Devtober 2020 Postmortem

This is the postmortem for Cook as the Romans do, my project for Devtober 2020.

A bit of (emotional) context

First, I want to provide a bit of context, so you can understand my motivations and emotional responses. This goes back to September, when I was finally working consistently on a game. I had started in mit August, and it was taking shape, and I was making progress. In September I suddenly found myself with a week of free time, which coincided with the schedule for VimJam. So I decided to take a short break from my other project, and participate in my first real game jam (not counting my entry for last year's Devtober). I really enjoyed it, and I was proud of the game I created: Saturday Morning Roundtrip.

So the week after VimJam, the Devtober Jam 2020 would start. I had already mentioned it to a friend, who was interested in making a game together. He approached me, as he was just done with some classes in his education, and expected to have a lot of free time. We decided we would put our efforts into making something together throghout October, and see where it would lead us. He would work on art, and I on programming.

I worked on the game for a week, before we talked again. I showed him my progress, but unfortunately he had not found the time to start. We did a short exchange of ideas, to make shure we were working towards the same goal, and that was that. A week later, so now halfway through October, I asked him how far he had gotten. As it is with lots of free time, things got in the way, and he hadn't started at all. He said he couldn't find the time and motivation. Maybe he would pick it back up and work on it in the future, but for now he quit the project.

So there I was, with a half programmed game, and suddenly double the work load if I wanted to finish it. I was uncertain what I should do. Finish it on my own? Or just drop it? In th end, I decided for something in between. I wanted to bring it into a somewhat playable state, but not waste too much time on it. I think I learned a lot with the extra work I did, but I am now also looking forward to working on my main project again, which has been on hold for nearly two months now. I am not really proud of the result, as it is a buggy, unbalanced mess, and especially untalented art, but I am proud of myself for not abandoning the project at the first possible moment.

History of the project

The original game idea for this game came from my project partner. He said some "Bazar" themed game would be funny. We talked a bit about it, and decided that on the one hand, buying and selling stuff should be a part of the game, and on the other hand crafting somthing out of that stuff. Initially there were ideas about crafting all kinds of crazy stuff, with basically everything being combinable.

However, in order to keel the scope small, to keep everything more consistent, and to make coming up with crafting recipes easier, I pitched the idea of just doing something cooking related, on which we ultimately agreed. And that was that for some time.

After my friend left the project, and when it came to creating assets, I decided to use my additional freedom to shift the setting a bit. I decided that something Arabic, which "Bazar" would imply, would be too unfamiliar for me. I toyed with the ideas of doing either something set in ancient Rome, or something in medieval Europe. Ultimately I decided on ancient Rome, as it also had a pretty comprehensive source in De re Coquinaria an ancient cooking book by Apicius.

I then tried to boild some of the recipes in Apicius' book down to some simpler components, and implemented them in the game. I did some rough, simple models inspired by Roman architecture (for example the Forum Trajanum). I had some ideas for Roman themed UI elements, but did not implement those for now.

What went right

Talking about setting, I actually thing that that is implemented relatively well. As said, I did not implement the UI elements, which would have improved that stylistic cohesion even more, but all in all, I think the setting is somewhat authentic.

Surprisingly, the I would consider the art something that went right. While I don't like it, and I don't think it's any good, I think it turned out better than I had feared (considering my lack of experience in 3d art).

While not recognizable in the game, I learned quite a bit more about Godot. This was the first game for me that really warranted creating additional tools to help the development, and so I learned about plugins, editor scripts, and implementing other Godot-built tools.

In terms of motivation I believe it went partially right. I managed to stay on the project throughout October, as I had set out to, and a bit longer even. And while I now won't continue the development, despite the game not really being finished, I don't feel like I have just abandoned it. Even though I would like to add more finished game projects to my list, I don't feel particularily bad for not finishing this game, as I will explain in the next section.

What went wrong

The game seems boring. I believe it's because we just went with the first idea, without testing it or refining it. That resulted in the game just being a crafting system and a buying/selling system, neither of which feels especially exciting. For this reason I don't regret not finishing this game, as I would probably have to start over if I wanted to find a version that was actually fun.

For buying and selling I event implemented a few things to make it more interesting, like dynamic pricing depending on the time of day. I even layed the groundwork for quite a bit more, which didn't really make it into the prototype, like vendor-dependent rates of what they liked and how much more they would pay for it, etc. However, I really regret how the cooking system has turned out. At the start, I focussed so much on the buying/selling part, that I decided on the simplest possible crafting system. But later in the development the focus of what the game seemed to be about shifted towards the cooking, which I noticed to late. So now it's a cooking game in which cooking seems kind of boring. If I had planned that a bit better, I probably would have done something like a kitchen with different stations, just to make the cooking a bit more immersive, instead of just "have these ingredients, and get this result".

Obviously the resources went wrong. I respect my friends decision, and am not angry at him for leaving, but I do recognize that it was less then ideal for the project. We could have gotten way more done together, and some of the things I had to scrap would now be in the game. I think to avoid things like that it would be beneficial, to agree on a team structure, and check in more often. While it still would have happened, it would probably have happened earlyer.

Conclusion

I don't really like the game, but I recognize that I have learned quite a bit. I have learned directly in terms of skills and knowledge. And I have learned indirectly, in terms of lessions of what to avoid. I am grateful that I didn't have to learn these with bigger, more serious projects. But for now, I just really look forward to work on more games.