Almost there: Finishing SokoFarm

Getting all of the games puzzles in and working meant that the majority of the work on the project was mostly done. That left us with the thing that catches a lot of developers out – finishing. There are various jokes on this subject all along the lines of ‘you’re 90% finished, so there’s only another 90% of the work left to do’ and fully completing a game project really can feel like that – the crazy amount of work involved in putting a game to bed can often be overwhelming. It doesn’t matter how many games you’ve made, this process always feels like climbing a mountain, with some games, a mountain range.

Stepping back from the game to assess where we were and what needed work – unfortunately one of the first things that came up was that the decoration wasn’t working – at least not in the way we’d originally planned. In decorating the puzzles, things had gone too far and a lot of the games puzzles looked crowded, the background was pulling the eye away from the puzzles. After spending a lot of time building and decorating the puzzles, one of the first things we then needed to do was take some of that work out and rebalance the puzzles look or in places, completely redo the decoration all together, very frustrating but something that made the game easier to live with for the players.

Something else that had been on the ‘to do’ list for a while was addressing how the different seasons would be lit to help give the impression of the progression of the year. Slight tweaks to the main lights position, strength and colour gave the game the grey of spring, a brighter golden light for summer, a softer red for autumn ending with a hard cold blue for winter. Further twiddling with the ambient occlusion and shadows finished things off and made for some subtle mood shifts for the different months. This was added to by including rain and snow as well as bees and butterflies to the game in their appropriate months. Interestingly, we’d already done this for the puzsle map, so, replicating it in the main game just tied things together quite nicely.

To further add to this, and to give the environments a bit more of an organic feel, we added grass and flowers to all of the puzzles, but as a little nod back to the original concept art for the game, this was done using flat pop-up like graphics which in turn helped knit the games puzzles to the front-end art which had also been based heavily on those concept pieces. The finished look ended up looking very pretty and helped fill the environments out a lot, which along with adding randomised custom fence pieces gave the different seasons a unique feel and a lived-in look which felt right for the game.

Now that the ‘to-do’ list was growing ever shorter, it meant that what was mostly left was mostly just the dull, boring tasks that always seem to get left until last, and now unfortunately needed to be done – things like help prompts, the games actual ending, ironing out the seemingly inevitable save issues that seem to dog every game at some point, all had to be addressed.

Localisation of the games text into the various languages the game supports was also needed – which in turn also meant that the different fonts for the non-Latin based languages needed to be sourced, installed, tested and optimised for the game. These are never nice tasks, and always take far longer than you expect and almost always throw up interesting problems that again take far longer than you expect to fix – but these are the sorts of things you have to grind through to finish a game, and doing these sorts of thing well can really make a difference to your game and open it up to a much wider audience.

Now that we were almost done, it was time for the game’s music, something that’s always left far too late, but usually makes one of the biggest differences to the game. We’d been going back and forth for months on how the game should sound musically, and while we all agreed it should be light and fun, we all had pretty much no idea what that actually meant, the games final sound ended up being completely different to what we’d discussed and something of a happy accidence as experimentation turned up some pieces that just worked and fit the game perfectly, they just clicking into place magically and immediately felt like they’d always been there.

With the music in and working, we had a finished game, while there was still some bug fixing and packaging to do, it was done and finally complete!