Finding Our Direction

The team was excited for the jam judging, and though we didn't get precise rankings for most of the categories, During the Judge's deliberation we were considered for several categories, including best Art, Gameplay, Overall and Sound. And the community ranked us 3rd of the nearly 65 entries. My particular favorite portion of the judging is the start of the Best Art category, where The Home of Pleia was brought up by the judges: Cultivation Jam Judge's Deliberation

The big question, is where to go from here? 

After a short break, and some deliberation on Discord, we decided we wanted to keep working on our game to publish it on Steam. So now for a brief interlude of program management. 

We needed a method of affording fees and payments, and being fair with royalty distributions and for everyone on the team to agree to it before any additional progress is possible. I decided a model sharing royalties based on unpaid effort and monetary contribution (for fees for becoming publishers etc..) would be the most fair. So after collecting hours and rates from my team mates, and fully scoping out the additional work we wanted to do to call the game polished, we have our percentages figured (although it is all imaginary money at this point).

 The additional scope came from our notes from playtests, judging, and suggestions from each other. They eventually made their way into our trello board:

A longer and more fulfilling story is needed, and there were a few changes to make the game more intuitive which would have taken it away from the jam's theme, but become a better game.  

Christine suggested a more pronounceable name for our main character "Elowen" and Jamie suggested changing the name to "Elowen's Light"  which plot-wise is more important than her house. 

Christine brainstormed some new character or critter options:

And ChaosConstant found it was relatively easy to add mobile controls: 

I have been doing mostly management stuff for these last few weeks, but did get the opportunity to make some visual tweaks to the sparkles to help the player understand that it helps with filling up their magic bar.

I also plotted out some trajectory stuff to help prevent the player from falling out of the house to oblivion straight away. It now goes toward a target:

Also I added some content including beetles (currently the small blue snails) and vertical barrier rocks, as well as a few additional pre-assembled platforms. Eventually these will be expanded out to scale in difficulty according to how many movement upgrades the player has unlocked.

and I almost forgot the most exciting news. With the new goal of publishing on Steam, We even named ourselves : 

Sweet And Power Sauce Games

Doug

-Team leader of Sweet And Power Sauce Games