Snowstopper

This game was created for the New year, new skills Game jam in approximately 4 days (I had to start the jam later due to personal availability reasons). 

Snowstopper

Snowstopper is a cozy 2D simulation game where you help people overcome difficulties connected to a snow-storm. Explore the canyon, meet the fine villagers of its community, help make the world a better place with your actions and help mitigate the snow storm!

Instructions

Movement : WASD keys

Interact with villager houses: Move towards the houses

Use the snowblower (once unlocked): Space key

Devlog

Please read this part only if you're interested in the experience of a fellow game jammer, or if you're curious on how the game was ideated.

I'd like to state firstly that, this was the first jam that I ever made as the sole programmer, artist, producer, writer. It was honestly quite overwhelming in many ways, and I had little idea for what I was signing up for, especially considering that I started the jam later. 

The whole idea came from my current stay in Salt Lake City, Utah where a snow storm was taking place in the weekend of the jam. I was reading precautions on how to best prepare, and thought to myself that preparation must be tricky to do when you are new in town. 

I had several goals with this game jam, that I am proud to have fulfilled (regardless of the game's state at the moment of uploading):

- Learning the manipulation of dynamic tile sets in the game

Indeed, the game's tiles change programatically based on the snow level in town.

\

Clear tiles

Tiles when the snow level reaches the 1st threshold

Tiles when the snow level reaches the last threshold

- Creating a dialogue/event manager that accepted player input and had in-game consequences. 

The first error I made was picking this genre: 

- Simulation games are complex, no matter if the scope is small. The game design aspect was really unclear to me:

- What is the player supposed to play? 

I eventually found the answer by trying to balance out town satisfaction, snow level and player gold... The simulation games I have played in the past shone due to their complexity (amount of resources, variety of events) and I feel like it's too much to take on a game jam. Nevertheless, I'm happy to have worked on it as a learning experience for myself.

- I like to make tools to help the dev process be easier. In this case, I made a small "Event Creator" in Google Sheets) that helped me write the dictionaries that I would then load and run in the game. 

This really helped me create events faster.... I just wish it didn't take me a full afternoon to write it, test it, and debug it to have it fully working. That's a lot of dev time I could have spent polishing. 

At the moment of uploading, I'm not entirely sure the game is running, but I'll be happy to connect with the mentors and the judges to discuss the concept some more. As this is my first experience on my own, and I would like to keep doing these, I really want to connect with mentors to get feedback on workflows, production tips for solo teams, and some more knowledge! 

In any case, I think the concept of a "New Year, New Skills" Jam is fantastic, and I'm looking forward to making my participation recurrent in the following years, with a team.. 

This game is not over yet, it's just the beginning!! 

Thank you for reading and I hope you had a blast in this jam too!