CUPdate 30: Combination Village Videos & Back to The Nays

I have been giving myself a break since the last CUPdate since I worked so hard to finish my game leading up to that one.

I started out by wrapping up a few things on my Spirits of Combination Village game. While the game itself was finished before the deadline, there were a few marketing/sharing things that I wanted to focus on since I usually don't spend a lot of time on that after a game is done. I started by making a video playthrough of the game.

I've also been seeing a few people streaming the games submitted to IGMC and I've loved seeing people's reactions to my game! It's been so much fun and very inspiring to see people enjoying a game I worked so hard to make. Then I started posting it on more sites include RPGmaker.net, the RPG Maker Web forums, and GameJolt. With that, I decided to make a trailer so I could better showcase what the game further than just screenshots.

Then I decided to transition back into working on The Nays, since it's been awhile! I started by just reading some Eventures from where I left off a couple of months ago to get back into it. And then I did a few sketches of them to get back into drawing more too.

Then I remembered my project that I abandoned last month for my game: my daily digital sketchbook! I won't be able to keep up with it for all of August since I'll be traveling a bit, but I did want to get back into that again a little bit. So I did some sketches for two days so far and had a lot of fun! I listened to Live A Live music both nights and honestly just let myself be really loose and sketchy. Lately I realize my drawings have been really stiff, so honestly taking a one month break from much drawing (other than game assets) really helped. Now I've come back fresh and I'm not afraid to make mistakes and have been able to really just be sketchy and feel things out. This made me really excited to get back into drawing and I actually had a lot of fun, which I've been noticing hasn't been happening with drawing lately, so I'm thrilled that the passion is finally back because I've really missed it.

So while this started as a sketch, I ended up getting carried away and turning it into a full illustration because I was having so much fun with it. I'm actually drawing posed characters from my imagination and not hating how it's coming out, which is a first!

I turned this drawing into the scene when Akuma faces off against Yuka and Mabui in the Death's Finale Eventure. I was listening to Gigalovania from Live A Live while drawing this too.

Recently I had a pretty bad downward spiral with a lot of doubts about myself and creating personal projects, but after making a game in a month and seeing the massive positive reaction I've gotten on it, even from people who I don't know, that really helped bring me back and feel so much better. It was a really nice confidence booster for someone like me who honestly has a lot of trouble with that.

I haven't been this excited to create art in a very long time, so like I said, I'm very happy to be back. I know I didn't have a lot to show this time around, but I am very happy with how I'm feeling overall. This year has been really rough due to just things going on in my life, so the fact that I'm finally letting myself enjoy my personal projects again and be happy making art is huge.

I'm not expecting next post to really have much either, but I will pick projects up again in September. I'm going on a trip in a couple of weeks so the next CUPdate won't be for awhile, but I'm not planning to get much done on my projects during that time.

CUPdate 29: Spirits of Combination Village [Playable Game]

So for this CUPdate I get to present my final submission for the Indie Game Making Contest: Rebirth! A lot has gone into this since the last CUPdate and I haven't really documented it along the way, so my plan now is to go over my process using final screenshots instead.

You can play the final version of the game below:

I started out by working on the puzzles in the second stage of the game. I spent a lot of time making those functional and some of them were more complicated than others. I drew all of the character sprites and backgrounds to go with them as well.

Then I finalized all of the UI elements for all parts of the game. I even made some custom menus depending on which part of the game you're in.

And then I finally finished writing all of the other parts of the story, including Pamchan's route and the ending of the game.

And over the weekend I really worked on a lot of various things. I finally came up with a title for the game and made the title screen and credits.

Then I did a lot of bug testing. And I think I underestimated how long that would take. My brother played through it once, then Jinny played through it multiple times. They both gave me some good feedback to implement, and I kept finding little things that would be stopping points. I think I got most of them, but it was a stressful rush to the finish line Thursday night. I usually upload a web version of my games so it can have a larger audience, but this time around, it really wasn't working out. I had to remove a bunch of files to get the web version to even upload to itch.io without an error, and when I finally did, it had an error with the ink script almost immediately when starting the game. So I decided this one will be download-only!

So overall this was a really big experience. I had a lot of fun along the way but also I definitely wish I would've done things differently. For example, the first couple of weeks I didn't really work on my project, which left me with rushing a lot towards the end. I wish I would've had the extra week to properly bug test and make sure it was all uploaded at least a day before it was due. But I hopefully have learned from this and will try to improve that for next time!