Someone's trash is someone else's treasure

A couple months ago, I participated in the SeaJam, a game jam dedicated to supporting Mr Beasts' #TeamSeas. The game had to be centered around cleaning the ocean, and looking at this theme I thought to myself: "mmm... I can sell this trash!"

And so, I made a game centered around recycling garbage found in the sea, and becoming rich in the process. Nice and simple. The game performed averagely in the first month, then had a spike in views and downloads at the very beginning of the year (it was big by my standards, but it really was just half a hundred or so). And you know what I did?

Of course, I walked away.

Not a word, not an update, nothing. Instead, I started working on a christmas project which was waaaaay too ambitious for the time I had at hand, and then proceeded to abbandon it halfway through January. 

I'm a profassionehll!

After abbandoning said project, I thought to myself:  "you know what I should do?  Go back to that old project about recycling I did two months ago, that was fun. Maybe I could develop it further, and make it into an actual fully fledged game! It shouldn't be that hard, I already have all the systems in place, I just have to add a little bit of  content, et voilà, I'll have a hit on my hands!"

And so I opened up the project, ran the game, and you know what I found?

A steaming pile of hot garbage!

The visuals were desaturated, controlling the boat felt more like flying a hoovercraft than handling an actual boat, and the building controls! Arrow keys to look around, 1 and 2 to cycle between elements? Did I just forget the mouse existed for a whole month while making this thing?

Well, I suppose I could just walk away again. And yet, I still have a couple of good ideas for this game, and I still think the theme is important and should be addressed.  So that does it: let's see if I can turn this trash into a treasure!

Before I start going crazy with content, though (and believe me, I will go crazy), I need to cover the basics, which to recap are:

• The visuals: the style is alright, but I need to adjust the colors a little and rework some assets;
• The boat gameplay: it has potential, but It also needs quite a bit of refinement;
• The building controls: the controller bindings are alright, but the keyboard ones? Oof;
• The lack of guidance: how does a new player know what they're supposed to do?

So, in this devlog, I will try and to just that. I mean, I already did it, but I'm going to showcase it, in case you're intrested or better yet find some flaws or ways in which I could make the game even better; in which case, feel free to suggest it in the comments.

So, whitout further ado, let's begin.

Uugh, my eyes!

As I mentioned, the visuals of the prototype aren't exactly pretty. I'm not talking about the art style, which I find kind of charming even though it's litteraly tailor made to fit my flaws. Yep, you read that right: as I was attempting to texture the robot, I couldn't make its eyes look like anything but a sharpie drawing, and so I leaned into it and ended up with this art style. But when I was texturing the boat, I didn't sample the cardboard color from the robot, which is why in the original prototype the boat looks baby-vomit yellow instead of cardboard brown. 

After I fixed the texturing, it finally hit me: I was forgetting the most basic trick to make my games look better even if I am a terrible artist. What is it, you ask? Well, look at the before and after and see if you can spot it.

Did you guess it? Ignore all the new stuff I added, I'll talk about it later; the trick is post processing!

How did I forget this?! All I add to do was adjust a few sliders, tick a couple boxes, select a couple options, and there I go, instantly better. Of course, that is if you're working in a game engine with a post processing stack. To be more specific, I upped the saturation a bit and enabled screen space ambient occlusion, as the main things. I also did tonemapping, white balancing, a procedural skybox; and all it took me was less than half an hour of toying around till I was happy with the results.

Moral of the story, use post processing, kids. Next, we have the boat.

As long as the boat goes...

So, for the boat, I had lots of ideas during the jam and very little time to execute on them. One that I did execute on was to give a little boost to the player every time they grab a piece of garbage, which I think gives the game a nice rythm. However, while mechanically the boat is fine, it's lacking in game feel. So, what did I add?

Well, first and foremost I added oars, so now the robot actually rows to move the boat instead of just sitting there, menacingly, using the force. Next, I thought I should make the boat drift, but I didn't like the idea of making the controls less precise, so I decided to cheat a little. Instead of having the boat drift, I have the camera rotate slightly to the side when turning around, and rotate even more when changing direction while moving forward: this gives the boat a nice sense of dynamism, and makes it feel more like an actual boat subject to the resistance of water rather than an overcraft or a drone. Or at least, that's how it seems to me, I would be curious of what other people think about it. Maybe I will update the prototype sometime soon? We'll see.

After that, I added a trash pile that shows up on the boat to visually indicate how much you have collected, and I also put a limit on how much you can carry at once. I also added some boat upgrades, especially since I figured the boat gameplay might get repetitive later in the game. For now, I added three: a claw on the front to pick up larger pile of garbage, a motor on the back to give you a little boost and an addittional mini-boat that you can carry around to increase your trash capacity. The rope attached to that thing gave me much more trouble than I'd like to admit, I could dedicate a whole devlog to just ranting about that, if you'd be intrested.

Anyway, once it's all said and done, here's how it looks:

Uuh, why is the trash floating? That's not how it's supposed to go. I'll have to look into that.  Also, no, the maximum garbage ammount isn't that low, I just wanted to show the full size of the trash pile.

What? It's been that long already?

I still have a lot to talk about, but this post is getting out of control, so I'll save it for next time.

If you're intrested in reading the next devlog, or being notified when the game comes out, consider following me right here on itch, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions about what I showed thus far, feel free to leave a comment.

Until next time,

Goodbye and thank you for reading!