Description

Spelltacular Smoothies is a light-hearted shop-keeping game. The premise has the player concocting magical smoothies to satisfy the needs and taste preferences of a cast of fantasy adventurers. Spelltacular Smoothies was created as a part of the Spring Cozy Jam 2024 and scored 15th place out of over 100 submissions.

Reflection

Spelltacular Smoothies was a technically simple project. The game was constructed over a few days instead of weeks. Despite its simplicity, Spelltacular Smoothies offered a new opportunity to expand my skillset in game development. For my previous projects, I had either worked alone or with a dedicated designer. With spectacular smoothies, I was made the informal lead developer after our dedicated designer had to leave the project. 

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I was initially intimidated as I had never led a project in game development before. I based my design style on a GDC talk by Jason Latino, Larian Studios’ Cinematic Director. Latino’s talk had a major takeaway;  he didn’t use his team’s work to realize his vision, he instead helped channel his team’s work into a singular vision. I took this approach to managing the project. Instead of dictating what the project needed, I focused on what my team was good at and provided the framework to unify the work of our team into a cohesive product. 

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Our team had a large number of artists. If I had made the artists create characters based on my designs, the production pipeline would’ve been far too narrow. Instead, I had each artist in charge of their character design and backstory. As the project lead, I provided guidelines and prompts to ensure each character would fit into the project. By distributing responsibility across the team, we were able to produce half a dozen characters with dialogue and art throughout our 3 day development time. The team was also vocal about how smooth the development process was.

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While I consider this project a success, there are still shortcomings that I aim to improve on in the future. Because my role went from full-time programmer to project lead, many of the technical features I wanted to implement had to be cut. The biggest features lost were fluid simulation for the smoothies and more involved ingredient combination effects. A project-changing scope is not the end of the world. The real problem was that I stubbornly believed I could still implement these features and manage the project simultaneously. With my mounting responsibilities, I should’ve identified earlier that features had to be cut. But instead, I waited until the last minute, leading to unnecessary pressure on myself. I can always expand on the project now that the jam is over. But if I could go back in time, I would instead be more realistic about what I could accomplish given my responsibilities to the team.

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