My learnings With Eco Mars Shop

Hi this is SoftDev and i’m writing my development story for eco mars shop.

for personal reasons i had only 3 days to work on my game, so to compensate and make an enjoyable game i had to compromise a bit, this jam i wanted to try and win this competition, a little bit of ambition is always good ;) unluckily though i had to rescope my game quite a bit. I originally wanted to make a rpg like game where your objective was to kidnap insects and plants to make an ecosystem, but for time restraints that wasn’t possible and with the clock's ticking i decided to make a game first and have an idea after. I first started to experiment with a growth mechanic as thinking about ecosystems made me connect them with trees, and I managed to have a tree growing system, then I programmed a simple player movement and at last, an idea struck. what if you were a human that had to rebuild mars atmosphere by building an ecosystem with the help of a stupid alien?.

For this game, something that I think benefited it was the making of art before programming, i found out that by first making the art helps you envision the gameplay a little better. though not everything goes as planned for example, i had no time, and this lead to dumb mistakes and design flaws for example: you needed to constantly water the trees to make them grow but that lead to boring gameplay, or having the option to place trees wherever you wanted, but if you placed a tree that collided with the shop to water it you were forced to open the shop too, and so on…

I think that the biggest obstacle for my game was time. I spent a couple of sleepless nights working on the game, working day and night even thinking about the game in school. though i think this helped me kill procrastination, having so limited days to work made me eliminate every distraction and put my focus all on the game.

Overall I think that this game was a really valuable experience that managed to make me learn a lot of valuable lessons on my future games. I also noticed an evolution in my games and I see myself becoming better with every new experience.