Community Garden Game Breakdown

In 2021, I worked on a project for Tim Krief’s Crunchless Game Jam. The goal for this challenge was to build a sustainable process and pipeline for making games. I co-founded the project with Sara Witsch as it’s producer/sound designer. My roles on the team were Creative Lead, Art Lead, and Programming Lead. This turned out to be too many hats for me, but what we learned was invaluable. I would love to try again with someone else taking on the Programming Lead position.

From the beginning of our process, logging our hours was a key part of our pipeline. Sara and I had meetings discussing our direction, as I dived into prototyping the mechanics. We reached out to our networks, and Sara posted listings online, trying to keep the process as similar to a funded studio as we could. We interviewed a lot of candidates, and ended up with a compact and talented team.

*A sample of my timesheet from the Jam.*

We gave ourselves minimum and maximum amounts of time to work on the project each week, so that we could be certain people would keep the jam crunchless. In fact, our production assistant Luna would check in on our timesheets regularly to ensure we weren’t going overboard.

Our process started with writing and concept art. The wonderful George Larkwright built out a brilliant script for us, setting up the basic premise of the game. As the main character, you would join a community garden that was in disrepair, and help bring it back to life with the help of a colorful cast of characters. As you cleaned up the garden, more residents would join or return - and you would get to hear their stories. Our 2D artist did an amazing job of concepting these residents, and many of the models. I filled in doing concept whenever I could (at a lower quality, mind you!)

My concept art vs. outcomes

I took my role as creative decision-maker very seriously, and did my best to assist the artists on their journeys of growth. Pictured below is the progression of our main character’s design - from initial concept, to finalized concept, to 3D model! I was there every step of the way making decisions. We wanted our character to be wearing clothing that reflects the fashion of a city, while still keeping the practicality of garden work. The proportions and palettes were important, as the game needed to feel cozy - inspired by other gardening sims like Animal Crossing.

I was responsible for the character animation and rigging.

Our iconography was important to the feel of the game as well. We went with a bubbly and colorful appearance - you can see some examples below. Our production assistant was eager to tackle this, and I taught them some design basics in the process.