Retrospective

I really liked the cadence of this jam; two weeks seemed perfect. The idea behind this game came about pretty naturally. I saw the prompt "wait, that's a resource!?" and pretty quickly thought of Thomas Jefferson's quotation about the tree of liberty and using blood to sustain it. It felt topical due to the divisiveness of modern politics and like an interesting departure from normal RTS games. Since art is my weakness, I opted for pixel graphics. Once the basic gameplay was created, I split my time between making the game "juicy" and balancing it.

Note: I briefly considered making this a AOE2 mod rather than a standalone game. I still think that might be a fun exercise.

Adding voice lines and sound effects as well as adding special graphics to menus I think really added a lot to the game and made it feel funny and much more complete. The voice lines were based roughly on the barks from units in WC3 and AOE2. I also gave each unit a unique name which had no impact on gameplay, but was supposed to make the player feel more connected to these little dudes who eventually need to go fight and die. The names were all the first names of US senators plus a random last initial. I also liked making the dude menu use gauges and pictures to relay information rather than just numbers.

I also tried something new with the music. The basic music loop was only about one minute, but it had several parts that would fade in and out depending on what was happening in the game. The basic melody was chanting. The number of lumberjacks would affect the woodblock percussion. If there was a farmer, tambourine would be added. Finally, if there were people at the base of the tree, ready to fight, then war drums would start playing. I also wanted to dynamically control things like tempo and key, but it seemed like Godot didn't have a good way to do that and I would have had to have whole new tracks which I didn't have time for.

In terms of balance, I struggled a lot with figuring out how fast to drain the tree's blood. It seemed like it was either too easy or impossible to get anything established before the tree died. I eventually settled on increasing the tree's bloodlust overtime. This also has the benefit of ramping up urgency and ensuring the game ends eventually. I also played with things like the gather rate, how much buildings cost, exhaustion rates, political alignment rates, how much blood each person provides, how much food each person needs, whether there should be a food upkeep required per person, how much wood each tree has, how much food each farm has, how often new units are produced. There was a surprising number of levers to pull, but I settled it down pretty quickly when I got to a place where it was possible to establish a base before the tree died, but not possible for the tree to live indefinitely. I think I could have fiddled with the mechanics more to make the gameplay more in line with what what I imagined, but when I was playtesting the game, I thought it was fun and didn't want to screw with the meta too much.

I also had my brother playtest it a decent amount. He found a lot of bugs, which was a huge help in terms of polishing the game. This is one of the first games that I've made that I'd consider actually somewhat fun; I'm pretty proud of that. I got to watch some of the game jam organizers play it on stream, which I think is the first time I've ever seen a stranger play one of my games, and I'd describe my reaction as "giddy". I wanted to spiel in the stream chat about all of the little design decisions I made and the details about the dynamic music, but did my best to hold my tongue. Regardless, it's amazing to see the nice things people said about it and see that some people are enjoying it.

This is also the first time that I added a tutorial which only took about an hour and added a lot to the game. It's interesting to see that even with the tutorial, both my brother and the streamers made the same mistakes, which notably was not initially sending a worker to the farm to gather food. It's really cool to see that small details that I, as the creator, take completely for granted can cause confusion for the players, and it really highlights the need for things like play-testing. I was also a bit taken aback by how verbose the tutorial felt when it was being played on stream. Each game was only played for 5 minutes on stream, and I think the tutorial only had a max of ~10 sentences, but it took up about 2 minutes of the playtime. Having a tutorial that let the player jump straight into the game would have been better in this case.