Devlog for SIGJ entry Idle Pleasure Boat Cruise

The Summer Incremental Game Jam was two weeks long and had the theme Evade.

Being July which is about sun, friends, and travel I spent about 8 days out of 14 on the project.

I managed to publish Idle Pleasure Boat Cruise by the deadline. Please play it and give me feedback! I'm new to game development and would love any and all critical feedback.

How it Started

I wrote up a set of ideas and decided to make a boat-based game. 

It had a big scope:

- cruise with passengers to earn money

- fish the seas to earn money

- transport goods to earn money

- Build Seattle-inspired locations (Fremont Canal, Myrtle Edwards Park, Puget Sound, etc)

Fun things

• collecting boats
• going from a tiny boat to massive ships
• hiring staff and gaining multipliers and auto-clickers

Evasion

• over-fishing would cause the game warden to fine you
• maybe loans on buying boats and you had to pay off periodically to evade bankruptcy

Etc etc. In reality, I didn't get much of the design built and never got to an evasion mechanic.

I snuck evasion in at the end in the description of the game as well as in the writing on the final screen of the game.

Rookie Moves

A total classic rookie maneuver is to use a new game engine during a game jam.

Despite knowing Unity and Unreal... I learned Godot entirely during the game jam period LOLz.

Because of this, I spent 90% of the game jam-building the core mechanic, so there was no time to play with it and iterate. I didn't create a "full game". It is more of a prototype.

Wins

I saw that a user Mika posted he was a music composer and looking for a team, but I saw he had posted days before. I was bummed as I was sure he would have gotten gobbled up by a team.

I DM'd him and no one had reached out. SHOCKING!

Mika joined the team and composed the awesome original music. 

He also created one of the sound effects.

Overall, Godot was a win. Once I set it up to use VSCode as the editor, it felt great and was lightweight.

I still have a lot to learn, but using Claude LLM I was able to learn and build much faster than I would have pre-LLM days. It is like having a teammate that knows Godot and is only drunk and makes sh*t up occasionally but is usually sober and very helpful.

Using KennyNL assets was good for controlling scope. I bought his everything pack and used some things from various 2D and 3D asset packs.

Things I abandoned

Instead of textual buttons, I had a multi-camera sub-view system mostly working.

This will allow the user to see 3D content in a zoomed-in, up-close fashion.

They will click this portal instead of a button.

My system was buggy and required much more work per button, so I scrapped this for the game jam,

but I will be adding it back in.

Nope Scope

Things I would have liked to do, but didn't due to running out of time.

• Custom animations, such as characters rowing paddels
• Smooth transitions that show the narrative of docking, loading passengers, and switching boats
• Particle animations when clicking

I'm looking forward to playing everyone's games!

I'm looking for critical feedback on Idle Pleasure Boat Cruise as well. I'm very early in game development and would appreciate any and all feedback.