Farm Jam 2026 - Dev Log 2

An explanation

I know I originally intended to submit dev logs as frequently as possible. Unfortunately, between working on the game jam itself and life getting in the way, something had to give. So I gave up the dev logs to ensure I didn't lack time elsewhere.

Where Do Things Stand?

The game is "complete", and by that I mean I have the core game loop I was aiming for and have submitted it to be reviewed and played by other jam contenders. Some extra things I would have liked to have seen didn't get added in time and I ran into some issues along the way but overall the game is getting good feedback for where it is, the core loop is enjoyable and it's a great foundation to build on top of if I decide to continue working on it outside of the Jam itself. I learned quite a bit during this process, dove into GDScript quite a bit more than I ever have in the past and learned more about Godot than I've ever known from my hobby dabbling before. I even had to jump into Aseprite a few times to make my own art assets but it was much more manageable and the end results were much more pleasing to the eye than I would have expected. If you're ever on the fence about how to learn or upskill in something like game development or design, I'd 100% recommend a jam like this, find a genre you're passionate about, a timeframe that would work best for you, and put something out there and keep yourself engaged with the community to make sure you're motivated and consistent.

So, what is the game?

The core idea behind the game was that the player character would be the towns general store owner and secondary farm/ranch owner (Think Marnie and Pierre from Stardew Valley), you take over a pre-existing business from someone else, and in doing so take a loan for operating costs and rent for the market stall that your shop operates out of. Your predecessor leaves you with a few supplies and 1 baby chick. You're goal is to pay off the loan from the bank within the 20 day cycle without missing 2 consecutive payments or the farm and market stall are taken by the bank. You have to raise animals (chickens, pigs, cows) to maturity to sell at market to other farmers in the area who will need them, you'll also sell wheat for feed and other harvestable items. Occasionally you'll receive personal requests in the mail from the locals as well, these will pay more but you may not have the time or resources to complete them so choose your requests wisely. You're behavior towards customers and accepted requests impacts your stores reputation which in turn impacts your customer count and sell prices. Balance farm, customers, and store needs without forgetting about the bills due at the end of each week for a successful run.

Welcome to Stable Stocks

I decided to name the game Stable Stocks, kind of a play on words of both the financial stability you'll need to maintain and the stabled livestock you care for on the farm itself.

Issues and what I'd do differently

I ran into quite a few issues during this process, which was expected to an extent as this was all mostly new to me. I couldn't figure out Godot Autotiler for tilemaps, audio streams were a curveball at first as well and making dialogue boxes with proper pagination setup based on text length was way harder than you'd expect among other things. If I was starting over I think I'd have better defined what assets I was utilizing for what purpose, properly setup a theme file for my user interface to avoid continually recreating the same thing over and over again, confirm my fonts work as expected without built in spacing between the top and bottom of the font itself, utilize the Godot Asset Library for things that I don't have to build myself (Looking at you Godot Dialogue Manager... I promise I'll reach for you next time) and properly setup the project structure from the beginning instead of reworking it multiple times as it grows. I learned the hard way that a lot of the things I wanted to do, more than likely has an option via the asset library to make it much simpler. Although, doing it yourself is a good learning experience, on a time crunch like this, re-inventing the wheel may not have been the best option. Also, I'd have studied the HTML export and itch.io submission process more, I had issues with my export and upload that made me run past the 10:59 PM submission deadline, thankfully the team hosting this jam was kind enough to allow me to submit afterwards and I'm extremely thankful for that.

Time Management

I was so proud of myself during this process until halfway through. I went from being 4-5 days ahead of schedule, to missing a week of development and then some when life came up and then crunching last minute to make up for the lost time and get something polished and viable submitted in time.

Going Forward

This experience was extremely fun even if I was frustrated or demotivated at times, the end result, sharing this experience with the jam community, discussing ideas and development with a group doing the same thing I am, was one of the best takeaways from this. Not only do I get to see a game I made from concept to completion but I get to see other people enjoy it, provide feedback, pointers, and on top of that I get to see their take on the game jam theme and the differences we all have in our own end result. I believe I will continue doing these in the future, I wanted to do Godot Wild Jam 96 (Theme was Charge) and even had a concept for it but it started before this Jam was done and now I only have 3 days left to build something. I may take my idea for that and build it out anyways just for fun and to continue learning. Regardless of what I choose to do, I'll do my best to continue writing about it, even if it's just for myself to look back on in retrospect and see how far I've come with this "new" hobby of mine.

What's Next

The teams in this jam are now all spending our time discussing eachothers submissions, rating them individually, and waiting for the rating period to end. At the time of writing this, that's in 5 days. Once the voting period is over, we'll be able to see where Stable Stocks stands in the categories we voted on and overall. I'll do another post when that happens and discuss anything that comes to mind that I didn't mention here, there.

Where's the game?

You can check out the Jam build of Stable Stocks here. It isn't much but for a 30 day game jam and my first attempt at something like this in quite some time I'm proud to have something "finished". If you check it out, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did building it and maybe one day I'll update it with some additional content and the stretch goals that didn't make it to the jam build.