Prisoners of Time Fabric: Global Game Jam 2022 Devlog

My brother and I finished our Global Game Jam project yesterday, but we spent a bit of time playtesting and debugging to make sure it was presentable yesterday night and a little bit of today. It's called Prisoners of Time Fabric and it's a survival game where you must solve puzzles to piece two timelines back together.

The game is playable in the browser, but we recommend downloading it for the best experience. Here's a link where you can do that:

Now I'm going to walk you through the process we went through to make this game!

Thursday/Friday

The theme (duality) was announced really early this year, so we had a lot of time to let the ideas circle through our heads. We didn't start working on it officially until Friday of the GGJ weekend though, it was mostly just jotting down ideas and brainstorming. It's funny that our game from last year, Slumbered Apart, actually fit this theme perfectly, so it was a goal to make sure it wasn't too similar to that project.

On Thursday night we met to bounce ideas around and come up with a basic concept. Our concept was based upon an Eventure that we wrote a few years ago about different timelines and alternate dimensions called Time Fabric Island. I knew I wanted Clove to be the main character since she's a time traveler, so I sketched a few sprite concepts of what kind of style to go with. I also made a template project file for us to work in.

We decided that we wanted one world to be more of a retro-styled Game Boy palette while the other would be darker like Persona 2, Link to the Past, or Parasite Eve. On Friday after dinner, I took my concepts from Thursday night and recolored them with a limited GB palette to see which one we'd wanna go with. We decided the bottom-right one worked best in both styles.

Then I proceeded to animate these sprites and create a full charset for Clove. This took up a lot of my time on Friday and I finished them around 1:30am. 

During that time, my brother was mostly setting up the project and getting some basic mechanics set up for our crafting system. We wanted the gameplay to be unique, so we came up with the idea that this game could be a survival game where you collect resources and craft them together to progress forward. 

My brother created an Inventory menu where you can collect resources and see how many you've collected there. Then he proceeded to create a Crafting menu where you can click to craft things together.

Once I started working back in the project, I imported an enemy sprite that I animated and started working on the dialogue system. We ended up using Galv's Message Styles plugin so that text bubbles could pop up above their heads. I also implemented a feature to change between two different styles.

Saturday/Sunday

We ended up staying up until about 5am on Friday, so we slept later on Saturday. I started when I woke up and we both were working on it by 3:30pm. We made sure to take our team photo earlier on so we could have better lighting and look more awake.

I started by concepting a basic HUD to lay out where all of the features would be. Based on feedback from last year's GGJ project, I really wanted to provide more directions like objectives and an options menu to learn about the controls.

Then I started to program the hunger meter mechanic. I started by setting up a timer so that every 5 seconds your health would deplete. I based the coloring system on my health bars from Compass Nays, but instead of a variable bar, this one is individual picture files. Eli's Enhanced Pictures plugin was super useful here. After it was all working, I gradually tested out time and ended up with the final number of 25 seconds per bar, which is a little long, but we didn't want to make the game too hard, so kept it.

Then I programmed the enemy chasing mechanic. I took a lot of inspiration from my Compass Nays game because I already had that working, but I made it a bit more simplified since we didn't need as advanced of a system as I made there. I made a basic enemy type that randomly spawns into a region and chases the player. I also programmed the objective system which updates based on a variable.

Then my brother started to lay out the maps and figure out where everything was located. He sketched out the rough map you see above (which we ended up using for the final since we didn't have time to update it). We ended up making all of these maps aside from the office in the final version of the game, though some maps slightly moved around a little. He then proceeded to work on drawing the backgrounds for a large portion of the night. I took a break for dinner at this point.

When I came back from dinner, I made the final art for the HUD in the dark timeline and then color swapped to create the retro styled timeline. I added my brother's rough forest drawing into the background to make a mock-up image for how it would all look together as well. Then I proceeded to actually implement these into the game itself.

Then I spent some time making more sprites. I drew a few different versions of our main antagonist Gregorn and then my brother put those together into an opening sequence to set up our game.

I proceeded to create sprites for all of our NPC background characters, and that process was pretty quick since I just made very slight animations for them and only had them all facing one direction.

All of the rough backgrounds were done and my brother was starting on the final background art, so I finally went in and started to add some game progression. 

I struggled a lot with the phone text for whenever Megumi talks. For some reason, the plugin we were using wasn't working well with what I wanted to do. Every time I would show the dialogue, it would pop up into the corner or a weird spot, and not the coordinate that I specified. After a few hours of testing, I got it working for when the player dies in the game, but it was still not working every time. I realized we didn't have much time left, so I ended up having to just use a dialogue box that pops up over her phone instead of directly implementing it on the screen as I originally designed. It wasn't a great solution, but with the time we had left, it was all I could do.

After that, I started to just connect all of our events together and make more game progression. I added a bunch of events that required you to do crafting and various puzzles to progress the game. Considering I did this in a few hours, I'm surprised it mostly worked without a ton of playtesting. Most of it was basic switches and dialogue, but I did manage to get quite a bit of progression in there. I also put together quick menu buttons for the map and options.

Once my brother finished drawing all of the backgrounds, I handed the game back to him so he could finish up the Jourdub Factory puzzle, which he had concepted and thought up, and the ending of the game. While he did that, I converted his background drawings to GB color palette styles by mostly just replacing the colors that were there very quicky. Then I found the music for our game and wrapped up some final assets like the title screen, end credits, etc.

We did some final playtesting since it was the end of the project time, and added some custom sound effects to replace some default sounds. Then we basically just continued to test and debug for a bit to make sure that there were no final bugs in there. I made the itch.io page and uploaded the project, and then today I further customized the page and made sure everything was working!

This project was a lot of fun to work on. And even though we ran into a lot of bugs that slowed us down and took away some hours, we made a game with a clear progression and beginning, middle, and end. And we made our very first survival game with cool new mechanics that we hadn't done before! So overall we learned a lot and honestly I really like how it came out. There were times when I was worried if we were even going to have a game because we started on the progression aspect so late, but we pulled it off!

I'm not planning to create a CUPdate post for this week since most of my project creation went to this, but I'll see you in the next post! Thanks for reading and playing our game.

CUPdate 17: Eventure Organization & Storyboards

So for this CUPdate, I mostly worked on organizing Eventures, drawing storyboards, and writing out plans for rewriting or writing Eventures.

I started out by organizing a bunch of Eventures, and through that, I was reading the Piko's Concert Eventure and realizing it wasn't very well written, so I wanted to redo it. I read a lot of they Eventures relating to when Kali first shows up and wanted to really improve a lot of parts about her entrance. So I made up some new ideas for rewriting at least the Piko's Concert Eventure and then parts of a few others. While doing this, I sketched out some storyboards for ideas I want to write.

I've kept up my goal of drawing every day so far. Some days it's honestly just a 5 minute doodle, which is completely fine. I decided to make a "Digital Sketchbook" folder so I can just open up the same file each day that I don't have time to make something bigger and treat it like a sketchbook page. My goal is to make a new one of these each month so I can upload those when they're done and not have to worry about actually uploading daily. I don't really care about the posting every day, but since I am drawing these, I wanna share them eventually without the stress of feeling like I have to actually post every day. This way, it'll be more like I just wanna post once a month (and obviously any other more finished drawings in between those). I'm posting this sketchbook page as it is currently, but I'll continue to add to this page in the coming weeks until the end of the month.

Overall, the majority of this time was reading and copy editing a lot of Eventures. I officially imported every Eventure into Google Doc format though, so that's exciting! All I have to do is finish reading through them all so I can add in music and drawings, and then proofread them all. For that proofing pass, I'm already about 50 Eventures in though, so I've been making good progress. I planned out if I proofread about 2 Eventures a day, I can be done with those by mid-March, too. At that point I can focus more on the storyboards and what needs rewrites.

Then I decided to plan some Eventures that I never wrote that were earlier on. I wrote parts of the Sid Eventure and fully planned it out, then I also planned out and wrote the whole Koukon Village Eventure that takes place right after that one as well. Then I drew a bunch of storyboards from the Koukon Village Eventure while the scenes were still fresh in my mind.

And then otherwise I've just been doing various storyboards and sketches of scenes as I'm reading. There aren't a ton of drawing updates this time, but I'm making a lot of progress on organizing Eventures and writing, so that's a big accomplishment!

With the Global Game Jam coming up, I'm sure most of the time for the next post will be dedicated to that, but I do plan to have a separate post for the GGJ. So next time might be lighter outside of that, but the GGJ is always a huge update for me, so I'm excited to share about that after it happens!

CUPdate 16: First CUPdate of 2022

It's been awhile since our last CUPdate because we took a break for the holidays, but I'm dedicating this post mostly to combining my last two posts and also talking about what else I've been up to!

I'd recommend checking out my previous two posts to learn more about how 2021 went and what my plans are for 2022, but generally, here's what's planned for 2022:

• Draw every day (even if it's a 10-second sketchbook doodle). This is so that I can get back into the habit of drawing more (not posting).
• Finish at least the prologue of Compass Nays. This doesn't mean art and final mechanics, but it should at least be playable with the basic game design, story, and sequence of events from start to finish.
• Finish at least 1 more Eventure Twine of The Nays. It's the 20-year anniversary of The Nays, so I want to get into the habit of finishing at least one Eventure Twine a year. Hopefully more though so it doesn't take over 100 years to complete!
• Meet with my brother once a month to create content about The Nays.
• Talk more about The Nays/get more comfortable sharing my ideas with people (right now it'll be in the form of quick videos that I might compile together some day, but definitely this one's a personal one that I won't really be updating online about).

And then there will be various other projects that may come up and inspire me.

After my last CUPdate, I finished up the very first Eventure, The Gek Eventure, in the form of a Twine to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of The Nays. It's now public for everyone to see, and was a Christmas present to my brother. You can read the story here! When I presented last time, I was in the process of wrapping it up, but now it's officially finished and up!

Over Christmas break, my brother and I finally finished writing the Garlint Eventure that we started back in April. And then after that we finished all of the together parts of the Hide & Seek Eventure (though there's still a part for him to write on his own). We only ended up writing 1-2 Eventures last year, but at least this inspired me to keep working on this project and to dive back in!

I also went in and started to convert a lot of our Eventures into Google Docs. Patchou Log Viewer has been acting up a bit on Windows 10 for me, so I want to make sure those logs are in an updated format that's easier for me to read in case anything ever happens. And then I also just really like importing the images that go with those parts in the story, so I can see which scenes I want to still draw or which ones I plan to finish out of the rough storyboards. Overall I think Google Docs is the best format for an internal final version, especially since it's the last step before importing into the final presentable Twine versions. My plan is to try and convert all of the Eventures we've written so far into Google Docs over the next few months to start to organize everything. I already imported rough versions of the first half, so finalizing those documents over the next few months should be pretty reasonable.

And then after organizing a lot of Eventures, I was also reading a lot of them. So I decided to improve some parts of the Searching for Home Eventure and rewrote parts of it. It was my first time rewriting an Eventure like this where some minor edits were in Google Docs and then longer scenes were the usual mIRC logs, and I could just combine them all in Google Docs in the end. It worked out really well and went faster than rewrites usually go!

When I got back from vacation and back to work this week, I had less time to dedicate to this, but I am averaging to at least read through 1 Eventure a night and finalizing the Google Doc for it. I've even been able to fit in a few storyboards for them. 

I'm realizing that I really enjoy doing very quick layouts as my first pass for storyboards so they're very rough and just get the overall feel of the scene. After that, I can go in and fix up proportions, get characters on model, and clean up the drawings. But by starting with this extremely rough pass, I don't have to worry about pausing so many times to look up references of poses or characters, and I can kinda just get the scene out of my head onto the canvas. I'm trying really hard to be as loose as possible, because I really feel like those are when my best compositions happen.

And then other than storyboards, on days when I'm tired and I feel like I can't do a ton of drawings, I'm planning to do one quicker drawing that I focus on. The other day I did some Music Mania sketches where I listened to music and did mindless drawings, and from that, I was able to brainstorm some story moments and do this little sketch of Mar that you see below. I'm hoping I can keep my drawings meaningful and related to the story, even on days when I do wanna relax and just make something quick.

Also for the new year, I organized my Notion page a bit. I decided to make a new database for my daily tasks (inspired by Hillary's!) to keep track of the generic things I do daily in my schedule like work, drawing, exercising, etc. That way I can gauge how well I'm doing with some of those daily resolutions. Right now I have filters to sort them by CUPdate so I can show those too.

So overall I got a lot done for this CUPdate! A lot of that was because I did have two weeks of vacation to focus on some of my own projects, but I am hopeful that I'll be able to try and stay productive while not entirely overworking myself.

I just really love January overall because it's always a time for me to think about my goals and figure out what I want to focus on. Lately I haven't been making huge goals so I can actually accomplish the smaller things, but overall I'm still feeling much better than I did in the fall, in terms of personal projects at least.

2022 Plans

Hello, 2022!

In my last post, I talked about what happened in 2021, and now it's time to think about what I'll do in 2022. Some of this will be addressing concerns from the last post, so I'd recommend you read that one first since this is kind of a two-parter.

2021 ended up being a year of game dev and improved mental health through having more of a social life and living in a safe environment. 

Before I get into the details, check out my updated improvement image:

So let me start by talking about goals over the years and what I plan to do.

Looking back at 2020 even, my goals were really to stop worrying about posting every day and focusing more on making art for myself, which is really great. I think in 2021 I took that to its own level which was when I stopped drawing every day (or even once a week in some cases), which was when it really became more of an issue.

I know there are artists out there that warn against the whole draw everyday goal, but for me, I really need to get back into drawing more. One of my big goals this year is to "draw every day". That doesn't mean posting every day. That just means doodle anything I can every day, even if that just means a 10-second doodle in my sketchbook. I just really need to get back into this habit.

Last year I was also a bit unfocused overall. I had a lot of ideas for projects, but because it was so freeform, I realized I didn't hold myself accountable as much because there was no real main goal. So this year I want to bring that focus in more.

My goals this year are to mainly work on Compass Nays (my RPG Maker game), and The Nays (ultimately in the form of Twines). I'm not going to set a specific amount to get done, I just want to focus on those projects primarily this year.

This year is the 20th anniversary of The Nays, so I really want to make a lot of progress on two of my biggest projects currently that are related to it, so that more people can experience the story from the beginning!

So to make this a bit more focused, I'll give myself some minimum requirements. For Compass Nays, I want to at least finish the prologue so it's playable from beginning to end. The art/menus/some mechanics can still be rough, but I want to at least have that much fully thought out and complete. I was hoping to have that done last year, but I think for this year that'll be doable as a minimum goal for this project.

And then for The Nays, my goal is to finish at least one more Twine. I realize if I finish only one a year, it'll take me at least 137 more years because that's how many more Eventures there are that I haven't made Twines for yet though. Obviously, some are shorter and some I've drawn storyboards for already, but putting that into perspective really inspires me to want to make those more frequently so I can actually finish this entire project in my lifetime. The first step to this will be organizing everything that's written so far into documents and also everything that's been drawn so that I know which areas need more drawings before converting them into Twine stories.

I've been talking with my brother and I'm hoping we can schedule at least 1 day where we dedicate to The Nays per month. This could be writing an Eventure, doing a Nay activity, creating projects about our characters together, or really anything related to The Nays just so I can stay motivated and continue working on this project, even while we're not still living together. A big pain point of last year was that I didn't feel as motivated to work on it, but after meeting up for Christmas, it helped bring that motivation back, so I want to make it more of a regularly scheduled time where we can continue to work on things together.

I realize that there are other projects that will come up that I get inspired to work on as well, so I don't want to push those away when I'm inspired, but I want these minimum requirements to really hold me accountable for those at the very least.

Other projects that I might work on throughout the year include more video editing projects like sketchbook tours, organizing Notion pages like The Nays Wiki, our OC trading card game, gifts for family and friends, and then anything else that I think of along the way.

I also do want to fit in other areas like keeping up my social life, playing more video games in my backlog, exercising with VR, etc. So I'm thinking that maybe I can put something together in Notion to help with this. Right now I have a "dailies" template task that I'll put for each day to check things off and see how well I'm balancing everything, and then I can figure things out from there.

Towards the end of last year, I was starting to get a schedule down that helped though, so I do think continuing that would be good. Basically every day after work and dinner, I would play VR for ~30 minutes, then draw/work on projects for a few hours. I would make a list for each day of smaller tasks to check off of the bigger project and once I finished those tasks, I would reward myself with about an hour or so to play a video game at the end of the night. This was really effective in December, so it's something I want to keep up so I can stick to this schedule. And then on my days off, I'm able to dedicate a lot more time to working on my projects and feeling motivated. So far it's worked the past month, so I hope this motivation continues into the new year!

So overall I'm trying to get more structure back into my life so I can stay motivated and inspired to work on things that I love!

I know these are always my longest posts of the year, but thanks for sticking with me and reading through this! I'm looking forward to a productive year to celebrate The Nays' 20th anniversary!