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justaddwater.html
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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/look.css">
<title>Shrunk in the Wash? Just add water!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Shrunk in the Wash? Just Add Water!</h1>
<h2>About the developer and the game</h2>
<div>
<p>
Shrunk in the Wash? Just Add Water! is joeldipops' submission for the N64Brew Game Jam. Probably one of the most unique and clever concepts in the jam, Just Add Water is all about strategically putting up clothes to dry in the sun. Players have to organize their laundry while keeping track of the weather forecast.
</p>
</div>
<h2>Chatting with joeldipops</h2>
<p class="interview-question">What got you into Nintendo 64 homebrew?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
This is going to be a long and rambling story, but I'm going to tell it, because you've made the mistake of giving me a platform. So shortly after the 64 came out in Australia, Mum took my brother and I to the local department store to buy us our first video game console. Maybe it was Christmas, maybe my parents had had a bumper pay-day at work, I really don't remember, but it was a big moment in my life. None of us knew much about games, but I'm sure I must have been pretty excited to play. We get to the counter and the clerk recommends this new shiny thing, the Nintendo 64. "Nintendo 64! Nintendo 64!" my brother and I chant.
</p>
<p>
But it was twice the price of the Super Nintendo on sale next to it, and Mum was never one to pass up a bargain. So we ended up with a SNES, Donkey Kong Country 2 (my choice) and some random Jungle Book game (my brother's - guess who works as a programmer and does N64 homebrew, and who owns a landscaping and equipment hire business XD)
</p>
<p>
So I never owned a 64 as a kid. I did play quite a bit of Pokemon Stadium, Banji Tooie and Episode One Racer at my mate's place. Shoutout to Xena Warrior Princess: The Talisman of Fate, too!
</p>
<p>
Fast forward to adulthood. I move to the big city, I'm making my own money and one of the first things I do pick up a 64 from a retro gaming place. I probably paid a bit too much for it, but bringing it home and setting it up felt GOOD.
</p>
<img src="media/justaddwater/DSC00672.JPG" width="640px"/>
<p>
That was probably a turning point for me - I started thinking of myself as a game collector, not someone who loved games. Not that I really take collecting seriously. I don't have a fancy display case, nothing all that rare, and the only boxed copies I have are ones that kinda fell in to my lap. But what I found I most loved collecting was add-ons and peripherals. I wanted to play FFXIII's Chocobo World on the Sony Pocket Station, I wanted to play DK's Jungle Beat with the Donkey Kong Bongos, and I wanted to play Four Swords Adventures with four GBAs. Or better yet Five gamecubes and four Game Boy Players. (So far have only managed three players, two GBAs, a Gamecube, and a Wii. - still a good time though) And I wanted to play Pokemon Stadium 2 with my own Pokemon via the Transfer Pak.
</p>
<p>
Here's the thing though. My Pokemon Crystal save battery was dead. I had managed to complete my pokedex on that save. One of my proudest acheivements? And I couldn't bring myself to start over. The hurt was too real (or was I just lazy?). But I still wanted that Transfer Pak. My collection had a gaping hole.
</p>
<p>
I asked myself "How can I justify owning a Transfer Pak if I'm too lazy to play the games I need to make it interesting."
</p>
<p>
I don't know what mental loops I must have jumped through to arrive at the answer I came up with, but here it is: Instead of buying a few pokemon games and having a nice time playing through them, I was going to Fill The Missing Gap In The N64 Library, Make That N64 Version of the Super GameBoy and Do What Nintendo Never Did.
</p>
<p>
And so I dove in to N64 Homebrew. My emulator is still kinda crappy and I haven't worked on it seriously in a year. But it's there and I'm proud of how far I've come with it. Someday... soommeeedayy, I'm gonna finish it by dammit!
</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="interview-question">How did you come up with the concept for your game? Was there anything about the jam's theme that stood out to you?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
I went through a long period of vacillating over whether I wanted to do the jam or not. I knew I would't have much time with a 1year old to take care of and definitely didn't want to join a team only to let them down when my son refused to go to bed too many nights in a row. And of course there was the ever-present feeling of imposter syndrome.
</p>
<p>
I figured if I was going to do anything at all, it would be some sort of puzzle game, since I assumed that'd be the simplest thing to whip up, and assets could be barebones. At first, I actually wanted to some sort of JRPG battle simulator, but I didn't think of any ideas that would have worked.
</p>
<img src="media/justaddwater/DSC01192.JPG" width="640px"/>
<p>
Eventually, I fell back on an idea for a board game I'd had a few years earlier. I talked about this in my interview with the judges, but I'll see if I can provide more details here.
</p>
<p>
At the time I had been playing a decent number of board games, and I realised that while video games so often involve violence and combat, board games are often about more peaceful or mundane things. In Catan you're building roads, in Monopoly you're buying houses and in Sushi Go, you're making sushi. So I kinda wanted to come up with my own mundane idea. I was living in a sharehouse at the time, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who know what I mean when I talk about the race for the washing machine on a Saturday morning. Not to mention the mad dash outside when you hear that first pitter-patter of a downpour when your clothes are almost dry.
</p>
<p>
So it was a competitive game, with an action economy. You had a hand full of sock, jock and shirt cards to get rid of, a few dice to predict the weather and the choice to hang your clothes out in the sun or under-cover. I especially liked the savagery with which you could spend an action to tear down an opponent's clean jeans and throw them in the proverbial mud.
</p>
<p>
Converting the idea from a a multiplayer party game to a single-player tetris-like came with a lot of changes, but ultimately it lent itself pretty well to the format.
</p>
<p>The announcement of the theme was really what convinced me to give the jam a shot. The ideas of clothes being "shrunk in the wash" on one hand and "instant growth, just add water!" on the other made perfect sense as a size-changing mechanic, so I was able to dive right in to it.</p>
<p>
Taking a step back it exactly the kind of theme I was hoping for. Abstract enough to be interesting but concrete enough to not leave anyone scratching their head for too long.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="interview-question">What tools did you end up using to create your game?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
I'm a libdragon fan so I used that. I like the idea of my homebrew being as open-source and 'legal' as possible, and I love how well documented and cleanly written the library is. I haven't experimented with Nintendo's SDK at all yet.
</p>
<p>
VS Code is my editor or choice, and I used GIMP to make the ugly, ugly icons. This was on a Dell running Ubuntu. For testing, I've got an Everdrive 2.5 and a PAL N64 hooked up to a small LCD TV. I'd dearly love one of the newer Everdrives with a USB connection, but when I first started working with the 64, I could barely justify the $100 v2.5, let alone the more expensive 3.0
</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="interview-question">Is there anything you particularily enjoy about your game, or is there something you worked on that you're particularily proud of?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have no illusions that my game was by far the ugliest of the jam, but I am proud that I got it in to a more-or-less playable state by the deadline. In particular I'm extremely happy with the last few days of the jam. My game had this bug where it would play fine for a random amount of time, and then freeze up completely without any obvious cause. Never the easiest bug to fix when it could be almost anywhere in the code-base. I found a bug and fixed it. The freeze still happened. I think there ended up being 4 or 5 completely different bugs that all had the effect of arbitrarily freezing the game, but in those last few days, I managed to track down and fix them all - at least no-one has mentioned to me that the game still freezes - and that felt immeasurably awesome.</p>
<p>I also think the code is pretty clean and maintainable for something built so quickly. I only have my own impressions on that, but clean code means a lot to me</p>
<p>I don't think my game is very enjoyable in its current state. I haven't balanced it well and I think the difficulty curve probably goes from boring to literally impossible far too quickly. It also fails pretty hard at conveying what the various icons mean and I feel a bit bad about that. But I am convinced that the mechanics and the core idea work and a decent game isn't further away than some visual design and graphic artistry (by someone who knows what they're doing) and a whole lot of time spent playtesting.</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="interview-question">Your game is unique in that it uses the directional pad and C buttons for each ingame hand. It's interesting and helps bring something refreshing to the Nintendo 64. What made you decide to present this control scheme?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
Honestly, a lot of my motivation was just to do something different. The N64's D-pad, and especially the L button did not get a lot of love during the console's heyday, so I wanted to come up with something that used them. The other thing I was trying to capture was that controlled chaos central to a lot a puzzle games. For an experienced player, I wanted them to be able to build up this impressive rythm as they managed one task or the other, and I wanted the skill ceiling to be high enough that an expert player can be hammering out both tasks at once to the awe of anyone watching.
</p>
<p>
As I said earlier, I don't think the game can offer that in its current form, it needs a tonne of tuning yet, but I think it would be an amazing feeling to be playing a game like that, and I don't think there's many that offer that level of truly simultaneous multi-tasking.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="interview-question">Like you mention, your game is similar to board games in that it has a slice-of-life theme to it. Are there other "mundane" activities you'd like to see transformed into video games?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
I think this is going to be very niche, but I am a tragic when it comes to elections. Not necessarily the politics around them, but the actual voting and counting systems used to pick winners. I live in a country with enough different states to have a bunch of different ways of voting but few enough to more or less understand them all. I could talk at length about how the 'Proportional Representation via Single Transferable Vote' system is extremely complicated but very fair, or why 'Group Voting Tickets' are one of the least democratic features you'll find in any country that doesn't actively rig its elections. So perhaps you could come up with a Sim style game where you set up parties, issues and elections and watch them play out. Or maybe a game where you play as a corrupt official and you're actually trying to manipulate the systems to get a particular result.
</p>
<p>
Sure, probably no-one would be in to that but me, but I'd still love to see it happen.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p class="interview-question">If someone wanted to get into homebrew today, would you have any advice or suggestions for them?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(coming soon!)</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Screenshots</h2>
<img width="320px" src="media/justaddwater/vlcsnap-2021-04-07-13h38m20s547.png">
<img width="320px" src="media/justaddwater/vlcsnap-2021-04-07-13h38m53s212.png">
<img width="320px" src="media/justaddwater/vlcsnap-2021-04-07-13h38m49s332.png">
<img width="320px" src="media/justaddwater/vlcsnap-2021-04-07-13h39m09s247.png">
<h2>Some Nice Links</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/N64brew-Game-Jam-2020/Just-Add-Water">The source code for Shrunk in the Wash? Just add water!</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6-vxqsInnY">Gameplay recording on YouTube</a></li>
</ul>
<a href="index.html">Back to the main page</a>
<hr>
<p>Website by Daniel Savage<br />
Interviews are CC BY-SA 4.0; Screenshots are likely fair use.<br />
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"><img alt="licensed under reative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" /></a></p>
</body>
</html>