Category: Game Development

Last week, I reported that I was making decent progress towards the last tasks before Toy Factory Fixer was ready for a v1.0 release, starting with adding music to the menus, allowing the player to mute and unmute the audio as they please, and starting work on the in-game help menus.

I continued my work this past sprint.

Sprint 47: Release criteria

Planned and Complete:

• Create How To Play menu

Planned and Incomplete:

• Update worker grunts

I did not get as much game development in the last week as I usually do. That said, I finished the in-game help, including giving the player an indication of which page and how many pages they are currently viewing.

As for the worker grunts/barks, the current audio that plays comes from a royalty-free collection of audio I got either from a GDC giveaway from Sonniss or a Humble Bundle. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough variety in those collections, so I decided to make my own.

I spent part of an evening in a room recording myself saying various phrases that I want the workers to say. My USB microphone and laptop weren’t giving me the quality I needed, so I used a Sony IC Recorder I bought in 2012 for a conference I was helping to run as I was recording the presentations.

When I felt I had recorded enough options, I used Audacity and sorted the phrases into tracks so I could choose from among the best options.

I cleaned up the noise, lowered the pitch down on a few clips, and ended up with a bunch of barks for the Strong Worker to say.

Unfortunately, since I didn’t get as much time in for game development, I didn’t get to repeat the same kind of work for the other two worker types.

I expect I will be able to finish it early this coming week, and despite having a relatively slow week, I think I’m still on track to get this game out later this month.

Thanks for reading!

—

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In the last sprint report, I got a another level completed, and I put together a plan for the final pieces of work to do before I release v1.0 of Toy Factory Fixer.

I put a decent dent into that plan last week.

Sprint 46: Release criteria

Planned and Complete:

• Allow player to mute SFX and music separately
• Create music for main menus

Planned and Incomplete:

• Create How To Play menu

I easily finished the work I started to create mute/unmute toggle buttons in my first hour of development.

And since the game is fairly silent outside of a game level being played, I added music to the main menu screens. I basically slowed down the in-game music so that it is rhythmic and industrial-sounding. I thought about having a droning factory hum, but I liked the music, and the hum was distracting, so I took it back out.

So the rest of the week was spent working on creating help pages. I know that even if I had done everything I could to make the game as intuitive and as clear as possible, someone would still have questions about it, so having in-game help seemed like a vital thing to have before release.

Of course, it required coming up with what help I wanted to show the player.

I used the same in-game “screen” that I used for the Credits and the end-of-level summary, and since it is so much smaller than the actual game’s screen, it helped me be concise and to the point. I’m still worried I was too verbose, though, and I worry that having too many pages of help text is also overwhelming.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish creating the last few pages before the end of the week, so I will continue that work this week. Then, I’ll update the worker barks so that they are distinct for each worker type before moving on to the rest of the release criteria tasks I identified.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!

As I said in the previous sprint report for Toy Factory Fixer development, I had spent time adding feedback to the player and fixing defects, including a major one that ended the game prematurely even if you had plenty of toys to craft.

I continued work on finishing the last of the training levels in this past sprint.

Sprint 45: Training levels

Planned and Complete:

• Create floor training levels/tutorial

Unplanned and complete:

• Allow player to mute SFX and music

The only task I wanted to focus on was finishing the final training level that introduces the sewing specialist. Originally the layout was derivative of a level I was using to do general play testing and experimenting, but I modified it so that workers placed near the beginning of the conveyor belt were less effective than those placed farther down the line.

Most of my time was spent designing the production runs of toys, and my main worry is that this training level is too intense.

However, it is possible to finish the level with an A+ rating in all three criteria.

Determining the First Release Criteria

Since I finished creating the level and it was the only task in my sprint, that meant I had time to work on something else. But what?

I decided that at the very least the player should have the option to mute the sound effects or music, so I started working on that functionality. It is mostly there, and the only thing left is to make the button labels change from “Mute” to “Unmute” when pressed.

Meanwhile, every Saturday I try to work on a non-routine improvement, and one of my goals this month was to put together a solid set of criteria for things that must be done before I feel comfortable creating a v1.0 release of this game.

So here’s the list I came up with:

• Number of levels
  • 4 training levels
  • At least 1 non-training level
• Polish
• Worker grunts need to be worker-type specific
• Need music/audio background for main menus
• Need call to action (sign up for GBGames Curiosities)
• Main Menu
• Options Screens
• In-game help
• Create a strategy guide
• Allow player to mute

I decided against any kind of persistence for this first release, even though I have some ideas and plans for it, such as a factory map with levels/floors that unlock as you finish them.

I’m most sad about not creating a Free Play level, which is a play tester request that I loved and also had plans for. Also, having only one more non-training level for a total of five levels may not sound like much when many other games have something like 20 or 100 levels, but this is a v1.0 release of a free game. Maybe I’ll work on a new update that includes more levels and features if there is enough feedback from players, but for now, I need to cut scope if I want to release this game anytime soon.

Then again, I keep worrying that these training levels are way too hard, and I think that I could always create shorter, easier versions as the training levels and use the existing level designs as more intense versions of them. I had originally envisioned the idea of reusing a level layout with different “shifts”, so each shift acts as a separate level with different production runs. So I could take the existing four levels and double it to eight levels if I create easier versions of them, getting both quantity AND an easier onboarding process for new players. Hmm…

Now, dear reader, you tell me. Is this actually feature creep, or is this just the nature of wearing multiple hats, including the producer hat?

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!

Last week, I reported that I had a desire to communicate some feedback to the player in order to make the sewing specialist worker effective in the game Toy Factory Fixer. Unfortunately, my capacity to get it done had been more limited than usual.

But I finally got it done this past sprint.

Sprint 44: Training levels

Planned and Complete:

• Make sewing worker unique

Unplanned and complete:

• Show money earned as hanging value over chute
• Defect: Worker specialty button isn’t highlighted on worker menu
• Defect: Cannot change worker specialty in worker menu
• Defect: Game ends prematurely even though there are plenty of toys possible to ship

Planned and Incomplete:

• Create floor training levels/tutorial

From last week’s report, here are the things I wanted to get done in order to communicate to the player things I never needed to communicate before:

• If the worker is idle and can’t craft due to missing parts, I want the player to know this fact instead of wondering why this worker isn’t crafting.
• When the worker starts crafting, I want to make it clear that toy parts disappeared from the inventory, something that wasn’t necessary when the player was manually deciding when toys were being crafted.

I am happy to say that this past week was a lot more productive and that I finally got these pieces of feedback into the game.

While I did have plans to create something custom for this game, instead I stole a speech bubble and some angry scribbles from one of my other games, Toytles: Leaf Raking.

Whenever the sewing specialist doesn’t have the ability to do any work, they’ll express frustration, which lets the layer know when to change this worker’s orders to focus on crafting Good Toys from parts actually available in the player inventory.

And speaking of inventory, I needed a way to indicate to the player that parts were being used by this worker type automatically. Before, it wasn’t necessary because it was obvious when the player was specifically commanding a worker to craft a particular Good Toy. If there weren’t enough parts, the button for that particular toy type would be disabled, and if there were enough parts, the player could easily see how many parts would be left if they command a particular worker to craft a toy.

So, something I’ve been meaning to put into the game anyway was floating number indicators. And it looks pretty good:

I think I need an audio effect to also indicate that toy parts are being taken, and I still like the idea that toy parts fly out of the inventory to the worker in question so it is even clearer, but I might not implement that last one before I release the game.

I also added floating numbers when toy parts get added to the inventory, but more importantly, I changed how the money bonus for shipping toys or starting a production run early looks. I already had the text showing the amount of money earned flying from the source of the money bonus towards the player’s money, but it was moving too fast for anyone to read.

So based on some feedback I’ve gotten from play testers and others I’ve talked to, I use the same text floater with different colors and a larger font:

I also fixed a few defects, a critical one being that the game would sometimes end even if the player still had toys to craft due to a logic error in determining if the game was over.

Unfortunately I barely started work on the level that introduces the new sewing specialist, so that work will need to continue this sprint.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!

As I reported last week, I settled on the features that would make the sewing specialist unique and implemented them in Toy Factory Fixer. Namely, this worker automatically crafts Good Toys assuming there are parts in your inventory for the type of toy they specialize in.

Related to this new feature, I wanted to continue working on some enhancements to communicate a few things to the player.

Sprint 43: Training levels

Planned and Incomplete:

• Make sewing worker unique
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

For many sprints, I always planned to get more accomplished than I actually could, and it was kind of demoralizing, so I decided to not pretend I was going to work on the tooltips functionality.

My sprint plan was supposed to be very manageable. Now that I have a third worker type, I wanted to create a level that introduces that worker. And to really finish the creation of this third worker, I basically wanted to communicate two things to the player that I didn’t need to communicate before:

• If the worker is idle and can’t craft due to missing parts, I want the player to know this fact instead of wondering why this worker isn’t crafting.
• When the worker starts crafting, I want to make it clear that toy parts disappeared from the inventory, something that wasn’t necessary when the player was manually deciding when toys were being crafted.

That’s it. Two visual indicators of some kind and a new level, and I figured the level would take the most effort to design and play test.

But last week was very unproductive for me. I only did game development for a total of 2 hours, which is very low even for my normally very, very part-time efforts. The last time I did so few hours was the first week of January, and, you know, it was the holidays.

Between the day job and other commitments, I found myself struggling to make time or have the energy to work on this project. It was kind of demoralizing, especially since the previous week was also a low productivity sprint.

So what did I accomplish? Well, nothing I can show yet, but I started working on showing floating numbers to indicate that toy parts are getting removed from the inventory. When the turn starts and a sewing specialist starts crafting, I want to see “-1” float up and then hover above each of the toy parts that make up the new Good Toy being crafted.

I figure these numbers can show up when you manually craft toys as well.

And some feedback I’ve gotten is to have floating numbers appear to indicate how much money you’ve earned when you ship a Good Toy.

I hope this coming week will be more productive.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!

Last week, I reported that I fixed a major defect and finished creating a level that introduces the strong worker, and I started thinking about ways to make the third worker type more interesting.

I had less development time on average both that sprint and this latest sprint.

Sprint 42: Training levels

Planned and Completed:

• Make sewing worker unique

Planned and Incomplete:

• Show tooltips during game based on triggers
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

For clarity, that planned work to create floor training levels? It consisted of a few separate subtasks, each of which is creating a specific level with a specific purpose.

The last task is to create a level that introduces the third worker, the sewing specialist.

Which means I needed to finalize my plans for what exactly the sewing specialist is supposed to be.

As I said with the strong worker, originally the only difference between the workers was stats and unique art. So strong workers were great at separating Bad Toys but terrible at crafting Good Toys, sewing specialists were great at crafting and bad at separating, and normal workers were average at both tasks.

After some play testing with the level in which I introduced the strong worker, I found that the strong worker wasn’t actually compelling as an option, so I changed things. Now strong workers can work on two Bad Toys at once, making them even more excellent for that task compared to the normal worker and justifying their increased cost. Nice!

Now the sewing specialist could similarly be granted the ability to craft more than one toy at the same time, but…BOOOOOORRRRRIIIIING!!!!

Also, hard. Strong workers just pick up more than one toy if it is possible, and I had to change how those toys get rendered, but that’s pretty much it.

But how do you tell a sewing specialist to craft more than one toy at a time? I would need to change the existing UI significantly for this to work, and I would need to worry about how confusing it would be for a player.

There were a lot of questions about how to implement crafting more than one toy at once, and so I decided to do something else.

I decided that not only are sewing specialists really fast at crafting Good Toys, but they’ll do it automatically. You just tell them what kind of toy to specialize in, and they’ll focus on it. If the parts are available, they’ll immediately start crafting it when the next turn starts.

You can also change the specialist’s specialty whenever the worker is idle:

What’s funny is that this way of assigning work was something I was toying with as an idea for all of the workers, partly out of concern that it is tedious to need to continually tap to tell workers to craft toys. Now it is a feature that helps to differentiate a particular worker.

The only downside? I decided that they MUST have a crafting specialty at all times, and they will NOT work on separating toys.

My thinking was that this was the big tradeoff you were making when hiring a sewing specialist: a faster worker you don’t have to micro-manage, in exchange for not expecting this worker to pick up any Bad Toys that pass them by on the conveyor belt.

And now I have three very unique worker types that I hope are each compelling.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time to actually create a new level for this worker, but I can focus on it next time, as well as some visual indicators to make it clear when this worker is idle and unable to craft new toys in their current specialty.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!

In the last sprint report, I reported that I had made strong workers more valuable by giving them the ability to separate two toys at once, which was a more interesting way of balancing them against normal workers than merely modifying some stats.

I continued to work on creating the level that introduces them in this past sprint.

Sprint 41: Training levels

Unplanned and Completed:

• Defect: Workers seem to hold onto toys long after they should have been separated, eventually letting them go

Planned and Incomplete:

• Show tooltips during game based on triggers
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

I spent less time on game development last week than I have since May, and it was one of my top four least productive weeks of the year according to my records.

And since I needed to spend time actually figuring out what tooltips will look like and how they will function, and I needed to figure out how the third worker type will be unique, the lack of time dedicated to it wasn’t great.

That said, I did manage to finish creating the third training level, which introduces the strong worker, and while play testing it, I discovered a serious bug that had a silly cause.

Investigating and resolving a major defect

At one point I noticed that some of the workers would hold on to a Bad Toy they’ve separated. They should immediately toss the parts into your inventory, but they wouldn’t.

I added some debugging text to figure out if it was a weird issue with the health of the bear or the type of worker or something, but eventually I figured out that it was due to the fact that toys now have unique IDs.

Since workers can now work on separating multiple toys, I needed a way to tie the toys they were working on to the worker and vice versa, mainly for rendering the correct things on the screen. Toys already knew which worker was holding them, but workers now knew which toys they were holding onto by their unique IDs.

Which is fine when those IDs are, in fact, unique, but weird things happen when two toys are on the screen with the same ID.

Which happens when I configure a level’s production runs by reusing toys that I add to the dispenser.

So basically on the third level, around production run 8, there are a set of toys that are dispensed and I wanted the same type of toys to get dispensed shortly afterwards, and basically I accidentally put toys with the same ID on the screen at the same time.

So a worker would work on, for example, a toy with ID 85, but another toy with ID 85 would be on the conveyor belt elsewhere. The worker would finish separating toy #85, but when the code looked to see which toys were finished being separated, somehow it would find the non-separated and pristine toy #85, and so the worker wouldn’t let go of the toy.

So the easy fix was to just configure the level with unique toys, but the risk is still there if I forget and do the otherwise easy-to-make mistake of re-adding toys that were already created.

Eventually I was happy with how well the third training level worked, and I started working on the fourth training level, which introduces the third worker, the sewing specialist.

Making the third worker also unique

One thing I liked about giving the strong worker the ability to work on multiple toys at once was that it made the strong worker more than a mere change in stats from the normal worker. They are truly two different types of workers.

Originally the strong worker was very strong at separating and very weak at crafting, and the sewing specialist was very strong at crafting and very weak at separating.

The obvious thing to do with the third worker was to allow them to craft two toys at once, to mirror the strong worker’s ability to separate two toys at once. It was a bit more challenging a task since I would need to change the crafting menu somehow to make it easy for the player to communicate that they want two toys to be crafted, and I would need to figure out what UI challenges to overcome there.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make this worker type similarly unique and not a mere mirror of another worker type. It just wasn’t compelling enough to me to have a worker that can merely craft two toys at once.

I thought about how crafting serves a very different purpose from separating, and how important it gets towards the end of a level when you are no longer getting more parts in your inventory but are instead trying to get as many toys put together as possible.

Maybe the sewing specialist can take two compatible Bad Toys and instantaneously turn them into Good Toys? I liked this idea, but the problem was that the toys coming down the conveyor belt wouldn’t always be compatible. So should this worker pick up two incompatible Bad Toys and try to separate them? Or should they only pick up one Bad Toy at a time unless they can pick up two compatible toys? There was a lot of complexity here.

Then I reflected on how tedious it can be to tap on a worker, tap on a button to tell that worker to craft, and repeat.

I thought about having the worker instantly craft an arbitrary number of Good Toys at once, based on parts in inventory and the worker’s capacity (2, 3, or even 10?), with a potentially long cooldown period in which that worker couldn’t do anything. I still like this idea, but then I thought of another.

What if the sewing specialist’s unique ability is to be told to craft a certain toy type once, and they will continue to craft until the parts inventory is empty for that type, and will continue once those parts are available again?

It kind of reminds me of games like Cookie Clicker, in which you manually do some tasks, but eventually you can earn enough to purchase things that automate those tasks for you. Maybe there is value in giving an option to avoid the otherwise tedious activity? Which makes the tedious activity less of a design defect and more of a purposeful part of the game?

So what’s the downside to having this worker automatically crafting toys? Maybe you would prefer to choose a different worker in a different location to craft a particular toy, but you can’t stop this worker from doing so first, which might mess with your strategy if you were trying to finish a level in the fewest turns.

More obviously this worker can’t pick up and separate Bad Toys when crafting, but should this worker not have the ability to do it at all? Is there no such thing as this worker being idle, or can the worker be idle if there are no parts to craft and so is available to collect Bad Toys on the conveyor belt?

And if the worker is assigned to crafting a single type of toy, what if you want to switch them to a different type? Should there be a cost to reassigning the task? Is the cost money, or a worker who can’t do anything for a few turns?

Some of the work I have ahead of me is figuring out how to communicate to the player which kind of toy this worker is trying to craft when they are otherwise looking like they are idle.

But the role of this third worker clearly needs more time to marinate.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!

In the previous sprint’s report, I made it clearer how much a toy is worth when you ship it, and I spent time designing and thinking about some aspects of the game’s levels and UI.

This past sprint I focused on changing the way the Strong Worker behaves.

Sprint 40: Training levels

Planned and Completed:

• Make strong worker able to work on two toys at once

Planned and Incomplete:

• Show tooltips during game based on triggers
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

There was a lot going on at the day job as I wrapped up a project there, so I once again didn’t put in as much time on this project as I would have liked.

As I mentioned a few sprints ago, I realized that the Strong Worker wasn’t as valuable as hiring two Normal Workers. I could try to tweak the hiring costs to balance things, but then the Strong Worker would be merely a variation on the Normal Worker, which did not feel very interesting at all.

So I decided to enhance the Strong Worker by giving them the ability to separate two Bad Toys at the same time.

And it turned out to be a bit more complex than initially anticipated, even though I spent a bit of time anticipating.

Originally toys knew if they were held by a worker, but they didn’t know whether they were being crafted or separated. Workers didn’t know about the toys they held, but they knew if they were crafting or separating. And somehow this worked fine.

But now workers had a capacity for how many Bad Toys they could separate, which meant they needed to know what toys they were holding at once. And rendering the toys required knowing if they were being held by a worker who was holding another toy so that they toys would be offset from each other.

And I noticed that when the worker threw both toys at the inventory that you couldn’t easily see it, so I added variations to the arcs of the throws.

And then I had to fix the problems I introduced in which toys would disappear if they were technically still considered “held by” a worker who didn’t think they were working on any toys resulting in messed up math.

But in the end, it looks relatively good, and now I can see how much impact on the balance of the game there is to have a Strong worker who can do the job of potentially two Normal Workers.

Which of course got me thinking about what could make the third worker special and unique.

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!

In the previous sprint report, I had created a number of enhancements to make Toy Factory Fixer easier to understand and play. More importantly, I got some great insight into how the Strong Worker actually works and decided I wanted to change it.

I had some big ambitions for this past week’s sprint, but other priorities took over.

Sprint 39: Training levels

Planned and Completed:

• Show Good Toy rewards in crafting menu

Planned and Incomplete:

• Make strong worker able to work on two toys at once
• Show tooltips during game based on triggers
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

While I managed to put in more game development hours than I normally do, the lion’s share of that time was actually spent on updating Toytles: Leaf Raking, my leaf-raking business simulation game.

Both Google and Apple have updated their requirements for apps in their stores, and so I needed to update the game to work on the latest Android and iOS devices. I have been putting it off, but with autumn starting in the northern hemisphere soon, and since the game is about running a business raking leaves, I wanted to ensure the game works for everyone.

Which meant that I didn’t get to make much progress on Toy Factory Fixer.

I did spend a bit of time trying to make it clearer to the player how much Good Toys are worth AND make it clear that they need to be shipped to get that value.

So after some good advice from people on Twitter, I ended up changing how money was shown in the game in order to create as concise a visual formula as I could.

If you recall from last time, I added the new pigeon gold coin, and any monetary amounts were shown next to that coin. The problem was that the icons to show “ship something to get XYZ money” were getting kind of long and awkward.

Well, rather than have the money amount next to the coin icon, I decided to put the amount on top of the coin.

Which meant I needed to change the saturation so that the letters read better. Here’s what it looked like before:

And here’s what it looks like now:

And now here’s the crafting menu with the formula shown:

I think the shipping chute could use some more work to make it clear what it is. I was thinking about changing it into a van or truck, so the toys jump off the conveyor belt into the back of it, and so a small truck icon should read more clearly.

And of course, if there is a truck, it should drive away at the end of the level, right?

I otherwise spent time working on designing tooltips. First-time players seem to struggle with understanding what to do in the game, and so I think it makes sense to throw in some animated arrows or word bubbles that basically say “Tap here next!” at the appropriate times.

I was also thinking about the level design, wondering if I could create two or three separate levels using the same level layout. Basically, in an attempt to make the game challenging, I might have made it too difficult. And my first few levels are called “training levels” so maybe it makes sense for them to go easy on new players. Maybe I can make three levels and call them 1st shift, 2nd shift, and 3rd shift, and each gets progressively more challenging. Then you can move on to the next level layout’s three shifts.

And of course, I would love to implement the ability of strong workers to work on separating two Bad Toys at once. I have also been thinking about what that means for the uniqueness of the Quick Sewing Worker. Should they be able to work on multiple Good Toys at once? Is it enough that they work on one Good Toy very fast compared to Normal Workers? Should they be able to do something else entirely, such as throw Bad Toys at the nearest idle worker?

And at what point is it feature creep as opposed to merely trying to make sure this game makes a good impression when it is finally released?

Thanks for reading!

—

Want to learn when I release updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking or about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and get the 24-page, full color PDF of the Toytles: Leaf Raking Player’s Guide for free!