Game Overview

Spirit Farm is a top down arcade-style game where you play as the Grim Reaper and must harvest the souls of the dead that are looking to go up to the heavens. Every ghost harvested gives you score and if three ghosts escape your scythe, then you get smited by god. Finally, the farther you get into the run, the more ghosts will spawn at the same time and the moon will change to a blood red.

Itch.io link: https://team-edgecase.itch.io/spirit-farm

Development

My work on this game consisted of the following:

• Discussing with team the idea for the game itself and mechanics.

• Communicating with my team on what we wanted the level to incorporate.

• Draw out some of these ideas on paper.

• Build out the level on Unity.

• Use of environmental assets to decorate the level.

• Playtest and resolve issues with any design or technical problems.

• Build UI for the main menu.

The Idea

Spirit Farm was overall a fast and easy concept for a game to come up with. We liked to think of this game as one of those mini-games you play on MarioParty with your friends. When it comes to the level design that accompanied it though, we wanted something that was also rather simple. This was done for 2 main reasons. First off, if we went for a simple design that was repeated in rows and columns, it would help provide instant heavy contrast whenever a ghost spawned. Even if your eyes were on the top left of the screen, if a ghost spawned on the bottom right, you’d see it. That was the ideal scenario. Second reason, a simple layout made traversal through it also simple. The idea behind this was to make it easier for players to focus more on looking for other ghosts as they headed for the one they were already targeting. Spirit Farm is a game all about keeping momentum. A good player would reap one ghost and, on their way to do so, already have 2-3 other ghosts they have eyed to reap as well. The level design philosophy in this game was made with the idea to facilitate that.

The Lesson

This was my first ever game jam game. So, my main lesson with this project wasn’t really about design itself, but about the development process. Game Jams are incredibly unique within the game development world (especially the really short ones, like 2 days or less). It forces you and your team to develop, what would otherwise take you a while, in a very short burst of time. I found it truly does make people be at their utmost efficient in working, and I really liked working with people firing through all cylinders. Staying up those 2 nights working on the game was definitely the biggest challenge of it all though. Thus, after this first jam, I made sure to rest what I needed for the next ones, so I didn’t sacrifice my health in the process of the work.