The Drone Café Postmortem

DRONE SWEEP! I think I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.

It surprises me every time how people engage with these projects. You're great, friends. <3 I'm sorry for not always responding to comments, as I tend to get overwhelmed, but I do make sure to read them all. Same for reviews, your feedback is highly appreciated.

Okay, post-mortem time! The project's been out for a while now, and I've had some time to process the feedback I've gotten. Here are some thoughts I've had.

(1) The development process

I don't know what February wants from me. It's always something with this month. Between the usual series of stressful life events, and lingering exhaustion from Lizard Game, I was feeling kinda tapped out. So after some back and forth, after starting a project and then putting it aside again, I decided I probably wasn't going to enter Strawberry Jam 9.

... yeah. 🤡

Officially, I shelved the project. But I still kinda... kept messing around with it. Putting some assets together, experimenting with interactions... and things just sort of clicked. It occurred to me that the "time management" style of gameplay (seen e. g. in Diner Dash) is actually a fairly good fit for the drone-kink routine. Do task, get praise. Happy robot. I've also used faux-hypnosis as a way to represent "configuration updates" before, notably in Reset Day, so the jam's optional theme really worked. (Fun fact: The spiral is a static PNG with a palette cycling shader, which creates a unique visual effect.) Before I knew it, I had a prototype and a few notes for story vignettes.

Development was based around the freeplay mode. This was a good decision - it allowed me to test and iterate on the gameplay rather quickly. The story mode's stages are just different configurations of that, with a little bit of special logic to handle intro and outro segments and skill availability. Given how many games there are to rate in a jam, I also wanted something that'll give people a quick "vertical slice" of the game.

And, well... I just really wanted to do another thing with these lil' beepers, you know? It's been a while since Unspecified Behaviour, and the follow-up project I was initially planning hasn't really come together. (More on this later.) But people love the drones, and so do I, and there needs to be more of them. There's people with utilikin OCs! If you encounter one, offer them head-pats. (But do check to see if their harness has a "working, do not distract" patch. And ask first.)

So, yeah, I decided to make something small for once. Put emphasis on the vibes, have a simple plot. And I think that turned out okay! In the next two sections, we'll look at the parts of the project that worked, and the parts that didn't.

(2) Points of Strength

First up, I like the gameplay. It's not too complex, but there's nothing wrong with casual games, and I think it hits the right balance when it comes to the number of tasks that you need to juggle. The idea of the different programs and modifiers adds just enough complexity, and gradually introducing them one level at a time creates a nice sense of progression. It still isn't too demanding, but there's quite a few things that you need to keep in mind. You have a few options to customise your experience, and of course it provides a structure that I can hang some plot on.

Initially, I was going to have little story vignettes happen within the levels, in the way that Papers, Please does. Just little encounters with local weirdos who show up to the café, like the Artist and her... servants? Handlers? Whatever those are. Unfortunately, this disrupted the flow of the gameplay a little too much, and I had to keep the encounters very brief. So, the story segments happen in between the levels instead. This gives the vignettes a little more room to breathe, and it nicely breaks up the gameplay segments.

Turns out that there's a reason people keep writing slice-of-life fiction! I knew I wouldn't have the mental energy for another sci-fi fever dream, not so soon after Lizard Game, and that's why I really wanted to keep things low-key. It was a nice change of pace from my usual plot-heavy stuff as well. There's still a bit of a story happening, and there's a few sequel hooks for potential future projects, but the stakes are pretty low overall. It did achieve its goal of letting me present you with more drones. For you to rotate in your mind.

The story is just long enough to have a setup-and-payoff structure. Like the thing with clipboards, which Enrich Flavour uses to signal that it wants to discuss some data.

I just... I really like writing for this setting. It's like a warm cup of tea. One of the jam comments mentioned that fiction like this helps you to exercise a sense of hope, and... yeah, that's exactly it. A joyful future remains possible, and we can get there. I don't want to get too melodramatic here, but good vibes do matter, especially in times like these.

Circling back to the game again, I think I have reached a pretty decent level of baseline competence. Sure, the game's a bit of a mess, but it... well, it does the thing. It will, broadly speaking, respond to inputs, and play sounds, and display graphics. Characters encounter situations and things happen as a result. There are many small things you can do that help an experience feel more complete, like having a settings menu, or immediate feedback for actions.

And I really think these small touches helped carry the game. Drone Café didn't really stand out in any of the categories, but it came in 2nd overall - so, a solid effort. I put a lot of effort into tutorialisation, making sure that there's different ways to discover how the mechanics work, and introducing them one at a time. I think that paid off. This was a year with a very large and incredibly strong field, so I'm quite happy with the result. (Seriously, check out those jam entries.)

(3) Room for Improvement

So yeah ratings! Cheers, jam gamers. A team of ECO drones is processing your feedback as we speak. 👔

Digging a little deeper, this was the fourth year in a row where Horny was my worst category. (Can you believe that I've entered 6 out of 9 game jams?) Of course, some category will inevitably be "the last one," that's kinda how lists work. But this has been very consistent, so Horny is perhaps where I should focus my efforts. I'm not good enough at art to draw porn that's appealing, but I'm sure I can find a way to turn up the temperature a little. I did initially consider the idea of having a third service station, which was going to be an, uh... "play room"... but I ended up cutting this because it felt a bit cheap. And the game was getting too unfocused.

Digging further into the feedback, the "interaction lockout" mechanic was pretty contentious. Some people saw what I was trying to do, others wondered if it's even intentional to begin with. (Answer: Yes. Once your active drone begins an action, that has to happen. You can't switch for a few seconds.) A few players did enjoy having to plan their moves, but overall the negative opinion ended up having about a 2:1 majority. Looking back I'm not convinced it really does what I wanted it to do. 

Moving to a different interaction model would involve engine changes, but I'll at least experiment with it. This is because of some assumptions the engine currently makes. When you interact with a hotspot, it checks if that hotspot has a walk-to position set; if yes, it moves the character and enables the lockout; then it waits for the "character has stopped moving" signal; then it fires the interaction. It's currently not set up to handle a scenario where a character stops moving for reasons other than having arrived at the destination, or for a scenario where another interaction fires while you're still doing the first one. But there's ways to handle that, just takes some experimentation.

As for the project management... I think I should do project management probably? That seems like a good idea. I had a coherent mental model of the characters, and a broad idea of what I wanted to achieve, but the project itself was just kinda... vibes. That works for something small, but not something big. For my next project, I think I want to try having a plan and following that plan, once more.

Oh, and I re-used more assets than I'm normally comfortable with. That's a small regret I have. It was kind of a consequence of the haphazard development process, since I didn't have the time or energy to make as much from scratch as I usually do. For the same reason, I couldn't hunt down any new music, this is all CC stuff that I've used before. I don't think any existing sprites ended up being re-used directly - they were at least spruced up a bit - and the walkcycles are new. So that's something. But still, I don't want to do quite as much reuse going forward.

Apart from all that... I think I'm fairly happy with the way the game came together. Go figure. There could be more content, but there could always be more content, and I think this game exists in a sweet spot for a jam project.

(4) Future Plans

... but of course the jam is over now. I do like the thought of adding new content in the future. The project remains flagged as a prototype, after all, and I can always write more vignettes and plug in more mechanics and programs. The basic structure allows for that.

Perhaps a challenge mode where you need to meet specific goals, and can "earn" access to more story vignettes. We'll see! I will at least experiment with changing the interaction mode, and - depending on the results - I might end up changing the game. Perhaps have it be an optional setting. Could have online high-scores when the balancing is all done, I know there's Godot plug-ins that enable this.

For now, I've pushed a small update, which fixes a few minor bugs. (This was a while ago actually.) I've also enabled optional donations now, since the game is in a state that I'm relatively happy with.

More broadly... I think I want to do more of this slice-of-life stuff. I think that's a good direction for the utilikin.

(5) Addendum

That's getting a bit off-topic, though - so I've put up an entire BONUS POST on my personal blog. It discusses potential future directions for the drone setting, and why it took so long for me to make a follow-up to Unspecified Behaviour. Check it out if that interests you.

In the meantime, I hope you've enjoyed this post! If there's anything you'd like me to discuss further, or if you have any questions, feel free to make use of the comment section.