Hey!

My name is Ivan Barabash, I'm a 3D Technical artist and an indie developer from a small team - Rotation on 17. We formed a team in April 2021, and since then we have been participating in jams with varying success, as well as making our own small prototypes.

Now, a few days after the end of the jam, the dust has settled a little, and the burden of disappointment from the number of unrealized things has decreased, and I can soberly think about what went wrong (as usual on jams most of the things).

Week ago, a few hours before the start of the jam, I wrote a message in the Lost Relic discord community with tips for beginner developers, and it turned out that all of these tips should have been read a few times during the jam by myself. (more about this at the end)

So the day before the announcement of the theme of the jam, we got together with a team to discuss what our game could be like, what kind of graphics we would do, etc. Few weeks ago, I came across a Unity plugin that simulates water in real time, with high performance - Zibra Liquids, which I have already tested, and I have wanted to try to make a game with this plugin. Therefore, I was really excited when the theme of the jam was announced. When we got together after work, we very quickly came up with the idea of making a god simulator-strategy game where you, through indirect control, need to unite the tribes, conducting water along the dry riverbeds, while terraforming the dried-up desert into a green and flowering forest. As well, the whole team immediately liked the idea of otters as the main characters.

But as usual, our ambitions were dashed against reality. Our fantastic 2D artist Nyuta was able to devote very little time at the beginning of the project with concepts, after which she practically could not devote time to the project, so we were left without a UI.

Also a big challenge was the stylistics for our 3D Artist Gregorey Filatov who works in industrial design, but with such a tight deadline, he did an excellent job, and the houses in the villages are there thanks to him.

As for me, so that work and jam do not overlap much, I planned a vacation from June 15 until the end of the jam, but due to problems at work, I had to postpone the vacation until Friday. By Friday, I had just sketched out in 3D the level terrain, and done a few simple things, like a rain effect and a simple triplanar shader for meshes like the base of the buildings, to make texturing and UV-unwrapping easier for the artists.

Friday and half of Saturday we spent to get the water working as we planned, but the approaching deadline forced us to reconsider our strategy, fortunately our programmer and 3d artists were not sitting idly by and by this time, we had villages inhabited by cute otters created by Tymur Matukhno, as well as some very cool terraforming done by iwannabesonic (he also solo developing space-sim game with cool starship builder system - Project Gamma) which made our game very enjoyable to play.

So, we decided to abandon the mechanics with rivers, and try to make a game like an aquarium, where you would not chase the challenge, but enjoy the satisfaction of the process.

Over the last 24 hours, we've put it all together, tried as much as possible to create a simulation of life inside a small tribe, for example, otters sometimes gather to chat (though sometimes back to back). And our joy knew no bounds when we managed to upload the build 2 minutes before the deadline. 

But as it turned out, I should have listened to my advice - “build more often”. We haven't made builds for the last 2 days of the jam, and we missed that we had a critical bug due to which our shaders broke during compilation, and almost all objects in the game, with the exception of the terrain, turned black. We noticed this too late, and did not have time to fix it quickly to re-upload.

And this post would not exist if it were not for the moderator George, who wrote to me the next day and said that we can re-upload the fix, and fortunately we had a build with the necessary fix on hand. So remember, make more builds, not always what looks good in the editor will also look good in the build!

What's next?

We really liked our idea, and we were fired up to finish it. Over the past few days, we have significantly upgraded the game, and we are not going to stop there.

If you like our game, please rate it on the jam page HERE, and if you have any feedback, we would like to hear it, so leave comments (on such a request from the comments, we have already started working on the minimap).

If you REALLY liked our game, you can subscribe to our twitter,  where we already started to share our development progress.

Thank you!