CUPdate 27: Short Game Idea for IGMC

So for this CUPdate, I started to heal and had some extra time off, so I spent that time picking up some smaller projects. It's been so long since I've done much other than playing video games and watching anime, but I'm slowly trying to get back to it.

To start off, June was pretty rough, so I didn't draw much. This is all I've got for this digital sketchbook page and most of these were drawn earlier in the month. Hopefully next month I'll have a bit more!

Over the weekend, my brother and I spent some time writing the Baron Sisters Eventure. It was a pretty short one, but we didn't have a lot of time in the same day to write it, so it was broken up over the weekend whenever we were free. We ended up writing all of it though! And this is the one that leads up to Timer, so next time if we have more time, maybe we'll be able to write that one!

I spent a little bit of time recording sound files and editing those sound clips together for the Osyra Eventure also. I was kind of all over the place and was just trying out a bunch of different projects to see which one I was most in the mood for doing. Not a lot to show for this one, but you can listen to the sound file I did for Scott's post here.

Then I decided to do something crazy. To try and help myself get back into things, I decided that I'm gonna take on a small challenge. The Indie Game Making Contest just started, and I figured this would be a good chance to try and make a quick game for fun! The theme is rebirth and it's a contest centered around RPG Maker games, so I decided it would be a fun little challenge. I'm not planning to put a ton of time into it and maybe just spend each weekend this month working on something for it, but I thought it might help me, since I know I've been having trouble working on things recently.

So I started with an idea that I actually had a very vague idea for in my Game Project Ideas document. I honestly didn't have any specifics in there, and just kind of the structure and plot twist, so I'm not gonna give away what that is just yet. But last weekend I was thinking about some ideas and decided I want this game to be related to The Nays but not about The Nays. So it's gonna be about characters within the same universe, but they'll all mostly be new. Pamchan and Xing are the only two that might make an appearance, but they're not going to be a huge part of the game.

So I started to sketch out some ideas for a design of a character. I don't really know much about them other than they're a spirit/ghost-like person. So I just did some doodles for now until I figure more out.

Then I started to come up with ideas for the gameplay style. The first part of the game is going to be a visual novel, then it's going to still be an adventure/point-and-click styled game, but a little different. Originally I was thinking of including action RPG elements, but with the time I have, I don't know if I'll be able to make something that complex, so I'll likely just stick to the adventure gameplay style.

My plan is that as big story moments happen, the UI and gameplay style slightly changes. There are 3 main phases of the game, so I've concepted some ideas for what those might look like.

Then after doing some concepts and idea brainstorming, I started on the RPG Maker MZ project file. I mostly just got plugins in there that I wanted to use and made sure everything was compatible together that I would need. I also have just been brainstorming a bunch of ideas in Google Docs. I started to import some assets to get some of the functionality in there for menus and UI.

And then I concepted what the main character might look like. The blue ones are the ones I started leaning towards for her design. All I know at this point is that she's Pamchan's older cousin.

Then I started to design the fast travel system to move between scenes in the visual novel portion. I made these backgrounds as placeholders based on photos I took, but I have a feeling they're going to end up in the final game.

I spent this past week working on some character exploration sketches in my sketchbook so I could hang out in the living room with my roommate and watch TV while still working on something for my game. It was a really fun way to come up with designs and allowed me to be a lot more loose and experimental. I ended up spending more time on them too since I was multitasking. I started with the main character, who I think I'm gonna call Heidi. I haven't fully decided on her outfit, but I think I got her hairstyle and face down at least.

Then I figured out her childhood friend's design. I think I'm gonna call him Zane. Noah and Miles were other names I was thinking about for him. But his design came pretty quickly to me on the first go.

After that I made some quick sketch ideas for Heidi's mom. I'm gonna call her Lily. I only did a few iterations, but I think I'm planning to go with the left one.

And then I worked on the coworker friend. She took a few different design ideas until I landed on one that I was happy with. I think I'm gonna go with the name Faye for her. The design I'm going with is the one in the bottom of the second image.

Oh and while I was sketching, I decided to do a sketch of what Pamchan's kid self design looks like. She's gonna be around 8 years old during this game.

I started to implement UI and text into the game more. I'm working on spacing everything out and figuring out where windows go currently. I was able to find a word wrapping plugin after looking for awhile (since I can't use VisuStella's with one of the Galv message plugins I'm using). It was surprising how difficult it was to find such a basic and essential plugin! And while I was looking for plugins, I found a plugin that adds auto and skip buttons to your text, which is often found in a visual novel, so I've been playing around with those too. There's still some adjusting to do in terms of where things are located, but I have a basic mockup in there now. And I drew a colored drawing of Pamchan (using the sketchbook drawing as a base) to see how she would fit into the scene. I feel like she might blend in a little too much, so I might work on seeing how to make her stand out more from the background more. I might try making the outer outline a bit thicker or blurring the background, but we'll see.

So overall I made a lot of progress on the project over the weekend, but not so much during the week. It's definitely harder to work on these projects after a full day of work or going out and doing things, so I imagine I might need to scale my scope down a little if I wanna have something that's done in time. We'll see how things go with working on it this weekend though!