The Devlog on Making "Even Finer Things" Post Mortem - Part 1

I wanted to capture my experience on making "Even Finer Dining", that was submitted for GMTK 2024, and I wanted to do it before I saw the reviews on the games, and am only basing it off of comments and feedback from other game jammers and our friends and family game testers. This was built with Godot, so will be referencing some of the structures found in Godot.

In order to start this journey, it's usually best to start at the start. 

For those in the future, or not aware, this game jam theme was "Built to Scale", where there is some element of scale being introduced (size). This was my second jam that included a team mate, and it was really great to have, as you will see the very first mockup of the game, it would look way less refined, less finish, and a whole lot more "character" (far too much character, like a fever dream ).

My partner in this Game Jam was Franchium, an amazing artist and UI/UX Designer, and it was great to collaborate.

Friday

We found we both liked the idea of going big and then taking things away to go small. That said, with our skill set we limited ourselves to 2D. Some of the ideas we were bouncing around were:

• Tractor Pull with bigger and bigger things, to the point of tractor pulling the world)
• Building something that would have been bloated, and then trying to prune it down (Think like building a car, but then you found out it had to fit in a very small garage or go through a small obstacle".
• A puzzle game where you were navigating a ball of yarn, and every move the yarn gets a little smaller
• A action game where you are a puffer fish being chased by a fisherman

As we were each taking away a game concept (myself the puzzle game, Franchium the pufferfish) and try to flesh out the idea and present it to each other, Franchium came up with the concept of French Dining, and how people generally joke about how small the food portions are, and the name "Even Finer Dining" came to me at that point. 

So, the gameplan kind of presented itself and the first steps were clear:

1. We need a Hand to control
2. That Hand needs to pick up the food
3. That food needs to get on a plate
4. That food should also be stacked
5. Each level, the food gets smaller and smaller, and thus harder and harder.

So going to google, I pulled some burger buns and took a photo of my hand, and so was born the prototype.

Here we can see I can move a hand over the screen, and (not captured in this gif) I was able to grab and squeeze with this hand. It didn't interact with anything, but it was a start.

Showing this to Franchium, I quickly got some real assets to play with

I placed a small Area2D Circle in my hand, and made each sprite for food a RigidBody2D with a circle collision. So when the hand picks up the object, it puts it as it's own child node, and drops it back into the scene (into an Object Layer). The food becomes shruken so it can't be seen and I don't know why. This will haunt me on Saturday and will need to be fixed, but it's getting late and I have surprise family visiting today, so it's time to call it a wrap.

Saturday

The sun is behind the clouds, and I wake up early to sneak in some programming before the day starts. I make my current hand 'shakey' and start making it travel a bit on it's own. I do this by setting up some timers and randomly pick a float between -1 to 1 and apply the speed the player uses to cause this effect.

Time to spend some time with the folks, and when I log back (a little bit into the afternoon), Franchium drops a great image for me to work off of and build the game around:

Ok, I see the game fully now, a bit more of the wiggle, lets get this done. So lets add the bell now!

I make the bell by using the food item, but gave it a different group node, and tweaked the logic of the hand when grabbing, to differentiate food from bell. I would generally try to use class structures and things, but realized "why do that when groups are just easier to implement when you are flying by the seat of your pants?".  SO I DID THAT.

15 minutes after finishing the bell, I brought in the plate sprite, looking good!

For the rest of the evening, I spent on the scoring. I kept it simple, all the sprites anchors where on their center points, so essentially, scoring would be done to be as center of the plate as possible, to conform to the 'fine dining experience'. This meant I would use the plate's global position, and measure the distance between the plate and each of the food sprite's distance that triggered in the plate. Honestly, the numbers and scoring never really changed from that point on (will ruminate on that in the second post). 

It was simple and it worked, perfect for a Game Jam

So we had the main game loop. It's Saturday and we got the main loop kinda done, let's get to playing it, and giving it to some friends/family to see their thoughts on it.

Wait.. before we give it out... I really want 2x hands, like really bad. Lets see if what reaction it gets and how it affects gameplay... Why sleep, right?

But here is the secret, since I always wanted 2x hands, I programmed it modular so I could easily implement it. 15 minutes later I have 2 hands on the screen, but it wasn't until 2 hours later where I was able to make the hands less floaty, and adjust the acceleration to be more... "fun", which gave way more handling to the player. 

It won't be the last time I devote 2+ hours on the hand's movement, but it's in a state now to push out for friends to try. I export it to HTML5 and give links/passwords out. Lets see what people say.

So, this being a game jam, this is going to smoothly, right? Right.

It doesn't come completely off the rails, but I am going to get panicky really quickly, because, though I haven't shared this with you dear reader, I was hoping to complete this with the 48 hour badge(cause I didn't take the Monday and Tuesday off). I felt really close to the goal, but... I am really glad we did do the full Game Jam because we got to polish it up a lot.

So in the next post, we will explore the later half of the GMTK 2024 Game Jam, the problems, and how we resolved it with some minor crimes.

Part 2 Here