That's a wrap for the Retrograde Jam. I greatly appreciate a jam that focuses solely on retro feeling games, it is in line with my creative vision as a whole and it allows me to make and play the kind of games I'm always looking for. I was happy to find it and participate to bring RADISH MASTER to life.

The idea for RADISH MASTER came to me not long after making Shoot-a-Can Jr. for the GMTK game jam (https://squid-related-games.itch.io/shoot-a-can-jr). I was really proud of my work for the GMTK jam, but there were a couple complaints I had with the design overall: It's extremely luck based, and I made a lot of compromises to my vision for the game due to time and my own limitations. I wanted to make a fast-paced puzzle game that wasn't so swingy.

I think I managed to accomplish that with RADISH MASTER, but not without some struggles. This is the first instance in which I have employed a sort of modern-Tetris algorithmic approach. The different vegetables will appear in fours, meaning the player is focusing more on the moment to moment decision making and shuffling baskets. Right?

While the algorithm worked, I ran into some design problems and bugs along the way. Let's start with design, and then move to bugs:

The current version of the game will end when the player mismatches or a flower hits a single basket. My initial concept allowed the player to lose baskets and continue playing. The player would also start with four baskets instead of three. There were a couple immediate problems with this design: First, it turned out the player can very easily navigate one basket around many vegetables and falling flowers. If all sessions ended with the player shuffling one basket, I felt the sense of accomplishment for winning was lost. On the other hand, even at slow speeds holding on to all four baskets was challenging. Losing the first basket always felt unfair. Why so, with an evenly distributed spread of veggies using the modern Tetris algorithm?

Bugs, that's why. The plucking function has a bug in which, at certain times, the vegetables are doubled. This would be wildly unfair if two different vegetables were falling in the same space, so I came up with a method to ensure that each pluck only spawns one type of vegetable. Essentially, when a duplicate appears, the game will resolve which vegetable stays based on a simple hierarchy (favoring the radish, of course). This throws in some deviation with the intended output of the algorithm, and if you pay attention you'll likely catch a couple frames where one vegetable turns to another. With this simple resolution, there is an edge case where if the doubled vegetable is of the same type, you'll simply score two for the price of one. The doubles are ever so slightly visible, so I didn't bother ironing this out and consider it to be a feature. Sometimes you'll get a double, nice!

Hindsight is 20/20, and I think that the game has more untapped potential. There are some easy bugs to fix, and I've received great feedback so far during the jam rating period. Even with these design issues and bugs, I feel like RADISH MASTER accomplishes what it set out to do: It's a more reliably fair and skill based puzzle game than I had made before. To what degree it is better or more fun than my other games remains to be seen.

-Jonah

https://twitter.com/jonah_srg