Beard Your Own Adventure postmortem
Welcome to the postmortem for Beard Your Own Adventure, my winning entry for the 2021 Winter Flowjam hosted over at Flowlab. I just hit 5000 plays on the Flowlab homepage and thought I'd celebrate with a breakdown of my process.
The theme for the 2021 Flowjam was "Growing" and as soon as it was announced, I knew I had the perfect idea tucked away in my brain dumpster. I dug through my box of sketchbooks in the basement and found my original notes for a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style mini comic I was going to make back in 2014.
Thankfully, I have my sketchbooks organized and labeled and was able to find my notes pretty quickly. Here is the logic tree and page layout from the original 28 page comic, followed by the updated logic tree for the game.
I started color coding my notes to keep things straight in my head: purple for grow, blue for trim and green for style. These colors translated to the buttons in the final presentation. At this point I laid out my "page bible" so I could easily reference each face.
I figured the coding would be pretty simple for the transitions between "pages" (some triggers, some timers, some form of wand to add or remove hair) but there were a lot of bells and whistles already filling my brain that I wanted to add, like eyes that followed the mouse, character specific backgrounds and music, flavor text, a free play option, hidden easter eggs. BUT, this was a game jam and I only had 2 weeks, so I would have to work hard to keep it under control.
The original comic just had choices to pick, but this needed to be interactive and fun -- and what's more fun than Wooly Willy with his iron shavings beard and little magnet wand? An easily recognizable classic! I knew this was going to be illustration intensive, so I grabbed a screen shot of Willy for reference and redrew him to fit my needs. I gave him a butt chin and a neck and a REAL nose because this wasn't going to work with a big dumb clown nose right in the middle of everything.
I've enjoyed a long career drawing caricatures at theme parks and parties so I pulled out every caricature trick in the book to make the characters unique and accessorize them correctly. Some were easier than others and there were still some pages I wasn't quite sold on -- things like the "Riker" beard from Star Trek TNG and the "hobo" beard (which was changed to its actual beard name "The Geribaldi" ). I also had no direction for Starburns until the very end (The original reference to a side character in Dan Harmon's Community seemed a little out of date) and the Fu Manchu went through several iterations as well (WWE era Hulk Hogan, a Texas Walker Ranger, a construction worker). I'm not sure why I eventually settled on baseball player except I was running out of time and knew what I could do for the music.
Speaking of music, for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to write individual music for each character and I even scrapped my first couple of attempts. I was spending a LOT of time drawing and writing music and not enough time programming the game. One week in, I had a lot of faces and most of the pages and some of the transitions and a huge to-do list (below).
I had been honing my chops on a couple game jams from itch prior to the Flowjam, (including a 3 hour jam that resulted in this) so I knew I had to dig in and start cutting ideas. My "wish list" was still too long and the eyeballs were glitching out and disappearing from the face leaving disconcerting blank white eyes.
I got almost to the end before realizing that I had no "reveal" under the trim mechanic. The clippers would buzz, stubble would fall, the level would progress, but I hadn't made graphics to transition from beard to shorn. There was a last minute hustle to create the trim masks, which resulted in a few questionable sprites out-of-context. XD
I sorted out my remaining to-dos (FIX EYES! - still number 1 on the list) and never made it to the 4th tier priorities: Human sound effects for reactions when growing or trimming, Different eyes for specific characters). I got the level select working and managed to scrape together a limited free play mode and submitted to the Flowjam with a day to spare.
The competition was fierce and after all the scores were tallied, Beard Your Own Adventure won by only .01 point! I had tons of fun finally giving this project some life. The other submissions were great and are definitely worth checking out.
This was my third Flowjam and my first time winning the big prize (a PS5 this time!!). I'm hoping to take a final pass at tightening up this game and upload it to the App Store. Maybe when I hit 10,000 plays ;)
Thanks for playing! Thanks for reading. Please friend, like and share and stay tuned for more games and updates from your pal, todorrobot!
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