Candy Jam/Candy & Watch Saga Postmortem! With Sean Willis!

Original post:
http://jakeofalltrades13.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/candy-jamcandy-watch-saga-postmortem-with-sean-willis/

Welcome back everyone!

On my last post, I talked about a game that I made for Global Game Jam that wasn’t accessible to the public. I also mentioned that I would participate through another game jam and make a game that is more accessible to everyone. Well guess what? That’s what I will be talking about in this post along with my experiences of making a game while being employed.

So the Game Jam that I participated recently was called Candy Jam. The event was organized just to poke fun at King (famous for Candy Crush Saga) in response of their attempt to trademark the word “Candy” into games, which can put on a good restriction on other developers if they wish to make a game involving candy, which can kill the creativity of the games in the future assuming this trademark passes. The rules are simple: Make the game that has words that are associated with King’s games. Specifically, Candy, Saga, Candy, Apple, Memory, Edge, and Scroll. Joining me in my part to troll King for their shenanigans is a fellow Last Token Gaming member named Sean Willis.

Sean: Yes the Candy Jam, all about candy and how much the King games company has been hassling developers over the name and inclusion of candy. Crazy really but even crazier is how many other devs jumped in to make well, very odd games. Talking together about the game jam Jake and I came to the conclusion to create a very simple Game and Watch style game.

Jake: For those who are not familiar with Game and Watch, it was Nintendo’s handheld gaming predecessor to its well known Game Boy Handheld. It was primitive in everything. Like the background was static and everything else on foreground was just LCD graphics that only light up to make things look like they are moving. But in actually, its just certain spots where sprites turn on and off to give off that illusion.

Sean: Game and Watch games that old now? They were a little before my time as well but LCD games continued being made well into the 90s. Not so much these days but I think Nintendo still makes remakes of their own. For the project the simple style of graphics and simple design seemed like a good idea for our limited time for the project. I find I do better with pixels so I tried to stylize things after the Game and Watch remakes on the Gameboy just to give us some structure to work with quickly. My art is horrible though I’m glad I limited myself to pixels. Heck just look at the background I made. Though I was more worried about providing a layout and design for Jake to know where to program everything. I’m just glad it worked out really.

Jake: Thats true, I remember owning a few of those LCD games when I was younger. I forgot that Game & Watch started the LCD game trend. I was honestly open to doing either the arcade remake or a Game & Watch Game. If I remember right, we went with the latter to make things easier on both of us. And I’m glad that we did go with what we went with. Since I did all of the programming in the game, it turned out to almost as easy than I thought it would be, despite the fact that were a few hard obstacles I had to tackle. In the end, there were a few things that I wished I had more time to implement.

So what went well for the game?

Sean: I’d say the fact it worked out and is playable at the end. Friends I’ve had play the game say they took a moment to figure out the gameplay but it sunk in quickly. I’m happy my design worked out. Through testing though I’ve found a small problems but in the end they sort of make the game more difficult and kind of fun in that regard. It just goes to show how some mistakes or even a time limit will end up creating fun elements purely by mistake. Art wise though I felt like I could have done a lot more considering I have much more time in my day. It does work out being as simple as it is though. If anyone asks about the animations not working though we can just say its to make the game more authentic to those cheap LCD game knock offs one might find back in the day. So more points for nostalgic authenticity there.

Jake: It was definitely playable for sure. That was the first side project I ever worked on that turned out to be more than interactable. In the past, every side project I worked on I either quit due to obligations, put it on a backburner until I can get back to it, or that it turned out to be interactable. It was also the first project that I did all of the programming for that game from scratch. I was actually shocked that I was able to bring almost all of the functionality to life but it helped reinforce on why we went with Game & Watch idea in the first place. It was also the first game project I attempted to create sounds for the game. The sounds didn’t turn out so bad. When I showed it off to a few people at a meetup meeting, it almost sounded like LCD noises. I knew that I couldn’t replicate those sounds, but for what I had, they turned out decent. More points for old authenticity!

So what went bad for the development?

Sean: You could say nothing did, it all went according to plan but thats like planning to make mistakes rather than focusing on making something work. One learns more from mistakes after all and some mistakes turn out into fun gameplay mechanics. I think I could have managed the design layouts much faster but I wanted to make sure we both contributed to the ideas. Perhaps I’m making excuses for procrastinating but considering we never really spoke much at all before hand the whole experience was just one good mistake in my view. We didn’t argue about our own ideas and mostly joked about in our communications (mostly through Skype) and quickly decided on a goal to achieve. Its not perfect in the end but its a free game and the experience was well worth the time spent in my view. Besides its not like we can’t come back to it later and improve things. I still have some unfinished higher res sprites to complete and I’d like to use them in something. Beauty of using the Unity engine really, its easy to jump back into projects and make updates without rewriting things.