v1.0 A Visit from The Very Tall Man is now live!

v1.0 

03/03/24

The combination of horror and farming was right up my alley, so I was delighted to join this jam. 

This project was a milestone for me in several respects:

1) My first 3D jam game, and I made all the assets myself. Thankfully, Unity is not too different when working in 3D than it is when working in 2D. In fact, 3D gives you access to some superior features, such as pathfinding and lighting. The biggest challenge was that building 3D assets is significantly more time-consuming than sprite work. But after two months of Grant Abbitt tutorials, I was more than ready.

2) My first multiplayer game. Granted, I didn't have to deal with networking, since this is just couch co-op. Yet the assumption that there can only be one player underpins a lot of design decisions in single-player games, so this was a significant shift in the architecture. Although I started the project with multiple players in mind, I spent a lot of time chasing some persistent and infuriating bugs.

3) My first farming game. I love Stardew Valley, and Harvest Moon before it, so I wanted to try my hand at creating a game where you till the soil and tend your crops. The cultivation system took quite a bit of work. I used an enum to track the state of each patch of soil, which is easy to serialize as an int. 

4) My first game to feature saving and loading. I spent at least 2 full days just tweaking the save system (and I have a nagging suspicion that a serious bug remains). But this was a very rewarding task, because a game without a save system can only go on for so long. (The Gnawing Hunger takes about an hour and a half to play, and that's about the outer limit!) Now that I have data serialization under my belt, I feel ready to build something much longer.

This was a challenging jam for me. I spent a lot longer than expected building the underlying systems and debugging, and had to narrow the scope of my design several times. But I pushed myself hard and got a lot out of it.

Incidentally, my favorite way to play this game is co-op, handling both characters. I usually send Pa out hunting the Grim Roots, while Ma tills the land, clears up the weeds, and guards the baby from those pesky Eye Spiders. It is a bit of cognitive load, but it's rather fun once you get used to it.