I am quite happy with the reception I have received for Fur! but there are always improvements that can be made. This post-mortem will take a little look at my process in creating this game and also reflect on what worked, what didn't work and what I would like to continue working on. Although I am starting to get busy with school, Fur! is a game I would love to continue working on to get closer to the creative vision I originally had in mind.

Issue #1: UI/UX and Player Onboarding

The most frequent criticism I got was players having a hard time understanding how to play. I am not surprised by this criticism as the only instructions the player gets are a static text instruction panel. Ideally, an interactive tutorial would be the best way to introduce the player to the interface.

Another issue with the UI/UX of Fur! is that the player doesn't get to see how their decisions are played out. My original goal was to animate the player's dice so the player would see a clear connection between their dice and the RNG happening behind the scenes, but I ran out of time during the game jam. The player locks in their dice, and then their resources are magically updated but the player doesn't see how or why they received a given quantity of resources.

Issue #2: Economy/Resource Balancing

From the beginning of the game jam, I knew I would not have enough time to properly plan out and balance the players acquisition of resources. But even for this gamejam demo version of Fur! I didn't want to completely wing it. 

I tooled around with mathematical equations to get a general sense of how the commodities (beaver and buffalo) should be priced. Generally, the buffalo should cost more than beaver and the acquisition of either of these resources will cause the prices to shift along these lines. The equations to solve for price of a commodity as a function of stock available in the game world, supply and demand. In future iterations of Fur! I would like to plan out the economy using Machinations to get an idea of how much resources should cost, and what should the probabilities in acquiring resources be to ensure a consistent gameplay experience that scales over time. This step is particularly important to nail down because it is this resource growth curve over time that provides the satisfaction to the player of starting with nothing and attaining in-game power.

Issue #3: Competition against Opponent AI

Right now the "AI" of the opposing Northwest Company doesn't do much of anything. Rather than the game feeling like a tense economic competition between rivals (a la Offworld Trading Simulator) it feels like a flat tension curve for the player. Ideally, I would create an enemy AI that takes into account its resources and makes smart decisions to over take the player as the economic powerhouse of the game world. The Opponent AI should be an additional factor affecting the decisions that the player is making.

Issue #4: Historical Context and Narrative

If I had more time to work on this project I would definitely flesh out the historical context and background narrative of this game. The Pemmican War is an interesting, and relatively unheard of piece of Canadian history and would serve as a fascinating backdrop for a narrative. Right now, Fur! lacks any sense of emotional attachment to anything in the game, which is not what I intended when I first started developing Fur!. I wanted the player to see first hand the human cost of their greedy actions, and right now that is completely absent from the game.

Conclusion

Overall, I am happy with how the core mechanics of Fur! turned out. I may have bitten off more than I could chew deciding to make a game like this in 7 days. I still really like the idea of dice representing human resources and might revisit that idea down the line.