Hello and welcome back to my final blog post for Gobby’s Farm! My name's Kaeli Becvar, I served as the lead designer for this game. With this postmortem, I plan on talking about my overall experience with leading these amazing people to the completion of my game. My producer, Nolan Owens, ran the show with our teammates and if you’d like to read his post mortem and how production went, you can from here! Being someone who’s never done game design, there were a lot of things I needed to learn early and very quickly. Designing a whole game and idea from one weekend through an entire semester has been challenging, hard work, but so gratifying in every way. There were so many things to think and plan for and even then, I still didn’t get everything written down! But with everything, this game came out beautifully and although some things were changed last minute, Gobby’s Farm came out perfect.

First up is the art, something that impacted the game in a major way. I began planning how we’d want the game to be fleshed out and the aesthetic that was needed to convey. I began doing concept art that was shared to our artists. I wanted to make it a fun, storybook fantasy style to make it feel as though you were really a goblin in a Wizard's garden. Focusing more as a 3D artist, I know how many polys I wanted and what I needed for the areas to feel like a Wizards garden. I made a list of the props I knew were needed, giving those about 2000 poly count then bigger, more so landmarks were given a larger scale of 7000 or more with high and low LODs enabled. Throughout this development period, I guided my artists in creating models and textures, giving references, critiquing their work, offering assistance and making sure problems were solved.

Another accomplishment when it comes to the 2D side of things, I wrote an entire storyline, created the videos, and added cutscenes and endings to our final build. Stories are usually heavily discouraged due to the time span we had to work but I knew I wanted this to be added in and I wasn’t willing to compromise. I put my nose to the grindstone and as soon as pre-production started, I made storyboards, started getting voice actors and scripts ready, and got all the videos ready and added into the game.

The goal for Gobby’s Farm was to create a fun, interactive survival game that made players want to play through it for exploration reasons and finding secrets! In order to achieve this, I wanted to make sure players had time to explore, had enough points lying around to use and gather, and that the enemies were fair. Researching other games that have quota systems involved, I took notes on how spots to hide were beneficial in the world, player movement needed to be solid, and that if you get shot multiple times and can’t avoid it, and enemies had their own certain characteristics. But with this in mind, we began polishing what we needed to make it fun and fair to play.

Second is the planning for level design, I know I wanted the world to feel big and open. The main concept was the player being able to run around and new areas to open each new week. With the idea of a Wizard’s garden in mind, I had them design plans for areas and how they would connect. What first came out of that were mazes, so many mazes and while it did add difficulty, it was too many mazes for what I wanted the game to be. So, about halfway through the project, we changed the levels and created areas based off of the original concepts. We broke the four areas into prefabs that level designers can work in, update it, and have them load into the main scene. It created a large playing area, all with little landmarks that help the player orient themselves with where they are and how to get back.

Third is programming! Gobby’s Farm is a simple game and having the core game loop made and ready helped out a ton. First we got the quota system up and running, player movement, the timer, collecting points and once those were fleshed out, we went on to the enemies and their functions. We have a bear trap meant to catch players off guard, a turret that swivels an area, then a wandering eye sentry that patrols areas. While these enemies are fun to deal with, I also wanted to make sure players were able to disable some of them by sacrificing their own points. This makes the game super fun, interactive and players have had a blast while playing it.

Finally, animations were not a major focus for this game, requiring very little time to get it up and working. I knew we needed Gobby’s hands in frame, having some animations play for him grabbing, aiming and throwing the produce. With this, we can truly make the player see through the eyes of Gobby, seeing his skin and weird hands. We also used the animation to close bear traps when produce triggers them and to break turrets as well.

For my reflections, there are areas that I want to touch on. What went wrong? Though I got pre-production started and completed as soon as I could, there were parts I should’ve put more time into. While I had so many things ready for concepts and references, we didn’t start animation till way later on in the time we had, requiring someone to come in and help. With this small mishap, I had to limit what I wanted fully for animations.

Next were models and some parts of level designing. Having to redo maps halfway through the production was rough but the change was very necessary and improved the game. However, with github came issues, especially with merging. Whenever we needed to merge different branches, we’d lose models or certain mechanics would disappear, causing some delays in placing props and more time in fixing issues. With that, some models we couldn’t find in our organization were lost in the process, which is frustrating but we made the world work with what we had.  

But what went right? In the beginning, I made sure pre production was done as fast as possible so everyone could read and reference it. With it, I was able to explain and show how I wanted the world to look. We were able to make our models, working with my artists for the textures and the design for UI, creating our fantasy world and capturing the ambience of being at night. We had all models finished early in the development, 2D art also following that pipeline and allowing our programmers time to set up our menus and everything. Also being able to fit in an entire story with cutscenes and different endings was a huge achievement on our part. We also had a game loop that worked very early on and didn’t require too much changing. Even with our rough builds in the beginning, players enjoyed how the game worked, understood it for the most part and got creative in how they would avoid traps and complete the quotas. 

What would be done differently? What would we do again? We should’ve had more meetings with everyone. While the team was wonderful, easy to work with and willing to make and fix when need arises, meeting would’ve been beneficial to double check how people were doing, to see how things were going, and to double check progress as well. But with it, I should have made the animations for Gobby’s arms a top priority, if those were done earlier they would’ve added more for the player experience. I also would’ve been a little more demanding on our level designing maps, so that way we weren’t stuck with mazes for half a semester then suddenly changing it. But on what I would do again, I would create the GDD as fast as I did before. Having paperwork ready with everything I needed was amazing and helped Nolan be on the same page as my vision as well. We had models completed very quickly, allowing level designers to start building the world as soon as they did. Another thing was going out and finding people willing to play our builds and leaving feedback. Those helped us find bugs, issues in levels or models, that gameplay was fun, if enemies were too strong or weak, everything. Anything we needed to know about, I sought out that feedback for my team to use and to improve the game.

This was a new experience for me in being a designer, but a welcomed one. I learned so much in how to write games out, creating scripts, reaching out to friends and strangers alike to help test the game, working with a team that have helped me bring a vision I had to life. Even with the bumps we had on the road, this became an amazing game with an achievement that isn’t made very often. Thank you for taking interest in the development of Gobby’s Farm, I truly hope you enjoy our game. 

For Gobby!