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What went well?

The Art

Immediately upon starting there was a core question: Could I make a style for animals on a grid ?.

The answer was yes, but it wasn't obvious to me when I chose the idea. Typically I'm a programmer, but I do have design knowledge. I just wasn't sure I could pull off the animals in a way that looked good.

I designed the giraffe first:

Giraffes have distinct snouts, so squashing the giraffes face down into a square felt wrong and I was worried I had removed what made it "giraffey".

I posted on twitter and here to get a sense for what people thought of the style, and people really liked it! I decided that maybe there's merit in the art style so I tried a few more animals. In the end the art was a big success, and I've come around to really liking how all the creatures look.

The Tools

I used Unity, which many of you are very familiar with. I tend to not use anything crazy noteworthy in Unity, but two of the things I felt were really useful this time around were the built in Unity buttons and the Animation curves.

It turns out there's a setting to make buttons change color on hover state and press states, so I made two button images for the two buttons in the game, and then I just set the colors for hover / press. Total it took a few minutes and helped a lot to escape that default-Unity-button feel.

The other thing I really liked was using animation curves to edit the title screen. It made it easy to make them bouncy without spending a lot of time on it, and it drastically increased the impression that this was a polished game, but only took a few minutes!

Figma

I'm most experienced with Illustrator, but I don't have a license right now and I didn't want to get one for this gamejam. So I used Figma!

Figma (https://www.figma.com) worked amazingly well. It was easy to create assets quickly.

I laid out a grid to create the animals on so I could quickly test them next to each other and ensure they fit within their bounds.

With Figma I was able to set up exports so with one click I could export all the animals for download and import them into the game. I would do color tests in Figma rather than Unity to quickly get a sense for what backgrounds and colors worked with the animal shapes. Then when I felt the colors were good I'd bring them over into Unity.

Figma definitely helped me crank out art at the rate needed.

Designing levels

I created a system for making levels pretty early, which was great as it allowed me to iterate quickly on level design!

I would lay out the available animals on the left, and the solution on the right. A system would then take the solution layout and turn it into tiles. This meant I could rather quickly create levels and play with their designs, which helped me quickly iterate on difficulty.

I learned a few things about designing levels pretty quickly:

The more square the solution, the harder it is! Giraffes make for hard puzzles. Penguins (take up a single tile) can make people feel like they have more choice with how to approach a level, but can be used to mask difficulty as well.

When I made the levels I would playtest them myself after. I was so sleepy that I would usually forget the solution and struggle with the level myself. I developed an informal sense of how difficult levels were.

At one point I had someone playtest the game and I realized that the levels were actually harder than I realized! I moved the third level to be the final level and in general adjusted the difficulty curve of the game. For a gamejam super difficult games aren't a great idea, so I tried to aim for slightly harder than the average Ludum Dare entry to make the game feel more substantial but not like a waste of time.

Pacing and Difficulty

I wanted to pace the game slightly differently than the straightforward "easy to hard" pacing.

The idea was that if the game had really short "fun" levels periodically you'd feel more of a sense of casual progress. It would make you feel good at the game and like you're on more of an adventure. However some difficulty is necessary to make the entire game not feel meaningless. I think this progression wasn't perfect, but it worked better than I expected! Watching some people play it was clear they weren't really into the game initially, but because of the progression of difficulty and the pacing they found themselves enjoying it in the end.

Nintendo is really good at this style of progression, and I was inspired by the game they published "Pushmo". Periodically in Pushmo there are levels that look like a character or object, and I tried to do something similar with levels like this one:

What went poorly?

Music

I don't know how to make music, and music could immensely help a game like this!

Narrative arc

This game doesn't have a sense of progress in that you can't tell where you are in the game. There's no goal you're working towards, or an ending that you can sense approaching. There isn't an ending to speak of.

When the player finishes the game they aren't left with any feeling beyond "well, it's over". In the future subtle little progression indicators could go a long ways. Even a Level 10 / 16 displayed in the upper right would have helped people feel more of a sense of progress. Level names could have helped establish a loose narrative and been an opportunity to introduce more personality to the game.

The Name

"Noah's Help" is a lame, very bad name. It isn't punchy, clever, or memorable. I knew this immediately upon naming it, but I didn't change it! The reason for the name is because I created the animated sequence where the animals are on top of the ever shrinking island and they yell "Help!". I realized I didn't have time for a title screen, so I had to make that animation the title screen. I also wanted to somewhere introduce the idea that this was a game about Noah's Ark. So given time constraints and what I had available, I just put the word "Noah's" above the animals cry for help, and that became the title.

In the future I should try to avoid boxing myself into a situation where I give the game a poor title, because titles matter a lot!

Humor

I chose this concept because I thought I could make it humorous, but in the end I didn't have time for any of the humor I had hoped for! This is in part a failure of planning, but also I could have identified simple ways to make the game more humorous that would have taken little time.

Silly sound effects or physics could have gone a long way!

What did I learn?

I think in the future I would like to think about how I want the player to feel when they finish the game. Even if they're just playing a gamejam gam for a few minutes, if I had a sense of the emotions I wanted the player to feel when they're done I could tweak the game design to better encourage those feelings.

I should learn how to make some basic music and better sound effects!

When I'm planning an idea I would like to create a breakdown of a few core categories of gamedesign and how I can make them work well within the time alloted. For this game I think I cognitvely blocked thinking too much about the weak parts of the game because I liked other parts, but having a more formal process for considering all aspects of the design might help me create a stronger design overall.

All this said, I'm very happy with the end result! I've learned a lot making this, and many people seem rather pleased with the game. Thanks for reading, and if you haven't played the game give it a shot!