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!