An aborted project: Tamanegi Nashi
Itch.io page
Developped with: Godot Engine 3.1
About the project
Tamanegi Nashi is a platformer game where you play as a living onion, Nashi, from the vegetables tribes that get cast out because there is a long-time drought and onions are known to makes vegetables waste their water by crying. Our hero must travel to find it’s peers and ultimately find the source of the drought to end it. The character can run, jump, dash, walljump and fire water bullet. But the twist is that he’s not supposed to kill or harm people, so firing water to ennemies is to make them change or disable them for a while (water for making a plant blossom and reveal a platform, or slow down ennemies by watering their eyes). The world was supposed to be divided in biome, with several levels and a boss for each. Nashi would acquire abilities along the way, we planned animated cutscenes, a tutorial, and alternative versions of each level to speedrun.
On the art part, everything was hand-drawn and fully animated.
Technical stuff I think were cool:
- The map was done the same way the Donkey Kong Country map was, with level on dots linked by guided paths with auto-travel between them.
- The trail of smoke was done with big round particles drawn in front of a camera, then I applied a shader on the image from this camera to have a nice black outline around the smoke.
Post-Mortem Thoughts
Tamanegi Nashi was supposed to be our first full game. Actually it came to be our first failure as game developpers, but I’m ok with that. This project is full of lessons to take. It’s my first real collaboration with someone I never worked with before, and most if it was done remotely. Eventually the team grew up in regards of the initial scope of the game. At the end, with people doing this on their part time, never seeing each others, lacking good directions, the project died like a fire going out, peacefully.
I see several cause to it:
- the scope was too big for a first game
- because of that, we searched for a lot a people to help us without the experience to lead them
- I wasn’t experienced enough to be efficient when coding and to be able to instruct newcomer about the project
- Project documentation was nonexistent.
Cutting this out was the good decision at that time, I think everyone was ok with this, because most of them never spoke a word on the Slack chat :D
The good points about this experience now, what I learnt:
- Documentations is the best way to transmit informations to team members (at least a good Game Design Document)
- I can’t think too big at start but maybe iterate over time when I feel confident about where the project is going
- I now have a better view about development process and global game architecture
- I made mistake during developing (in terms of code) and my future projects will benefice from these mistakes
- This project allowed us to participate to an industry event, the Indicade 2019, where we were able to shocase our game to the visitors, and it was amazing, I would be doing this again anytime!
Maybe someday we will come back to this project with a reduced scope, to make something out of all theses fantastic assets.