Ploppy Weather: Getting started (dev log #1)
I’ve never really done a development blog before. But I feel like this game might end up pretty cool and it’s the type of game I would like to read a dev blog for myself.
The game is sort of a mix of three or four different games. A Short Hike, Animal Well, Mosa Lina and a bit of Spelunky. There are of course more inspirations in there too, like Breath of The Wild. How could I not take a queue from that when I’m making an open world game?
I’ll go through what I’ve done up until now and where I think it might be going.
Getting started
I doodled this little “tin hiker” in my sketchbook a long time ago, it stuck with me.
7 months ago I did a quick little art experiment/prototype in Unity. Without much to any gameplay in mind at all. I had a certain way I wanted to model and render water droplets.
So I made it walk around under these enormous rain drops. I found it quite pleasant and shared it on social media.
I’m not sure why I said “ASMR,” cause I’m not really a fan of it. I just thought “ASMR walking sim” had a nice ring to it. And it makes for quite a catchy tweet. In fact this sound fixation lead me down a false path. This video had quite an enthusiastic response everywhere I posted it. But I felt like I needed to establish some sort of gameplay hook for it, something that wasn’t “ASMR walking sim.”
A false start
I came up with the idea of the player character being able to record sounds. And then use those sounds to make stuff happen. The clearest example being:
→ The player finds a leaking faucet → They record the drip sound from it → Playing the recorded drip sound makes a droplet fall from the sky → Looping the sound and increasing the speed of the sound makes more rain droplets fall → Increasing the volume makes droplets fall in a bigger area around the player.
There would be lots of different sounds to find in the game world. It would be up to the player to figure out the use for each sound. The idea with the drop sound was to design puzzles where the player water flowers and fill up lakes.
I actually had this drop sound ability fully implemented. It was quite fun to run around with it even though there was nothing to do with it yet.
But as you might suspect from the way I’m talking about this idea, I ended up scrapping it. For several reasons.
I would’ve had to make lots of sound abilities like this to justify it as the game’s hook.
The game would’ve been very focused on sound, complicating the implementation and raising the expected quality for audio quite a bit.
I like sounds but having such a focus and pressure on audio didn’t excite me at all. My usual approach with solo projects and audio so far is to just go on freesound.org and implement the sounds as simply as possible.
I would have to design a lot of puzzles and I don’t wanna make a puzzle game.
This is how far I got it. Ironically enough this recording didn’t include the audio.
Discovering some design principles
So after this experimentation I returned to my barebones flat void and this silly walking toy.
Around this time I was thinking about what type of games I wanted to make. And I thought back to the original game idea that started it all for me, I wrote an issue of my newsletter solely about this dream game.
Some concept art from Wild Wild Wild, the dream game.
“Something I loved about going on these adventures was when an unexpected obstacle would show up.
There was this one time where me and a bunch of buddies were walking through a forest and got blocked by a shallow but wide creak. About 2 or 3 meters. Everyone in this group has very different personalities, so we all crossed it differently.
I threw my bag across. Then I backed off and ran towards the river and jumped across it.
Then the next guy found a freshly fallen tree, just thick enough to hold his weight, laid it across and balanced over.
My next friend also used the fallen tree as a bridge, but he used two branches like ski-sticks, because he didn’t want to risk losing his balance.
My third friend took his shoes and socks off, and rolled up the legs of his pants. Then he just walked through the river. We dried his feet with toilet paper.
I wanted to make a game where these different types of approaches could all work! And where the main obstacles in the game would just be these sorts of environmental hazards. Rushing rivers, steep cliffs, paths blocked by thick foliage. Just a game about wandering and exploring your own way with fun consequences.
And I wanted you to be able to take your backpack off, toss it across the river to make yourself lighter. Or fall into a river and lose the bag as you tumble around under the surface. Then save yourself on a rock and then chase after the bag by skipping between stones.
I wanted it to be a game where you would rarely ever die. Instead you would just end up in these situations where you end up somewhere you didn’t mean to go or you lose something.”
I tried making a game inspired by these feelings a couple of times since I started learning game development. It was the idea that inspired me to learn game development in the first place.
The reception of that newsletter was unexpected. People cared way more about it than I thought they would. Then I had a brilliant idea (I hope), which is to use Ploppy Weather as a stepping stone towards making the dream game. Instead of tackling my wild dream game head on, prematurely (I’m not ready), I will make a simplified version of it, using the same design goals. This way I get some practice in before I end up doing that game. And I will also get a big pile of code that I can reuse when that day comes.
So I thought about what aspects of my dream game I could use for Ploppy Weather.
Overcoming an environmental obstacles in different ways. Like the story I told about my friends crossing a creak.
Finding stuff/items in the world that all have more than one use, like in Spelunky everything exists for more than one reason and stuff interact with each other, not just with the player.
Unexpected and chaotic consequences when you make mistakes, like getting swept away by a river.
I wrote those principles down a couple months ago. And I think it’s probably too much to ask of myself to pull of all these principles on my first try. Principle #2 especially seems a bit too ambitious.
Discovering the game through prototyping
The player controller’s movement in the original mockup video was rough. It felt extremely stiff and could only walk on flat ground. So after my previous false start I decided this would be the first thing to focus on.
For the original movement I was simply pushing a Unity rigidbody around using AddForce() or something like that. While clamping the max velocity. This proved to be very tricky to get control over when I tried to make it walk on uneven terrain. Because of this, and with my previous experience on Surmount, where the player controller is completely made using rigidbodies, I decided to try a more handcrafted approach. I deleted all the movement code I had and turned to Unity’s CharacterController component instead. Unlike the rigidbody component it has no built in physics simulation, pretty much all it has is a handy function for moving with collisions. That’s about it.
The new player controller shoots a raycast into the ground, gets its angle and rotates the player according to the angle. Which means I can tell wether the player is moving up or down hill! I use this to speed them up downhill, and slow them down when going uphill. If the angle is too steep I turn on ragdoll mode.
I made this banana peel to test the ragdoll mechanic.
I could watch this fella tumble all day. I’m gonna do everything in my might to avoid adding health points, it’s so much more fun to ragdoll downhill than dying and respawning somewhere.
With this new walking mechanic another principle started to take shape that I didn’t consider before. It has something to do with travel and presence in space. Maybe I’m being overly proud of what I’ve made. But running around the game world like this feels a little bit like running my finger over a surface and feeling the texture of it.
“The secret of this kind of climbing, is like Zen. Don't think. Just dance along. It's the easiest thing in the world, actually easier than walking on flat ground which is monotonous. The cute little problems present themselves at each step and yet you don't hesitate and you find yourself on some other boulder you picked out for no special reason at all, just like zen.”
- Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums)
Designing the game from both ends
Usually when I start making a game I come up with a mechanic to build everything around. But from my experience with prototyping different projects I’ve found this often turns out to be a dead end. Because inevitably once I have a mechanic I need to figure out what game to actually build around it.
To avoid this dead end I’m taking a different approach. Instead of expanding everything outwards from the player’s mechanics. I want to make decisions based on what will make the game sound fun/appealing/interesting.
Everyone gravitates to types of games that are somewhat familiar and which are easy to understand from a screenshot or a genre. I already have a pretty clear idea of how my game will look and based on my social media posts I feel pretty confident this won’t be my main issue. Which led me to think more about my game’s genre. It wasn’t hard to pick based on my design principles, I’m definitely going with “open world” as my main one.
Then I looked at some games in that genre that I can compare myself to and learn from.
A Short Hike, Sable and Little Kitty Big City are the three most successful games in the genre that I find comparable. There are also some lesser known open world games which I like. Such as Sludge Life and Smushi Come Home. I compared the estimated sales of these games using Steamspy (so they aren’t completely accurate). But these estimates are good enough to get a more realistic picture of what is possible given ‘the game’ I’m getting myself into. I cross referenced these games to see what features and traits they have in common to see what I need to put into my own game.
Some of the traits I know I’ll need based on this is; immaculate vibes, great level design, a unique movement mechanic and lots of stuff to discover (collectibles, characters, items).
I want to channel this research into something concrete right away. So as I’m doing this I’m also making a pitch deck. I’m saying which features I’ll add, what the gameplay loop is, why people would want to play it. I’m using the pitch deck as a tool to design the game and to think of it from the player’s point of view.
With this approach I’m designing the game at both a micro and macro level at the same time. Micro being the little decisions I make in the prototype and macro being these bigger framework and presentation aspects of the game. Hopefully this helps me head in a good direction.
The reason for the game to exist
It’s not enough to see this project as a checklist of stuff I need to include. It also needs to have a soul and be about something.
I think all these successful open world games have a clear player fantasy that people get immediately. Little Kitty Big City is the clearest one, it’s about being a cat, with everything that entails.
The more recognizable the fantasy is, the more potential the game will have to spread. So I’ve put a lot of thought into it and I know which one I’m going for: to run away from home.
That was an extremely strong fantasy for me growing up. Not for any reason you need to be concerned about. I just always had an urge for it. When I saw Into The Wild in my teens it made this wanderlust almost unbearable. Sitting in school all day and listening to boring lectures was torture.
“Empty pockets will
Allow a greater
Sense of wealth
Why contain yourself
Like any other
Book on the shelf”
- Eddie Vedder (lyrics from Far Behind)
I think most people can relate to that.
I’ll avoid the details of the game’s story here (in fear of spoilers). But basically you’ll be stuck in an office job and you run away. The whole game is about searching for freedom. I wanna push that idea to the limit.
I’m gonna be taking a lot of inspiration from Jack Kerouac, Into The Wild, One Piece and a bit from Rasmus på luffen.
To sum it up
Right now I have a clear picture of the game’s structure and I’ve got lots of ideas for what you’ll be doing.
This first devblog ended up quite wordy. But this is me trying to condense 7 months of on-and-off process and thinking. I will try to keep future devblogs shorter than this. I don’t intend to write these updates regularly. Just whenever I have something to talk about.
I’m not too sure about the long term plan yet. As I see it there are two ways this could play out. Either I successfully pitch the game to someone and get funding (could be a publisher or a grant), or I keep doing freelance work as my primary income to keep this completely independent. They both feel valid, they both have pros and cons. Regardless I will pitch it around to see what kinds of opportunities might pop up.
The dev time is gonna be affected dramatically depending on which path I choose. If I go full time I think it would take about one to two years to finish it. God knows how long it will take if I don’t.
I’m tempted to set up a Steam page for the game already. It’s very early but it would be a bit of a motivational boost to have it up there and start collecting wishlists. Especially incase any of my future posts go viral.
High hopes here.
