TomeSpire 05/25 Sprint Retrospective

Inscribed on

They say there’s no rest for the wicked, which seems cruel. Being wicked is a lot of work, and everyone deserves a weekend.

Did you know there’s such a thing as Wicked Thai Chicken Soup? I don’t know what’s meant to be wicked about it. But if it’s an evil soup, I’m down. All my homies love evil, and all my homies love soup.

Okay So What Did We Actually Get Done?

The tome menu is selected from the haunted bookshelf and opens to reveal several different kinds of crops.

  • The tome menu has real pages that can do things. You can click and stuff.
  • You can plant all the things in the right place, you can harvest them from where you planted them.
  • Plants grow!
  • Also fish grow!
  • Also ores grow!
  • Yes you can grow an ore. Fight me.
  • If you harvest something, it goes into your inventory. As opposed to going into the pocket dimension containing all the world’s missing left socks.
  • There’s tabbed indicators of what can actually be planted in each area, to make that more obvious.

A pixel art scene features a wooden dock above a body of water with a grid of dark circles suggesting holes, accompanied by a bobbing red and white buoy.

  • We made the fishing plots a bit easier to visually parse. They stand out more from the background and their relative state is more obvious.

The Broth, or The Foundation of Things, or What Would I Want To Have Known Before This Sprint If I Could Have Known Them

A pixel art scene shows a small farm plot with various crops, four characters, and hay bales on a green background.

  • The sprints keep sprinting. By which I mean, time stops for no mage. By which I mean, if we get caught up in the other urgencies of life, the sprint retro is still due.
  • This is sort of why sprints exist, it’s a forcing function to make sure the keepin’ on keeps keepin’ on. But sometimes it’s also a surprise when, at 4pm in the afternoon on a Tuesday, the whole company (all two of us) realize the sprint’s almost closed and there’s still much to be done.

The Bread, or The Accoutrements, or Other Things That Go On The Side And Are Also Good Maybe But Aren’t Really A Meal On Their Own

A pixel art style game interface shows a farming, fishing, and mining inventory in an open book with a focus on crops and an empty turnip inventory.

  • Reminder to ourselves: it’s a prototype, spend less time on polish and more time on mechanics.

The Great Scott, Batman!, or The Things Coming Next, or That Which I Naively Believe We Might Actually Be Talking About Next Time

  • We think it would be nice if players knew that a crop was ready to harvest. That seems like a nice thing to make obvious. Maybe if the crop glowed? Uncertain, more research needed.
  • Animations could be more gooder.
  • Unbreak XP. Think about gameplay. Smoosh these two things together and make them kiss.
    • Also they’re married and in love.
    • And Barbie can’t play with us.
    • Ken can, though.

Hey. Did you know I’m going on vacation? I’m going on vacation! This almost never happens. We planned the prototype knowing that two, maybe even three sprints in the middle wouldn’t happen. Things might be quiet over here for the next few weeks. Just know that I’m charging up my mana pools to cast Garnog’s Greater Ridiculousnessnessness when I get back.

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