Global Game Jam 2016

So this weekend I worked on an entry for the Global Game Jam with Steve Rakar. We made a game called Nays Living in Houses. You can check out more information about the game over on our Global Game Jam page here! There are also download links on there for you to play!

If you Download the game, that is probably the best method to play it. It will have less loading times and be an overall better experience. (P.S. If you have any lagging with the downloaded file, I highly recommend updating your Direct X to this version here.)

If you cannot download, then you can Play it in your browser!

This overall experience was super valuable, and I would recommend to anyone at all interested in game development to participate in the years to come. I didn't actually attend the event itself, since my brother and I didn't want to lug our equipment out there, but we worked from our studio at home collaboratively, so we still had a great time.

This experience overall gave me a confidence boost, since I impressed myself with how much I could produce in two days. Although we didn't get a whole lot done in the game itself, we produced a lot of artwork and maps, and were able to get things functioning well enough to be playable. Sure there are some glitches here and there, but the fact that it's this playable and we made it in under 48 hours, I think that's pretty cool.

Overall, I only spent a few hours working in RPGMaker on the game. I placed all of the characters on the maps and made up the majority of the NPCs single dialogue lines. My brother was the one who really took the resources that I created and put them into the game. He also made all of our 30-something maps and put together the dialogue for our opening scene and first quest. He also spent a lot of time working on getting our plug-ins working, and even getting into the code itself to modify some to fit the needs of our game.

So as I mentioned, I focused heavily on the artwork. My original plan was to fully draw out facesets for every single character. Of course I was not THAT fast at drawing them, or else they would have turned out lot worse. I ended up being able to draw facesets for seven characters, and then for the remaining characters, I simply used previous illustrations that I had done and turned them into facesets. I spend the majority of my time on the UI and menus though.

Without further ado... below are tons and tons of screenshots and concept art that we made for the game!

This a screenshot of our opening scene! I was responsible for all of the art here, but my brother made the dialogue.

I made lots of new facesets/character portraits for this game. This was probably my favorite part of working on this game, actually!

Since our game relies heavily on the day and night system, I created two different UIs for when it is day and when it is night. I also made some little text advancers that you can see in the bottom right corner (animated). I wasn't able to import that into the demo for yesterday, but we're planning on implementing it when we get the chance to.

We made a Friendship system, so here are all of the different groups' pages. I was responsible for the menu layouts and the images on the right, while my brother edited the existing plugin, wrote the descriptions, and made the pixel art icons.

This is the main menu for our game. I was responsible for the menu layout and art, but my brother drew out that map on paper.

We also made a quest system for our game, using an existing plug-in. My brother was responsible for inputting this quest information and making it work for our game. I created the UI image though.

And then all of the other menus! I made all of the layouts

This was a little element I added in, where once you enter a new map, that image drops down to let you know which area you are in. This will come in handy a lot when doing quests.

This was a map that my brother made. It's Town Square. And this is the opening sequence in which Finnchuk is dropped off. He also made edits to an existing car sprite to turn it into a taxi.


And here are our credits for the game!

Thanks for reading this super long post! I hope you'll take the time to check out our game. We also would appreciate any feedback, so just leave a comment if you would like to give some feedback. :)