Cashier Guy Postmortem

Development

The Good

1. Completion

Cashier Guy was a game made for My First Game Jam (Summer 2020), which spanned two weeks. The first issue I knew I had to tackle was the scope of the game. I really wanted to be able to finish my game and I knew I had to scope small in order to do that. Thus I came up with a small idea (make change as a cashier) and Cashier Guy came to fruition. After those two weeks, I can proudly say I have delivered a “complete” game.

2. UI-first

Usually, I delay the UI of my game until I have completed the mechanics, but when making Cashier Guy, I completely implemented the UI first. This was because I wanted to make sure the size of everything was right and because Cashier Guy was a UI-heavy game. This worked out really well; once I had all of the UI elements, I could work each one separately without having to worry about whether the other UI elements worked. This also meant I could delay artwork for as long as possible, because as long as there was stuff to fill in the space, it was fine (although I eventually kept all of the temporary art because I didn’t have time to redo it all).

The Bad

1. UI-first

I know I just praised working out the UI first, but there was also a downside: it confined the space I had to work with my art. I’m already a poor artist, but being confined to 150x150 pixels is pretty lame and probably would’ve sucked if I knew how to draw well.

2. Mis-sized sprites/textures

Another thing that went wrong was when I was drawing the texture for the slots. I ended up having unequal spacing among the slots. If you look closely, the dime slot is smaller than the rest, and this could’ve caused a lot of problems. If I had music that matched the speed of the indicator, this would’ve thrown off the beat. Luckily, I don’t know how to compose music, and I opted for a sound effect every time the indicator went over a new slot, rendering this detail unnoticeable. When I created the texture for the slots, I made the entire slot bar at once, but I realized this was a mistake when I decided I wanted to animate the changing slots. It would’ve worked a lot better if I made a sprite for a single slot and just placed them adjacently. I made just workarounds, but next time I should probably think more about how I’m going to be using the sprites.

3. Audio volume

But what was even more unnoticeable was the audio. I set the volume of the sound effects to really low because I hate when I boot up a game and literally have my ears exploded. However, it seems like I made them too quiet; although I could hear the sound effects quietly on my laptop with headphones on, I couldn’t hear them when I played on my brother’s laptop. Ideally I would’ve made a settings screen where you could adjust the volume, but I think in this case I just made the default volume way too quiet.

4. Exporting

One more thing that gave me trouble was exporting the game. Originally, I wanted to export to HTML5, but the audio and game were both laggy when I tested it out, so I had to resort to exporting a zip file and making my players download it. I’m not sure if there’s much I can do about this because Godot’s HTML5 export, from what I’ve read, is poor and due for a remake. On the topic of exports, it also turns out Godot doesn’t export all files in the directory by default, so at first my Tutorial.txt file wasn’t exporting. This was an easy fix, but it’s something I should keep in mind for future projects.

Feedback

It seems that players had fun playing my game, and that makes me so happy! I also was fortunate enough to be able to watch my brother and his wife play the game, so I made a lot of mental notes during that time. Thanks for playing my game!

The Good

1. Difficulty

I think the best part of Cashier Guy was its difficulty. As I came to realize while playing the game myself, it really quickly becomes boring if making change is too easy. By providing such a high level of challenge, I think I got the intended core experience of Cashier Guy on point, and this was confirmed when I saw my brother playing the game. From a game design perspective, I think it was pretty successful.

The Bad

1. Easing the player into the game

Being a gamer all of my life, my level of skill is pretty different from those who don’t play games a lot, and this really showed. Cashier Guy’s slowest speed turned out to be already fast for someone just coming into the game, so the speed increases proved to make the game really difficult for newcomers. Top it all off with the other “fun” effects, and the game becomes downright impossible. I’ll have to keep this in mind when designing games in the future if I want to make them more accessible.

2. The tutorial

The tutorial wasn’t bad by any means, but I found that it didn’t prepare the players for the game as well as I thought. One of the things I missed in the tutorial was something that I thought players would figure out pretty quickly, which was that if you pressed another number while the indicator was over the same slot, it would change to that number. It would’ve probably been obvious to me because I like to explore my controls a lot, but it’s not obvious to others.

Another thing the tutorial missed was actual gameplay. Before starting the game, the indicator moves at the default speed and allows you to practice making change, but there’s no encouragement for players to actually practice. I think making a few change-makes should’ve been required as part of the tutorial so that players can actively learn instead of just reading the tutorial text.

3. Visibility

A tiny detail that I didn’t realize might’ve been an issue was actually the visibility of the font. I like using pixel fonts as part of my aesthetic, but it’s possible it wasn’t the best choice in this case. Cashier Guy’s font is important because they display the numbers that the player needs to see in order to make the correct change. If those numbers are hard to read, then the game becomes much harder. Another thing to keep in mind, I suppose.

4. Visual aesthetic

Yeah, it’s pretty ugly. I was so embarrassed to show the cover image of the game publicly that I removed it from the discord embed when I shared it. I’m going to have to really work on my digital art skills because I want my games to look good! It’s not because it was pixel art; pixel art can be absolutely beautiful. There are no external reasons why the game art isn’t great; I just need to work on my own art skills.

5. Not testing the game with other players before releasing the game

I discovered some game imbalances while I was watching my brother and his wife play the game. Most notably, they needed two slot passes before they would go for making change. However, I had the punishment set to after only a single slot pass, and it was a huge punishment too, which might have made the game a lot harder to those who aren’t as fast with math as I am. This would’ve been an easy fix if I had just asked others to play my game before I submitted it. In the future, I should be less shy about asking others to test my game, even if it isn’t visually appealing.

Ending Remarks

It was a fun two weeks. I’m really glad I decided to participate in My First Game Jam because I was able to learn many things about myself and my game development skills. Thank you to everyone who played my game, especially those who commented on it or rated it. As for future plans, I don’t think I’m going to participate in game jams for a while. This jam informed me about how much more I still need to learn before I’m confident in my game-making abilities.