We made Sweven as part of Brackeys Game Jam 2021.1 in 7 days. Those days were very fun, productive and exciting but also quite exhausting. To keep ourselves motivated we started a diary with what we managed to make on that day.  Sharing it with our fellow Jammers, connecting us with the community and reading the kind feedback was something we looked forward to.

Hoping that it is entertaining, motivating or helpful to you, dear reader, we want to share it here as well.

Day 1 :

Starting with a discussing what "Stronger together", the theme of the game jam, meant for us. We began to converge on a game about building a community, reaching out to people and connecting. I began coding the Character Controller with Movement, a way to highlight objects in front of the character and interacting with them in form of a speech bubble containing symbols from the extensive emoji library of https://openmoji.org/. Limashi went to produce the graphics for the tiles, trees, rocks and house . We were really lucky finding a fitting aesthetic fairly quickly and it looks quite similar already to the finished game.

(The ghost image and the shelf were placeholders from a different project)

Day 2 :

Limashi made and animated the main character and I created the inventory and crafting system. We also had plans to be able to enter houses and decorate them. An NPC happiness system would then unlock new crafting recipes based on the level of decoration. We later had to scrape this plans due to time concerns.

Day 3 :

We extended the crafting System to be able to mine Stones and Trees for Resources, added an NPC and animated picked up items. We also realized that we made more content than we could show in a single screenshot so we had to learn to make videos to continue the dairy.

Day 4:

I managed to stumble into creating the background texture by playing with color gradients and turbulence effects. We added the sheep and a work animation. We decided to have the game take place on little Islands connect by cloud bridges. We also made buildings buildable.

Day 5 :

We added more characters, little clouds when walking over the bridge, a sheep enclosure and sounds for walking and speaking with characters. The characters now face the player when speaking. We also added upgrades for buildings and a progression system in the sense that some objects appear only after some conditions is met. Some objects now give a resource when clicked and recuperate over time.

Day 6 :

We spent a lot of effort creating content, fixing progression triggers and dialogs. We added the last character and added a lot of graphical details. On the 5. day we made the mistake of implementing the sheep enclosure as a single image. This caused the sheep inside to have problems with the draw order, meaning they wood sometimes apprear under the fence. So today I cut the image into tiles. Using those gave us the added benefit of having an easy way to make the enclosure be visual upgradeable.

Day 7 :

The last day was spent playtesting and fixing inconsistencies. We added some sound effects for cutting trees and the background music the game would feel a lot staler without. After we were finished with that we had some fun creating little easter eggs on the final island and making a screen explaining the controls and for "The End".

Thank you for reading!