We made Brownie Town for the Godot Wild Jam #82, Unseen. When the theme is announced we start throwing out ideas and discussing them, as well as tossing out variations and refining the ideas. We continue until we have an idea refined enough that we think it will make a decent game, that we should be able to do in the time available, and that we will have fun making.

A stealth game was an obvious choice for the theme, as were the fae, who are often referred to as the the hidden folk or unseen. We did have some other fun ideas, but most of them were not doable, with our current skills, in the limited time of a jam. While we decided that we’d have a bit of a stealth game, we also wanted to make it different. We’ve been making more lighthearted games, so picked Brownies doing chores, over more typical stealth game styles involving combat or stealing. We also decided that it would not be just stealth, but also include mini-games.

We start with more ideas/features than we’ll have time for, then narrow the scope as the week progresses and we see what is likely to be doable. This time we overdid it more than normal, especially since we had some things not related to game dev that needed to be done which took up a couple days. Getting the game to the point where we felt it was enough of a game to be worth submitting required a very long final night. We all stayed up late to get it into an acceptable state, and I ended up pulling an all-nighter to finish some final touches, including the 3^rd (sweeping) mini-game. We tend to do long days during the jams to get as much of our plan into the game, but this one we pushed more than normal.

The original plan was to have the game progress over several days. We had not settled on if you would pick one house at the start and stay with it, or be able to pick a new one each day. In either case we wanted to have a popup with details about the house, such as who lived there and which Brownie took care of the house. The houses were designed with specific people living there in mind, but we did not have time for the UI to show those details. We also have art for variations on the Brownie so we could have different ones for each house.

If you did well at the chores (mini-games), the people would leave you a bowl of cream, which would offer a bonus. We had a lot of ideas for mini-games, including some outside the house. There are also variations for some of the games, such as instead of washing dishes you’d wash the car, or instead of sweeping you’d dust. With time constraints we decided to focus on just getting the base version done. It does make the houses a bit more repetitive than we’d like. I had thought about implementing some simple multi-day logic, but it felt like there would not be much difference from just restarting the game. If players enjoyed it enough to play more they could play another game. No point making it longer just to be longer.

One of the other features, which would knew from the start would be tough to implement in time, was to also add Goblins. The most basic version would have them showing up in the house you were in and causing mischief. They could trigger new mini-games. If you had sorted a bookshelf, they might undo the sorting. They might also go to a book shelf that had not been set as an active mini-game and activate it as one. We had a planned mini-game of finding the person’s keys they had misplaced, and putting them where they belong, and the Goblins could instead take keys that were in place and hide them. The Goblins would be like the Brownies in that they could be invisible. If a human walked into a room, any Goblins would vanish. You could also get them into your Vision Cone to make them leave. The even more time-consuming variation we wanted to implement was to let you play as the Goblins as well. We’d have some houses listed as good people who the Brownies wanted to help, and others that were mean to them and that they left to the Goblins to cause mischief in.

We had also planned for people to be inside the houses. They would have a routine, as well as some random behaviors, such as getting up at night for a glass of water. Some might go for nighttime walks and could come home after you arrived. You’d need to balance completing the chores while avoiding detection. This would have included a time element as well for motivation and challenge. We also wanted there to be a sound based stealth element as you did the chores so that you could wake the people up if you were too loud. Different people have different awareness levels, and some houses would be listed as easier due to heavy sleepers.

We are a family dev team. I am the lead programmer, and my wife is lead artist. While we create our games we are also teaching our kids to do game dev. In Brownie Town they created several mini-games, including the dishes and book sorting ones that made it in. They also customized look of the humans, gave them names and mini background stories, and did the initial design of the house interiors based on their stories. We then went over their work and helped clean it up and integrated it into the core game. They also take part in deciding what game we create for the jam and any overall design decisions. While they don’t have their own account yet, they do play the other jam games and give their feedback when we rate them.

We certainly had too much planned and need to better set our expectations for these jam games. Still, I think the submitted version is decent. The core mechanics are there and can be built upon in the future. We do plan to have a post-jam release with some quality of life improvements. At the moment we are not planning any major updates, such as adding all the features we did not get done in time. Perhaps at some point in the future we will come back to this. Maybe in a future jam we will take some of those ideas and create something new with them. For now, we want to get back to Let’Em Run Free. We had intended to release an update to it before this jam, but it still needs a bit of polish.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and for playing our games!