quality and feel of the game.
no new features strictly speaking came from this, but a few silly ideas here and there came up and those got added to the game! my favorite i think is just the entire level falling down when you make too many mistakes:
(and yes, that means the game over screen is there the entire time. hidden behind the stage, waiting for you to make three mistakes)
day 3: testing round and more polish
monday - the final day. also the day on which we both had work so we couldn’t really work on the game, hence wrapping the game loop on sunday.
this also meant, as we aimed to (and did) get a publishable game by sunday night, that we had a build we could upload and send around for a testing round, to see if we could catch some stray bugs or balancing. turns out there were a few tweaks to make!
looking at the tweaks first, the big mistake. the big mistake was made of two big breakfasts, itself roughly a combination of everything. the problem is that everything needed tomatoes or ketchup - going all the way to the primary ingredients, out of 50 or so, the big mistake needed about 25 tomatoes. didn’t waste any time to change that to something more reasonable.
as for bugs, we had a bit of a silly one. we specifically had seeds to plant, rather than ingredients directly. it makes sense since we use seeds to make the ingredients to begin with. problem is, we could also plant ingredients. which doesn’t really make sense now does it.
these ingredients didn’t grow. they were stuck in place, you couldn’t even see what was planted. be silly enough and basically you’re stuck with 20 planted ingredients and a softlocked game.
what
another bug was that you could plant a seed over another one that could be harvested. not anymore! made sure it worked, and now it’s a feature. super satisfying, thank you play testers.
we also made a title screen because kicking players right into a game might’ve been a bit overkill and quick. also, games take time to load in the browser and if your attention span is less than 3 seconds you could’ve looked away. i know i do. but hey, the title screen actually pulls from the recipe list to show an example. it’s not much, but i love to put in details like that.
results
two days and a bit definitely are not enough to make a full game, even though that’s not the point for a short jam like that. we didn’t have enough time or expertise to make the game we really wanted to make, but we did make a game that was fun to play, and that we were proud of!
and i think people noticed that. i mean, we were in the top 30! in both fun and overall rating! how’s that for a result!
check out the comments too! it’s always so heartwarming to see people enjoy what i do. i do what i do because i enjoy doing it, but seeing this just makes me want to do more. and more i have done, since i’ve participated in two more jams after this!
it’s gonna be hard to reach this kind of result again. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t want to make a game that good again, but not every game’s gonna be a hit with everyone.
i learned a lot about Unity working on this, and game design too. i’m still far from experienced, and probably approached this not exactly the best way possible, but we made something that people enjoyed, and i think that’s the biggest takeaway for FUD.