Genesis

I'm working on a 2.5D exploration game called FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT. I've nailed down an artstyle I love, I've got some light 3d platforming and exploration elements, there are NPCs to talk to, but there is something missing from the experience.  I want to have a puzzle-like minigame that breaks up the exploration segments and provides a throughline for the entire experience.

Most of my games have a deep mechanical crunchiness, and live somewhere in what can be considered the "thinky puzzle" genre. I've been trying to break out from this genre to make something more casual and enjoyable, while still incorporating some of the aspects of light logic to gameplay. Thus, tomato fighers was born.

Tasty Boardgame Decisions + Quick Puzzle Action

My two main inspirations for tomato fighters are Clank! A Deckbuilding Adventure! and Hack-Match. Clank! is my favorite board game of all time, but I hate how tedious it is to set the board up or wait for another player to finish taking their turn. I've also been thoroughly entranced by Zachtronic's Hack-Match, a quick falling-blocks style action puzzler in a similar vein to Puzzle Fighter or Puyo-Puyo. I thought these two could be a good mash-up and honestly if I ended up with a straight 1v1 Clank! clone, I'd be cool with that. So I started out building the boilerplate for a typical deckbuilding game.  

Departure from Clank!

I pretty quickly ditched the dungeon delving, treasure-grabbing, press-your-luck aspects of Clank. While they're great and lead to some extremely tense game endings, I just thought it would be simpler and less derivative to make a chesslike board where players would be vying for points. I did pull inspiration by boiling some of the clank designs into the board. Instead of a clank bag to pull randomly from, the board acts as a real-time indicator of the potential wins and losses for the players. I really like how that decision turned out.

The process

This was a 9 day jam, and I had off from any other commitments, but in total I only spent a little over 32 hours on my jam entry.  Another aspect of the work worth highlighting is that I spent most of the time working on this jam live on twitch. This is the first time I've ever done that! I was a little worried I'd be too distracted but it proved to be useful to keep myself on track. Feel free to follow me there to see what I'm working on next! Because of my teaching background, I love to answer beginner questions about game development and/or unity.

https://www.twitch.tv/toomuchtomato

Once again, participating in a game jam has re-awakened my passion for working on my long term project. I'm feeling a lot of direction and motivation with FORKLIFT FLOWERPOT that I had lost for a bit in the middle of July.  I guess I got a bit depressed. That happens sometimes! The important thing is forgiving ourselves and moving forward.

The tomato fighters

The name actually came from a chapter of a book on Zen Buddhism called "Nothing Special" by Charlotte Joko Beck. It talks about two competing tomato growers reveling in a friendly conflict but not dwelling on it, even enjoying the conflict that their playful rivalry brought about. That's pretty cool.

What went well

Really happy that I stuck to the concept and finished the jam in the allotted time. I think the game has some good mechanical crunchiness under a thick layer of jank.

What could be better

I wish I had more time to polish audio and visuals! That is usually my favorite part of the game jam, but I didn't really use my time wisely leading up to the final weekend. It was very casual until the last two days, which I actually treated more like a game jam.