Launch

I finally worked on a project with a small enough scope that I was able to get it to a state in which I could upload it. I made this game to get ready to attempt the GMTK 2025 Game Jam. I based this game off of last year's theme: "Built to Scale". In the game you play as a travel agent who arranges expeditions to scale the Seven Summits; The largest mountains on each tectonic plate. you pick all the resources needed to scale each mountains from dropdown menus and set the price for the expedition. You get stats about each mountain and there's a Safety Sheet in the game's guide which lets you know how many resources a patron will require. The game consists of 7 mountains that each act as a puzzle. The mountains gets progressively taller and you get more options for how to scale them as camps are introduced. There are two scores in the game: money and the safety rating. You start out with a safety rating of 5/5 and no money. If you complete a puzzle and either score is at 0 you will lose. You make money by setting a price for each puzzle that covers the cost of all the supplies, camps and sherpas you have selected and turns a profit on top of that. If you set your price to high you will get few or no customers.  There are many different ways to solve each puzzles but some cost more than others. If you fail to bring enough supplies it will decrease your safety rating. If you solve all 7 puzzles you will be met with a screen that displays your final scores and gives you a  review of how you did.

I felt that the game met the theme of built to scale in two ways; It's about scaling mountains and it's about building a business. I also did build the game to hopefully scale nicely on different devices however that required some tweaks when I uploaded the project to itch.io and designing the game in that manner was more about playability, not about the theme. I did build this game after having seen the Game Maker's Toolkit video about last year's game jam. I think many of the games were able to use the theme in more creative ways then I did however I think my approach did meet the theme. 

I developed the game using Twine's Harlowe story format.  As a tool primarily for telling interactive stories I was fairly limited in what I could do. I think those limitations did help me design the game as I had other ideas for games and features however I couldn't figure out how to make them work with Twine. I chose to go with a monochrome and ACSII art style largely due to time as I was trying to build the game in a few days to mimic a game jam. I think the style works well for twine games and that approach definitely saved me time versus other projects where I draw all my own assets. Google's Icon font also worked well with the style and saved me from having to make many of the assets at all.

I built most of the game in 1 day and three evenings.  A few things like the credits page and various small tweaks were made after that. The research ended up taking more time then I expected. Making a game that is based on something real was nice as all the stats already existed, I just need to compile it all. It was during this time I learnt about the term the seven summits as I had originally planned to only include the three tallest mountains in the world. I think having more puzzles was good as It is already a short game and It wasn't a lot of work to add each mountain after the first one was put together.

I decided to upload this project to itch.io as I wanted to go through the whole process of publishing a game before attempting a game jam. I am happy I did as I had some difficulty getting the game to work properly and had to do a bit of troubleshooting. I now have a better idea of how things should be formatted so I hopefully can avoid those issues if I ever finish another game again.

I like the game. It is built to my sensibilities. I like resource management style games and puzzles games. I worry that it is too confusing initially and too simple once you get it. The instructions are one of the elements in the game I tweaked the most and spent the most time on despite how simple they are. I still worry the guide does not give enough information but I wanted the whole thing to fit on one page so that it was easy to display. I found it fun trying to get the highest scores I could. Due to the game being so short you can iterate pretty quickly and try new things. I don't think the game has much replayabilty beyond that but I think that tends to be the case with a lot of puzzle games.