This project was a challenge of scope from the start. To get to the meaty balance of interesting systems, I thought I had to make the systems complex enough for interesting interactions to occur. This initially started as a multi-fold system of: chicken types, daily tasks of chicken maintenance, randomized weather patterns, in-game shop using in-game currency from the previous steps.

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Shortly before my final ship, I cut a lot of the systems. I highly pared down the in-game shop to simplify it, cut the chicken type complication down, and entirely cut the chicken maintenance. I wanted to focus on making the systems I had good rather than overwhelming players with everything that needed to be done.

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I poured a lot of time into balancing the chickens with the night event system to ensure that players were given a fair chance to succeed, while also still making it tense enough to be engaging. By adding in a prediction system through the Weather TV, players were able to gauge what would happen and make choices of how they wanted to save their chickens.

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This solo project was given a total of three-quarters of a year's worth of work, spread over two years. I was able to take the initial kernel of my project from the initial quarter into an extended and expanded project that it has become at the end of the single semester of development and polish I was given.

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I focused all of my coding efforts on making the systems dynamic and flexible, which meant that when I had to cut a lot of content, it was quick and involved very little refactoring. This means that I could easily reinstate these systems if I were to continue working on the project.