Garden Rogue

This is just a short overview of the development process of Garden Rogue for the mix and game jam.

Day 1 (6 Hours)

The theme for the jam was mixing genres and day 1 was mostly spent coming up with the idea behind the game. After many ideas, we settled on Gardening and Roguelite. The idea was that you lived in an underground garden and could grow plants which would make you stronger. You could then venture out to the wasteland to fight slugs and gather plant feed. By the end of day one, we had a basic prototype of the combat and some pots that grow plants.

Day 2 (12 Hours)

To start of day 2 I implemented a simple finite state machine to give the enemies some basic ai. The ai was kept quite simple so it came down to 3 states used in total. One for the idle state, one for chasing the player and finally one for attacking. The attacking state would also attempt to move the unit away from the player if they got too close.

The next thing to tackle was the underground base. After setting up the scene with all the collision boxes, the main thing to implement was the plants. A plants manager was implemented as a singleton which would hold all the information for plants. The underground base could then save the plants to the plants manager and retrieve the data when the scene was reloaded. Next I gave the player ability to place pots down. Some areas had to be added to avoid the pots blocking the exit or sticking in walls. Finally, a ladder was added that allowed the player to head out to the wasteland.

At this point the sprites for the player and slugs were ready to be implemented and after some tweaking were ready to go. Enemy drops were added after this as those sprites were also ready. After this the player ui was added and the game was at a playable state.

To wrap up day 2 a boss was added which was made simple since I could reuse the ai and could modify the attack rate and attack type.

Day 3 (8 Hours)

At the beginning of day 3 there was a lot to get done.

At the top of the list was the map system. In the end I decided to go with separate rooms with harder version halfway through. This made expanding the amount of levels simple enough which allowed some variety. Each run would then serve levels in a random order. After 10 levels the boss level would appear after which the credits would appear.

Next I generated sound effects in sfxr and added them to the player, enemies and the projectile. I also made the first music track in beepbox.co. Later on, one more music track would be added to be played in the overworld. A global music manager singleton was added to ensure the music continues between menus and levels and to prevent music from playing over eachother.

The main menu and pause menu were next which took a bit of work to get right but were kept simple in the end. A tutorial was also added which was in the form of basic text that would show up in the first few rooms.

With the tutorial finished, one last play test was done and the game was complete!. With only 1 hour to go the game was exported for html, windows, mac and linux and the itch page was created. After filling out all the information and submitting it we had 15 minutes to spare.

Conclusion

Being able to focus fully on the gameplay(asides from the sounds) allowed me to get a lot more gameplay systems implemented. I learned a lot about systems working together and about enemy ai. There’s a lot more that could be done with the idea and