Tiny Idle Creatures

Hello!

Tiny Idle Creatures is a game that was started for Ludum Dare 56, the theme was tiny creatures.... Of course. 

It was never submitted to Ludum Dare because squeezing gamedev into 72 hours just doesn't fit my lifestyle right now.

Last year my wife and I had our first baby! He's great and my perspective on life has very much changed. Everything has changed. I used to be able to grind gamedev from the moment I came home from work, deep into the night, or late into the mornings, all weekend, non-stop. Every free moment could be spent on gamedev. That's just not available for me right now. 

I've had to learn to shift my attitude; small progress is acceptable, and actually a huge achievement.  

Ludum Dare is a 72 hour jam, and that has always been a challenge, but the amount of free time I have in 72 hours,  is about 12 hours... About 4 hours a night when baby boy is in bed... maybe. I decided early on that I would likely not submit to Ludum Dare, and instead see how long it could take me to make something I felt good releasing. The only way I could submit to LD is if I landed on a great idea, and all my 1st draft programming just worked flawlessly... Or, maybe If I just made an even more simple game.

What  could be more  simple than an Idler/Clicker? It turns out Idler/Clickers can be pretty complicated from a programming/game-design perspective, especially if you want it to have any depth.

I'd say I'm used to clamping down my ideas, but clamping down even more is a new challenge. And I'm still interested in making something to a certain standard, I don't want to release anything too undercooked. That said, Tiny Idle Creatures is probably my among my worst games as far as polish and presentation go. 

There's a lot more that could go into a game like this (I feel like I say that after every game jam), but I just really wanted to see this idea come to life without insane scope creep sneaking in.

The original idea was  supposed to be closer to Pikmin. I actually had a protagonist who the creatures could follow around the farm. I decided to remove the protagonist. It felt kind of cumbersome to navigate the farm space. I think the protagonist approach would work great if there was some kind  of world to  explore.

I spent (wasted?) a night playing with higher resolution visuals, that was early, when the protag was still in the game. I decided it was better to keep it simple pixel art, considering  I didn't have much time to go crazy.

An idea I was going to do, but just never got around to doing; was occasional buffs/power-ups appearing that would improve some stats for a period of time. The foundation for this buff system  is there, I just never finished it, and was afraid I would continue to push my goal post.

Another idea I left behind was an infinitely expanding farm,  no boundaries. I was worried things would get out of control and unstable to a point where I would end up limiting the space, so I just kept the space limited, didn't even try. I turns out it's still possible to bog the game down if  you play long enough.

I've had  ideas on how to optimize, because the biggest issue is that virtually every upgrade creates more and more coins, I  could also creating  higher value coins, like nickels, quarters, dimes, etc. Right now we only have pennies, and it's possible to reach a point where 1 click is dropping 10,000. Do that every frame and you'll have about 4 frame-per-second. In a way, you can kind of expand  infinitely with the prestige  system. I literally have no idea how crazy things can get as far as income per second. I'm pretty sure there's a point were the math just breaks.

TLDR - Gamedev requires a lot of time that I didn't have. I tried to make a simple clicker game and probably spent too much time on it.  Enjoy!