An Honest Day's Work
Genre
Third-person Multiplayer Tycoon
Date Created
Dec 2022
Award
Persistent Worlds
An Honest Day's Work was a collaboration effort between myself and two other designers. We wanted to challenge ourselves by creating a game for the Crayta Mega-Jam, without having prior experience in using the Crayta game engine. We were given 2 weeks to complete the project, and emerged with the Persistent Worlds award for our game. My contribution to the collaboration was as the Lead Designer, Level Designer, and Game Developer.
This video is a full walkthrough of the game. Since Crayta closed down on March 3rd, 2023, this is all that remains of this game.
The Mega-Jam theme was "Unfinished Business". They wanted to see games that would draw players back to the game time and time again. Following this theme, we designed a campground with several things for players to do. There is a centralized Main Lodge where the main Farm Shop is located, along with the leaderboards and the lotto machine. The Main Lodge is centrally located to help guide players from the lodge to the various locations throughout the game.
The Farm Shop, which is located at the Main Lodge, offers players the ability to purchase seeds that they can plant in the their farms. Players can also sell items they acquire from the lotto booth and from fishing. The progression of seeds into plants will result in the plants being sold for coin. Coins can be used to unlock more crop plots, or keys to other locations in the game. Each location offers a higher rarity of fish, and more valuable crops to grow and sell.
Fishing was added to the game so that players wouldn't get so bored while waiting on their crops to grow. Also, deep below the surface of the lake, is a path that will lead players to a hidden cavern where they can obtain a key that is required to access the most valuable plant in the game; the Bird of Paradise.
The Hidden Cavern also has a Fish Market located conveniently so as players are fishing to acquire the Snow Key from their fishing adventures, they can sell the fish they catch to help increase their coins count.
The second level of farming is done in the Alien World. Here players much purchase incubators, then alien embyos, to help save the alien race by incubating their eggs for them. Once incubated, the eggs can be turned in to collect payment in the form of coins.
Through the design process of An Honest Day's Work, I used various assets to create leading lines and breadcrumbs around the game so the players will never get lost. Behind the scenes I had to tweak the numbers for each crop so that the time to completion would allow for a fun and interesting experience, rather than just a quick speed run to boredom. The cost of each seed, the time to grow, whether it needs water and how much, and the value when sold all had to be balanced out in order to allow for a fun and rewarding experience.