Cocotero: Game Boy Jam 3 Post Mortem
Overview Weâre major Nintendo fans here at Other Words so we were stoked when we discovered Game Boy Jam, a yearly game jam event dedicated to creating games inspired by the style and limitations of Nintendo Game Boy games. While we've been busy developing Treasure Trade we couldn't resist taking a week off to change it up and participate in the jam festivities. We knew it would be a great way to practice working on short iteration cycles, task prioritization and developing future project ideas. For those reasons and many more, we began developing what would eventually become Cocotero!
Game Summary Cocotero - A rapid-action arcade homage to the Nintendo Game Boy. - Click here to play! -
Help Manolo scale palm trees to collect coconuts for his shop. Gather as many coconuts as possible before time runs out. Watch out for falling coconuts!
Team We began development by establishing team roles and bringing on a friend to handle our music needs. Tasks were divided as follows:
Ashley Alicea - Co-design/programming, art and animation
Jeb K. Alvarado - Co-design/programming, sound effects
Josué Gonzålez (Guest Collaborator) - Music composition and creation
Development The team agreed on a set of personal goals we wanted to focus on while developing the game:
A simple idea that could be created quickly and allow us to focus on polish
Adapting the color palette from the Other Words logo
Creating a game inspired by our native Puerto Rico
We tossed around various concepts, from growing flowers to rescuing sea turtles, but we decided a coconut-picking theme would allows us to achieve all of our personal development goals. Thus, Cocotero (thatâs Spanish for a palm tree that sprouts coconuts) was born. The original concept had the player collecting as many coconuts as possible until getting hit by a falling one. We later tweaked the design to be a timer-based game with a rapid button tap mechanic to simulate shimming up a tree.
We ended our first day of development solidifying the design and aesthetics. Our hardest decision of this jam happened at this time, when we had to decide between creating a âtrueâ Game Boy game or a homage. While the idea of working under each and every restriction the original system had seemed fun, we decided a homage would be the best route since having the ability to flex our creativity was one of our highest priorities.
Jeb had the game up and running by the second day with his lovely programmer art. Ashley then jumped in to replace the assets with the art she created. The game was beginning to match what we envisioned! We sent the alpha to Josué who used it as inspiration for his music composition. We agreed we wanted to give the game a heavy Puerto Rican and tropical feel so Josué worked to attempt a unique mix of 8-bit and merengue music.
Like with every game jam, we then encountered the dawn of bugs. The coconuts went on strike and disappeared from the stage. Ashley worked to find a fix for the game-breaking issues while Jeb took a break and worked on the menu and UI systems. After some much needed rest, all gameplay glitches were fixed by the afternoon of day three, much to the relief of the team. Jeb also managed to implement our boot/logo, title, credits and game over screens. Our fourth and final development day was spent polishing. We adjusted the gameplay difficulty, edited sprite animations, improved the UI/menu systems and added a tutorial splash screen to help players quickly understand and enjoy the game. Lastly, Josué sent us his audio files to add to the game. We were blown away by his ability to mix such different music genres into a perfect track for the game. We wrapped up development and shipped to Game Jolt, another jam done!
What Went Wrong The main reason we love game jams is because theyâre great learning experiences. We enjoy handling the bad as much as the good, hereâs what we dealt with this time around:
Task trespassing - Our largest road bumps occurred when team members worked on tasks they weren't assigned to. In the rush of the jam, they thought they would be helpful by assisting with tasks outside their scope but they ended up getting in the way and stalling development. When the problem was recognized, they addressed it with a quick conversation and re-evaluation of task and design documents. Development was smooth sailing afterwards!
Respecting the schedule - The week of the jam happened to be a busy one for the team in general so we couldn't spend too much time on the game. When we started development, we established that we would work on the game for two days tops but we ended up working on the game over twice as long as we planned. This was mostly due to wanting to heavily polish the game and fix all the bugs. However, we weren't happy about submitting the game on the last day of the jam. We acknowledge we might have shipped on schedule if we just put aside more time on the first day to flesh out the game as much as possible. We also plan to be more conscious about the priorities we place on polish items. Fixing bugs is important but things like slightly tweaking animations took more time than they were worth. All this being said, this was a relatively minor problem. Weâre extremely proud of what we shipped!
What Went Right We were strict on ourselves during this jam and it ended up being a massive benefit. So many things went right this time around and it helped us learn what work patterns work best for the team. Hereâs what went great:
Quick decision making - From agreeing on the game idea to making menu changes, we made sure to resolve decisions as quickly as possible. Our priority was to spend more time developing than discussing and it was a process that worked out really well for the team. We end up working best together when we can all be independent!
Documentation & backing up - Jeb really pushed documenting every single detail of this jam. We had a Google Drive folder full of brainstorming, design and art documents that we frequently updated. We also uploaded frequent backups of all our development and art files. This helped us work quickly by eliminating the need to wait for files or info, very helpful for a team that worked together remotely. It also served as a great resource to writing this postmortem.
Trust - Perhaps because we know each other extremely well, we heavily trusted each otherâs abilities and this reduced the amount of check-ins and decision discussions we needed. For example, Ashley had full reign over art-related tasks because we knew she would make the right decisions for the game. Each team member held their own and trusted each other to do so.
Final Thoughts While we know jams are learning experiences, we didn't expect how much this jam would impact our growth as a team. Working with a retro theme helped us learn about each otherâs past, understand each otherâs approach to games and brought us closer overall. We loved watching other jammers submit and post about their games on Game Jolt and Twitter. When it comes to Cocotero, weâre so happy with what we have done and the response we've received. Our game was even added to a collection of GBJAM Let's Plays by Jupiter_Hadley.Â
We had an amazing time. Congrats and thank you to everyone for a great jam, Other Words will see you next year!
