Kalidax Farming Program

Project Overview

Kalidax Farming Program is a farming game where players are hired by the corporation UAFC to conduct a farming operation on the planet Kalidax. Players are required to collect, farm and sell the local inhabitants to meet the company quota. However, the corporation demands more revenue to be extracted from your operation, forcing you to make decisions that will harm Kalidax and its inhabitants as a whole.

Team Size: 6 Members

Roles: Game Designer, 2D Artist, System Designer

Timeline: 7 Months

Tools Used: Unity, Jira, Clip Studio, Miro, Google Docs and Excel

Play on Itch

Design Process

Project Goals

Creating a game that criticizes and showcases the consequences that corporate greed has on the environment if left to its own device

Creating a progression system that allowed flexibility and difficulty without having a sequence of events players would have to follow

Creating and drawing a unique world filled with interesting creatures and environments

Designing the Economy

Overall Goal for the Economy

Our game's economy was our main progression system and also the main hurdle the player had to overcome. So when designing wanted to create a system that rewarded player planning and player experimentation. As I didn't want our economy to be a linear set of steps that players had to figure out and follow. I wanted to give them room and opportunity to plan out their strategy and execute upon it. Since the player had to balance the act of selling seeds and aliens, planting seeds, buying new incubators and expanding their farming, there were a lot of different numbers to take into account when trying to balance the system. That's why I planned the entire economy on a spreadsheet, this way I could keep development quick as developing something on paper will always be faster than trying and testing it out in game.

Designing the Initial Economy

This led me to the first iteration of our economy where every single day the player would be required to hit a quota. The quota would get larger every day, slowly creating that difficulty that I wanted within our game. How I arrived at these exact numbers was calculating the maximum, the average and the minimum amount of seeds that the player could collect per day to sell to meet the quota. This way I could see what a unlucky, an average and luck player could experience and adapt my system to account for any form of luck. Since in this beginning stage of our game when the player would farm a tile there is a chance a seed could drop.

Flaws with the Economy

However quickly I realized that this type of quota system did not match my design philosophy. Since I wanted players to plan out and strategize on how they are going to meet the quota, having a quota every single day defeats that purpose. Certain actions like putting a seed in an incubator took multiple days to finish, it left no room for error. This type of system also puts a heavy amount of pressure onto players. As from day one you were already tasked at meeting your quota giving the player no room to learn and experiment.

Fixing the Quota

The fix of the economy was a simple yet effective one. Instead of having a quota every single day for the player to meet I space them out more, giving the player days in between before their next quota was due. This allowed more breathing room for the player and allowed them to have the time to strategize and plan out how they would meet the quota. In doing this the multiplier for the quotas was increased so every quota was significantly larger and harder to reach because of how spread out they now were. Additionally I scaled back on some of our other systems that were tied to the economy to make it simpler and more easy to work with.

Using Spreadsheets

When working with the economy system I mainly used a spreadsheet that I designed. I did this because it was a fast and cheap way of visually seeing how the economy worked and was very easy to edit if needed. I designed the spreadsheet in a way that if I changed the quota amount or any other point in the economy all the other data would be updated. Doing it this way increased the time it took for me to set up the chart, however in the grand scheme of things it decreased the amount of work I had to do when editing the chart, greatly saving me more time.

Designing Aliens

The Task

Since our game was set on a distant alien planet the game needed their own unique animals to inhabit the environment. Specifically within our game the player is tasked with farming these aliens and selling them for money. I was tasked with designing and coming up with 3 separate alien designs for the player to farm and splice together and pitching them to the team.

Gathering Reference

The first step to my design process was gathering reference material. I gather material from both real world animals and fictional ones. For my real world animal references I stuck with deep sea aquatic life and insects. These animals have very unique and distinct features that aren't common in animals that people see in their everyday lives, making them perfect references for aliens.

Concept Art

Once I gathered my references I then made some quick sketches of the aliens base form and their more hybridized mutant forms. For the designs themselves I wanted the aliens to look like more real animals that had an alien and slightly monstrous twist to them to better sell that they weren't from our planet. As the aliens got genetically hybridized their monstrous qualities would be exaggerated and take over the design. The sketches I drew were drawn rather quickly as I wasn't the artist handling character art, my role was only designing them. So I wanted to make more quick drawings so I had more time to design an experiment with the concepts.

Designing Alien Lore

Finally I gave the creatures lore mainly about how they fit into the ecosystem and what effects were on the environment. Additionally, my document offers up where their seeds would be found within the playable area to give the level designers a sense of where the seeds will need to be and what environment they would need to be in.

Adding Progression

Removable Wall Prototype

When developing the game it made itself apparent to me that our game lacked a sense of linear progression. We did have the progression system in the way of buying additional incubators to create more aliens. However, I felt that the ability to unlock new regions and find new aliens within them would benefit our game. So I developed a rock barrier that could be cleared using money to get access to the second more valuable alien. This way the player had more options when it came to using their money besides just buying more incubators. Which gave the player more options when it came to meeting the quota and tied into my wants for the economy and progression.

Removable Walls Final

The price of the wall had to fit into our economy and allowed the player to decide when they think they should open it. I did this by plugging the price into the spreadsheet and making sure the rest of the quotas were achievable. To reinforce this I conducted playtests both internally and externally to see that the wall could be removed at different points in the game and didn't soft lock the player. Additionally if the player interacted with the wall and didn't have the funds necessary to clear it, the wall would flash red to reinforce that a requirement wasn't met.

Playtesting

Over the development period of the game I conducted and hosted 10 playtest sessions at various stages. These tests were integral in reinforcing design decisions that worked well and highlighting faulty or intuitive systems within our game. When conducting playtests I had to follow our playtest protocol which provided me with a script of how to introduce the game and the playtest and detailed instructions on how to conduct these play tests. We did this protocol to make sure all of our playtests were conducted in the same way to not skew the data we got.

How I Playtested

When conducting a playtest I would introduce myself plus the game and thank the playtester for taking the time out of their day to play our game. Playtesters would then have to fill out a pretest survey so we could gather certain information on their background around their gaming skill and enjoyment of genres. Once the pretest survey was filled out I would then ask them if it was okay if I recorded the playtest. If the participant said yes I would record the session, if they did not feel comfortable with it being recorded we would continue to playtest without the recording. Recording the playtests was quite handy as I could always go back and review the footage and take more detailed notes on the behavior of the player and recall quotes that they would say. Once the participant finished the game they would then be asked to fill out a post test survey. This survey was more focused on the game itself asking questions about mechanics, gameplay and any pain points they might have experienced. This was great at gathering data and seeing what players liked and disliked and addressing that in future development.

Creating the Environment

I was also tasked with creating environmental assets to populate our cave environment and was in charge of creating the incubator and the gene splicing pod. My goal for these assets were to as close as possible remain true to our games art style by analyzing our main artists and replicating the style they were going for. Overall for someone who doesn't usually do 2D work I think my work blends well with the rest of our artists work. I'm overall proud of what I've created.