Robotato Friend!
The High Empress of Gamma Prime is coming to dinner and you must peel 10,000 potatoes before 6 pm. Build a bot to peel those potatoes!
Average Play Time: 2 minutes
Engine: Twine
Dev Notes
- thoughts on the process, documentation, & miscellany
Robotato Friend! is my scoping success story.
In December of 2021, I participated in Droqen's Variety Megajam.
(Shoutout to my friend Emma for telling me about it).
The goal of the jam was to make 10 games in 10 days over the course of the month of December.
My idiot brain decided this meant “make 10 games during the last 10 days of December.”
On Day 1, I worked about 12 hours and built 30% of a game.
On Day 2, I worked about 12 hours and built 50% of a game – what would later become Interdimensional Clown Train.
On Day 3, I was absolutely effin’ determined to make one game in one day.
The suggested prompt for Day 3 was Identity and there was NO way. NO WAY was I touching that. I looked for the ‘smallest’ prompt. Vegetable Peeler. Perfect.
I don’t like peeling vegetables. If I had to peel a lot of them, I’d want to automate it. I’d want to make a little robot pal to do it for me. Work smarter, right?
So now I had my full concept: in Twine, make the smallest game possible about building a vegetable-peeling robot.
My design decisions were as follows:
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Just one vegetable type (Obviously this means Poh-Tay-Toes).
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All choices must choke back immediately. No meandering branches.
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Some choices are ‘feel’ not ‘real’.
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‘Real’ choices are either $A or $B.
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There is no fail state.
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The player should be able to name their creation. (Putting the 'friend' in Robotato Friend!)
Instead of flowcharting, I simply scratched out a few ideas for choices in my notebook.
- In the next Iteration...
The only possible hiccup was the text entry box -- I’d never done one before. Fortunately, I found it pretty straightforward to implement.
I started Robotato around 7 am and finished by lunchtime.
Then I ate a sandwich.
A few days after publishing Robotato Friend! I realized it would make a decent kid's game -- if I rewrote the text to specifically cater to a young audience. Robotato Friend Jr., if you will.