Hatch: A Bara Postmortem

Ethan Tlacuache:

As an illustrator Im focusing solely on the art, but Jack's being so open to my suggestions on how the game should look and proposing ideas himself really helped me get new ideas on top of what one can find on a normal virtual pet game. 

Working in a game for the first time, I'm surprised how different game design art has to be to simple illustrations.The art needs to be a lot cleaner and consistent throughout the game so cleaning that up is the first step to make the game look better. 

Now having a finished product and getting to play it I see that interactivity is the thing I should focus on more right now. For starters, I would like to have more neutral-looking idle animations and have a few more character animations for when they eat or deny an activity, as well as random activities they might do on their own, like sit down to play a game, read a book, just sulk, etc. 

I also wish to make different idle animations for when their stats are low.

I'd like to make the mini games a little more interactive, have another animation that tells you you have completed the task successfully. I think this and other things will really make the game play more enjoyable and help the player connect with the characters. 

I'd really like to show the personality of the characters shine, so I'd like to give the players more options to interact with them.

In general, I feel we have something really special and entertaining and I really want to see it grow into the game I imagined the first time we started planning this little project.

The main things I want to work on next are: idle animations, add more animations to the activities and reactions from the characters to make them more interactive.

Jack Allinjester:

As all first projects are, Hatch held many important and hard lessons. The month of November felt like an endless sprint to the finish line. And like a sprint, much had to be sacrificed in the hopes we would make it in time. Our goal by the end was to have something to submit to Bara Jam and, though it may not have been what we had envisioned back in October, we accomplished this. The Bara Jam version of Hatch is rough and held together by gum and paper. Yet I adore it all the same.

Hatch is my first game to be made in the Godot Engine. Using Godot 3.5 and coded entirely in gdscript, Hatch was a much larger undertaking than I had anticipated. A lot of time during the game jam was invested in learning both the engine and gdscript, figuring out my workflow in the new environment, troubleshooting, and trying to design an optimal architecture for hour game. Thankfully, Bara Jam alloted me the time to do all this while working on the game. But time management was always an issue whether trying to balance life, holidays, and learning alongside producing an actual game. Hatch was also the first virtual pet game I've ever worked on. I prefer designing games that use gamepads so trying to design for mouse exclusively offered new hurdles for me to figure out.

Gdscript felt foreign to work with after C# and C++, especially fighting the duck typing and formatting, but for a game jam project I found it inoffensive. Once I grew used to its presence, I could appreciate gdscript's ease of iteration and certainly relied on its forgiving nature as I rushed through code near the end. Coding within the engine editor left a lot to desire but, much like gdscript, you make do. Working with Nodes, Scenes, and Resources were certainly my favorite parts of the Godot Engine. I willing wasted time on organizing nodes and scenes into the perfect scene trees! Also, as always, I hated setting up and connecting UI. The first couple iterations of the project burned precious time just figuring out how to handle Control nodes and all their eccentricities. By the end of the game jam I was much better equipt to throw UI together with less strain but that was a skill hard earned.

There were plenty of times during the process the thought of postponing the game until after the jam crossed my mind. But having a great artist and project partner at my side helped me keep going. Besides handling all the visual assets seen in game, Ethan often volunteered to take up any writing and game design still pending all by himself. It can be difficult to release control over what you feel strongly about but I'm glad I did. It often felt like near the end I couldn't possibly think about anything besides programming or else the infrastructure holding up my brain would collapse. Ethan picking up that slack truly saved the game and I'm grateful he did so.

For the future of the game, there is certainly more than polish needed to create the Hatch we wanted from the beginning. Once more, the game will need a restructuring both in code and in scene tree. I will be upgrading to Godot 4.2 for the post game jam version. I look forward to seeing how improvements to gdscript and the engine itself can help Hatch. There will need to be increased complexity to Hatch's design to better support animations and interactivity. I also hope to support touch input for a more mobile friendly build. There is much to do and I look forward to the challenge and the experience.