Two months ago I decided to develop a small game. The main condition was to finish this project in a reasonable amount of time. In the beginning, I had planned that the duration of the project would be one month. I had zero experience with gamedev engines, but I had programming expertise. I have chosen the Unity engine as I wanted to do a 2D game and it seems to be more widely used than Godot. 

I had been thinking a lot about a project before I finally chose a game genre . I wanted to do something between puzzle and casual strategy. Islanders and Tiny Islands games are the nearest references. The main difference is that placement of an object could destroy surrounding objects, so the game could potentially last forever. 

After some thinking, I have chosen the animal setting. Each animal could eat only specified types of animals surrounding it. I have started working inspired by that concept.

Deadlines

I wasn’t able to finish the project in a month. I understood that I needed one more month for development and decided to join the Devtober 2022 game jam. It was a good decision as I finally set a clear deadline. 

So, a poor estimate of required development time is my first mistake. As it was my first game project, I didn’t realize how many tasks I would face. I have never worked with vector graphics, open licences, sound editing, or color adjustment. I had to learn all these things during the development of the game.

What went right: early game

My favourite part of the game is an early game. Originally, I filled 70% of the game field with grass at the initialization. Sometimes this led to a player losing the game regardless of their actions. My solution was to choose initialization from the fixed number of fields that I prepared myself. It allowed me to have more control over the difficulty of the first moves.

What went right: middle game

I didn’t like how the middle game works. When a player beats the current score, he gets a new pack of animals to place. The problem was that the packs were too random and usually it wasn’t something that the player needed. My solution was to choose a pack based on a situation on the game field. If there are many gazelles, you will get more lions. If there are a lot of meerkats, you will get more hyenas. 

Also, I liked how the to undo button works. After I added it, the planning became simpler as you could see the result of an action and undo it.

I still think that the middle game has room to grow, but big progress has been made.

What went wrong: end game

I still don’t like the end game. When almost all of the field is filled, the player doesn’t have a lot of choices. The only option is to place animals in the available cells until the game is over. I couldn’t beat this problem but I tried to reduce the duration of this stage.

What went wrong: technical issues

As I wasn’t experienced with the Unity engine I made some wrong decisions in the early stages of the project. For example, I added a music mute button, but I was unable to support sound effects muting. Also, I didn't have time to find sound effects for all of the actions, and some of the actions are still soundless. 

I didn’t implement some features from my backlog. For example, I haven’t done the leaderboard of the players, as it had proven challenging and expensive.

What's next

I’m going to work on a new project :)

As for this project, I will give a thought to whether it is possible to create something bigger with this idea. I am a big fan of the casual city builder genre and I still haven’t seen a lot of games with disappearing objects.