Project description
Keep It Mowing is an arcade-like game where you play as a grumpy farmer, whose garden is being infested by pesky flowers. Hitting your lawn mower gets it moving, and the aim of the game is to run over as many flowers as you can without getting run over yourself!
Made as a team building exercise at the start of my internship at Godspear Games. This was a submission as part of the UNWRAP Gamejam 2023. A physical jam over the course of 3 days. We opted for something quick and witty, and ended up placing third as per player vote. Art was made by Oscar Tulkens, our boss, and my fellow intern Joran De Pessemier worked on programming alongside me.
The controls are simple, move with WASD, and hit your land mower with left click, shooting it towards your cursor. Gain points by driving over flowers, which can be seen on the number in the grass.
My contribution
As mentioned, this project functioned as a form of team building. A the very start of your internship, Oscar Tulkens asked us if we would be interested in participating in a gamejam with the goal of testing the waters. Luckily we were able to work together quite efficiently, which set a good mood for the rest of the semester.
In terms of learning, this project was about fast brainstorming and prototyping, and figuring out how to work together in a quick and efficient manner despite never having worked together before. I mainly programmed during this project, working on the gameplay aspects. This all went quite smoothly, and I’m happy with the end product we reached within the time limit given.
Programmatically, I mainly performed the tasks required for the core gameplay. Focussing on aspects such as making the hitting of the lawn mower satisfying and reactive. To achieve this, I had the mower react based on mathematical equations relative to the player’s position and their aim. Adding an aspect of randomness to it on top, as to cause some emergent gameplay.
Aside from this, we worked together to make the game as satisfying as possible. Turning the polish up to 11, we added little things to every aspect of the gameplay as possible. This was my first learning experience with polish, a large aspect of what Godspear Games targets in terms of user experience, and it is something that I will take with me hence forward.