{"author_link":"\/users\/avavt","author_name":"AVAVT","author_uid":"avavt","comments":[],"epoch":1494032437,"event":"LD38","format":"md","ldjam_node_id":30331,"likes":3,"metadata":{"p_key":"92904","p_author":"AVAVT","p_authorkey":"1012875","p_urlkey":"305822","p_title":"Johi Farm - A Post Mortem","p_cat":"LDJam ","p_event":"LD38","p_time":"1494032437","p_likes":"3","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":"1012875","us_name":"AVAVT","us_username":"avavt","event_start":"1492732800","event_key":"69","event_name":"LD 38"},"node":{"_collation":{"body_sanitizer":"TextUtils::SanitizeHTML via existing importer","event":"LD38","removed_author":false},"_superparent":9405,"_trust":6,"author":12875,"body":"![JohiFarmLD.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b42\/3\/z\/3fa4.gif)\n\n**A bit of context:** LD38 is my personal first Ludum Dare and 3rd Game Jam. In the beginning I planned to join in Compo, but when I submitted my off-work plan - I teach programming to youths and children at TechKids coding school, hence weekends classes - the other instructors noticed and wanted to join as well.\n\nIn the end, most of the main instructors joined and the school decided \"Well, it doesn't hurt to close the school for some days\". It was all planned right after LD37 ends so it's not like we just spontaneously decide to close down the school, we had plenty of time to organize our courses.\n\nSo that's how the team was formed, and we're under pressure that an entire school was following our novice game-making progress. I sincerely hope [the end result](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/38\/johi-farm) is not too disappointing to my students.\n\n## What went as planned\n\n**1. The idea:** The first promising idea we had was about a guy who couldn't grow a beard, one day stumbled upon a potion that make him smaller. The guy would then sneak into the house of bearded men and attempt to trim their beard to sate his jealousy. It's also an inside joke because among the instructors only 1 of us managed to grow a beard.\n\nCould've worked, sound good. But after a while I thought it's too hard to express the idea, and if done poorly the players won't be able to feel the joke. So the idea was scrapped.\n\nAfter that we talked for awhile, and somehow we reached Harvest Moon and then an idea popup: \"Hey what if we make Harvest Moon from the perspective of the 7 helpers? Like how we have to take care of a guy's farm while he runs around picking up flowers to woo girls around the village?\"\n\nAfter some more discussing we decided that idea was a bit too big for a jam, and trimmed the scope down to what we have in the end. That leads to...\n\n**2. The scope:** I already had experience working with @mitus (our *programmer* artist) in the recent Global Game Jam, so we kind of know how much content we could pull out in 3 days. In the end, the scope of the game was spot-on: the final Jam version has exactly all we planned from day one, with about 1 hour to spare. The 1 hour before deadline was also planned, we already predicted that the site would go down near the end, and to be safe the Jam version must be submitted earlier.\n\nActually we almost didn't reach that target. 5 hours before deadline we just finished the 2nd stage of the tree, having worked a full 24 hours without sleep. But we can't bring ourselves to sleep then because the idea of an end game boss fight was too tempting. And @huynq did awesome work pulling out an entire boss in 2 hours. After we got the bird animation from @mitus I was tweaking the battle's design right behind @huynq's back, demand ups and downs of delays again and again for nearly an hour. This fight **must** be awesome. I'm quite sure near the end of it he was like\n\n![fts.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b42\/3\/z\/3fa7.gif)\n\nBut..\n\n**3. It was great fun!** And I think our game is fun, too! @mitus is great at conjuring child-like imagery, and his characters always surpassed our expectation (just to note he's also a programmer like us). @darknesszx was on music & sfx and despite this being his first time doing actual composing, he did a great job.\n\n## What didn't go as planned\n\n**1. A Jam team full of programming instructors** is a terrible idea. Who the heck brought that up?\n\nLet's admit it: despite my praises, programmer art & programmer music sucks. And because I'm the one most experienced in game making I was tasked with game design. I wanted to code damnit! And I've only read game design books for off-specs entertainment.\n\nOne of the most complained flaw in our game was that the water can can't be pulled, only pushed. I already saw that problem during the jam - it's a result of miscommunication - but I thought it's not a big deal and not worth the effort to fix. Guess I was dead wrong.\n\n**2. The whole schedule of LD is messed up**\n\nI'm happy to have a chance to make games, and I'm thankful to @pov and others who helped make LD. But to be honest: this is the most messed up event I've ever attended.\n\nWe ourselves host hackathons on a monthly basis in our school, and we know full well the work load that come with such events. But when something is bad, it's bad. Excuses don't make bad experience good.\n\nWe're a pretty busy bunch, and delay after delay messed up our schedule and we couldn't fully enjoyed the post-jam process. When we scheduled our time to prepare for voting, we ended up with an entire day free looking at a delay notice. And when the voting actually started, we're all diving deep in a mountain of work.\n\n## What I've learned personally\n\n**1. Farsight-ing is pretty benefiting**\n\nHeh, that feeling of \"I have already seen the ending\" at the end of the Jam, when the site went down 5 minutes after we publish our game: It was quite awesome.\n\n**2. Anger-management is crucial in teamwork**\n\nTo be honest we didn't really \"hit the ground running\". There was a lot of issues at the beginning of the jam. Dead mouses, broken usb cables, corrupted files, etc. Minor problems after minor problems. And I snapped. I was quite frustrated with my teammates for their lack of preparation and it showed. I didn't realize my attitude was destroying the team's morale, I just *have* to give them a piece of my mind.\n\nOn the afternoon of day 2, I turned around and suddenly realized that it had stopped being fun for the guys.\n\nA Game Jam is not a dead-or-alive race. I was taking it too seriously, too selfishly. I'm sure the guys feel bad about the issues too, and it doesn't help if I as the leader delve too deep into it.\n\nSo I changed my attitude, barely in time I guess. By the end of the Jam, everyone's laughing again, enjoying the creative work we planned to do in the beginning.\n\n**3. I really should seriously learn how to make proper shaders**\n\nI spent 3 hours trying to create a 2d \"glow\" effect for sprites without avail! I didn't realize it was so hard. 9-pixels alpha blur only work well on pixel art. When I try different blur methods they all kill performance and impractical for any kind of web build.\n\nIn the end that's 3 hours wasted and I've yet to get any decent glow shader yet. Would love to see someone experienced with Unity's shader sharing some insight here.\n\n====\n\n**So, that's it for my post-mortem.** It can be summed up to: It was fun, the event schedule was terrible, and I should learn proper anger-management.\n\n\nAnd also, [try my game](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/38\/johi-farm)! There's no point sugar-coating the fact that I'm advertising here :D","comments":0,"created":"2017-05-05T22:51:02Z","files":[],"files-timestamp":0,"id":30331,"love":3,"love-timestamp":"2017-05-06T05:08:25Z","meta":[],"modified":"2017-05-06T05:08:25Z","name":"Johi Farm - A Post Mortem","node-timestamp":"2017-05-06T01:16:32Z","parent":18619,"parents":[1,5,9,9405,18619],"path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/38\/johi-farm\/johi-farm-a-post-mortem","published":"2017-05-06T01:00:37Z","scope":"public","slug":"johi-farm-a-post-mortem","subsubtype":"","subtype":"","type":"post","version":79463},"node_metadata":{"n_key":"30331","n_urlkey":"305822","n_parent":"18619","n_path":"\/events\/ludum-dare\/38\/johi-farm\/johi-farm-a-post-mortem","n_slug":"johi-farm-a-post-mortem","n_type":"post","n_subtype":"","n_subsubtype":"","n_author":"12875","n_created":"1494024662","n_modified":"1494047305","n_version":"79463","n_status":"WAYBACK"},"source_url":"https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/38\/johi-farm\/johi-farm-a-post-mortem","text":"![JohiFarmLD.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b42\/3\/z\/3fa4.gif)\n\n**A bit of context:** LD38 is my personal first Ludum Dare and 3rd Game Jam. In the beginning I planned to join in Compo, but when I submitted my off-work plan - I teach programming to youths and children at TechKids coding school, hence weekends classes - the other instructors noticed and wanted to join as well.\n\nIn the end, most of the main instructors joined and the school decided \"Well, it doesn't hurt to close the school for some days\". It was all planned right after LD37 ends so it's not like we just spontaneously decide to close down the school, we had plenty of time to organize our courses.\n\nSo that's how the team was formed, and we're under pressure that an entire school was following our novice game-making progress. I sincerely hope [the end result](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/38\/johi-farm) is not too disappointing to my students.\n\n## What went as planned\n\n**1. The idea:** The first promising idea we had was about a guy who couldn't grow a beard, one day stumbled upon a potion that make him smaller. The guy would then sneak into the house of bearded men and attempt to trim their beard to sate his jealousy. It's also an inside joke because among the instructors only 1 of us managed to grow a beard.\n\nCould've worked, sound good. But after a while I thought it's too hard to express the idea, and if done poorly the players won't be able to feel the joke. So the idea was scrapped.\n\nAfter that we talked for awhile, and somehow we reached Harvest Moon and then an idea popup: \"Hey what if we make Harvest Moon from the perspective of the 7 helpers? Like how we have to take care of a guy's farm while he runs around picking up flowers to woo girls around the village?\"\n\nAfter some more discussing we decided that idea was a bit too big for a jam, and trimmed the scope down to what we have in the end. That leads to...\n\n**2. The scope:** I already had experience working with @mitus (our *programmer* artist) in the recent Global Game Jam, so we kind of know how much content we could pull out in 3 days. In the end, the scope of the game was spot-on: the final Jam version has exactly all we planned from day one, with about 1 hour to spare. The 1 hour before deadline was also planned, we already predicted that the site would go down near the end, and to be safe the Jam version must be submitted earlier.\n\nActually we almost didn't reach that target. 5 hours before deadline we just finished the 2nd stage of the tree, having worked a full 24 hours without sleep. But we can't bring ourselves to sleep then because the idea of an end game boss fight was too tempting. And @huynq did awesome work pulling out an entire boss in 2 hours. After we got the bird animation from @mitus I was tweaking the battle's design right behind @huynq's back, demand ups and downs of delays again and again for nearly an hour. This fight **must** be awesome. I'm quite sure near the end of it he was like\n\n![fts.gif](\/\/\/raw\/b42\/3\/z\/3fa7.gif)\n\nBut..\n\n**3. It was great fun!** And I think our game is fun, too! @mitus is great at conjuring child-like imagery, and his characters always surpassed our expectation (just to note he's also a programmer like us). @darknesszx was on music & sfx and despite this being his first time doing actual composing, he did a great job.\n\n## What didn't go as planned\n\n**1. A Jam team full of programming instructors** is a terrible idea. Who the heck brought that up?\n\nLet's admit it: despite my praises, programmer art & programmer music sucks. And because I'm the one most experienced in game making I was tasked with game design. I wanted to code damnit! And I've only read game design books for off-specs entertainment.\n\nOne of the most complained flaw in our game was that the water can can't be pulled, only pushed. I already saw that problem during the jam - it's a result of miscommunication - but I thought it's not a big deal and not worth the effort to fix. Guess I was dead wrong.\n\n**2. The whole schedule of LD is messed up**\n\nI'm happy to have a chance to make games, and I'm thankful to @pov and others who helped make LD. But to be honest: this is the most messed up event I've ever attended.\n\nWe ourselves host hackathons on a monthly basis in our school, and we know full well the work load that come with such events. But when something is bad, it's bad. Excuses don't make bad experience good.\n\nWe're a pretty busy bunch, and delay after delay messed up our schedule and we couldn't fully enjoyed the post-jam process. When we scheduled our time to prepare for voting, we ended up with an entire day free looking at a delay notice. And when the voting actually started, we're all diving deep in a mountain of work.\n\n## What I've learned personally\n\n**1. Farsight-ing is pretty benefiting**\n\nHeh, that feeling of \"I have already seen the ending\" at the end of the Jam, when the site went down 5 minutes after we publish our game: It was quite awesome.\n\n**2. Anger-management is crucial in teamwork**\n\nTo be honest we didn't really \"hit the ground running\". There was a lot of issues at the beginning of the jam. Dead mouses, broken usb cables, corrupted files, etc. Minor problems after minor problems. And I snapped. I was quite frustrated with my teammates for their lack of preparation and it showed. I didn't realize my attitude was destroying the team's morale, I just *have* to give them a piece of my mind.\n\nOn the afternoon of day 2, I turned around and suddenly realized that it had stopped being fun for the guys.\n\nA Game Jam is not a dead-or-alive race. I was taking it too seriously, too selfishly. I'm sure the guys feel bad about the issues too, and it doesn't help if I as the leader delve too deep into it.\n\nSo I changed my attitude, barely in time I guess. By the end of the Jam, everyone's laughing again, enjoying the creative work we planned to do in the beginning.\n\n**3. I really should seriously learn how to make proper shaders**\n\nI spent 3 hours trying to create a 2d \"glow\" effect for sprites without avail! I didn't realize it was so hard. 9-pixels alpha blur only work well on pixel art. When I try different blur methods they all kill performance and impractical for any kind of web build.\n\nIn the end that's 3 hours wasted and I've yet to get any decent glow shader yet. Would love to see someone experienced with Unity's shader sharing some insight here.\n\n====\n\n**So, that's it for my post-mortem.** It can be summed up to: It was fun, the event schedule was terrible, and I should learn proper anger-management.\n\n\nAnd also, [try my game](https:\/\/ldjam.com\/events\/ludum-dare\/38\/johi-farm)! There's no point sugar-coating the fact that I'm advertising here :D","title":"Johi Farm - A Post Mortem","wayback_source":[]}