"Gnome-body Like You" Workblog: 12/5-12/11

https://itch.io/jam/3to1-studios-down-low/rate/1832581

Project Roles:

Design Lead

• Managed wiki

• Designed game mechanics

• Oversaw Taiga.io boards

Music Producer

• Made game's music with BeepBox

Tech Artist

• Created particle systems for game

Conceptualization

Phase one of the game's development, I pitched an older idea I had for a caveman art game, where the player would spend some time foraging in a prehistoric world and use the materials collected to create art. We transformed the game setting to a gnome world and the main mechanic to mushroom collecting, bouquet arranging, and courting gnomes to better match the theme of "Down Low."

Design:

Our new design meant that we needed a new objective and "win" determiner, so I created a scoring system for the bouquet where both the arrangement of the mushrooms and the selection of mushrooms specific to the personality bio of the gnome that the character is trying to court, or the "shawty". The former of this data I documented in our wiki, while the latter is organized in a code-friendly spreadsheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pWwtEd1TtMkyGA5LRxwrnLAd4arN9tEbZsMOOmDAsH4/edit?usp=sharing

As for the actual foraging, I designed a variety of mushroom types and some tools that the player would use to harvest the rarer ones. Originally, we had planned a crafting system, but it was scrapped on account of half of our team getting sick.

I also filled in some of the role of our sick UI designer, but the role moved to others as our design and art team expanded. Other than that and sound effects, basically all of the design documentation was mine, and I'm pretty proud of the work. I do wish that we were more lucky with the whole sickness thing, but as a whole, this game is at least conceptually fun.

The game turned out to just be a walking simulator, since none of the bouquet scoring was programmed into the game. Although frustrated, I can't really blame the coding team for being sick, but it really crippled the project's prospects.

Music

I don't have the full progression for the development of this song since we were working in such a tight timeframe, but I wanted to deliver a sense of mysticism with the forest scenery as well as longing for the two gnomes trying to find love. I think that the audio balancing was a bit off, however I didn't have much time to revisit it in the last few days in the studio.

Particles:

Me and another artist worked on designing various particle systems. I developed the default system and guided my co-artist through how to work with light and sprite emitters. I allowed each mushroom to be assigned a particle material and a particle system by adding material instances and niagara system references to their data structures and assigning them via data tables.