Wendle & Crow

Assets and Game Creation

Paige “Mooch” - Visual Assets

Every visual you see in the game including fonts - with the exception being the game’s logo, which uses the “Jekteam” font by Khurasan: https://www.fontspace.com/khurasan , was hand-drawn by Paige in Clip Studio Paint. All UI, buttons, fonts, character art, etc. were Paige’s responsibility and defined the visual aesthetic of the game.

Caleb - Godot Coding - Message on Discord

Caleb made sure Paige’s assets and Guti’s sounds had a world in which to live and breathe. He worked hard to create a faux isometric perspective with GODOT’s 2D tools, and dedicated a significant amount of his time to making sure everyone’s visions could be realized. All coding, debug, and interactive mechanics were created by Caleb. He also made some cool visual effects to help sell the actions and lighting in the world.

Alex “Guti” - Music and SFX

Guti was the sound wizard. He brought his full library and years of sound design experience to the table and made sure our game sounded exactly the way we wanted. All sound effects and music you hear in the game, from simple menu clicks to completely custom musical themes, were created and recorded by Guti.

Bringing Wendle to Life

Wendle & Crow started as a comic assignment when Paige was in college at the Savannah College of Art & Design back in 2013. It was a story told without speech bubbles about a kid whose father demanded he get rid of crows attacking their crops, and the kid tries ever-escalating means of solving the problem, from a simple shotgun to a full cannon that blew up his father’s field.

When the opportunity to do a Game Jam popped up, we decided it would be fun to expand on the Wendle & Crow concept and make a game based in the art style Paige developed while at school. It’s heavily influenced by Tim Burton and games like Don’t Starve, but we wanted to make sure it had its own unique feel. We started with the idea of a Tower Defense game where the scarecrows acted as towers and a line of crows came through the farm and had to be fended off in an idle game format, but the player could run Wendle around to repair damaged towers and harvest crops. We largely stayed true to this concept, but it evolved into more of a strategy defense game inspired by tile placement games, where the player has a calm phase of placing scarecrows and buying crop plots in order to best survive the combat phase where crows spawn and fly in from all sides of the screen.

We knew we wanted Wendle to be on screen and controlled by the player - he’s very cute, and Paige really wanted to see him in action. That was the basis for a lot of our decisions: what did we want to see? What sounded fun or cool? Could we get GODOT to do that? Alternating between wanting to tell a specific story and chasing cool mechanics lead us into a bit of a chaotic week. We weren’t sure until the last few days of the Jam which combat mechanics we wanted to use or what the final gameplay loop would look like, because things kept evolving as we encountered fun and new ideas. It was messy, but rewarding. Discovering w