It had been awhile since we did a drawing activity, so my brother and I decided to bring back the Return to Mr Marcus World activity a couple of weeks ago day. This activity always involves a variety of art projects and it really gets us thinking creatively on a variety of mini-projects revolving around our characters.
The first one we did was draw over Steam screenshots that we had to include our characters in them and as close to the style of the game as we could. I drew Gair and Lonny in Afterlove EP, and then Piko, Lonny, and Urom in Goodbye Volcano High. We kept most of the background and just drew characters over it.
Then we drew the base of our characters, and swapped for the other person to draw a different character's clothes over top. The base characters I drew were Zandra and Lee, and my brother drew JrTr and Yaro's clothes over them.
He drew the base for JrTr and Yaro, and then I drew the clothes of Zandra and Lee over them.
Then we did probably my favorite activity of the day, which was drawing game design levels on paper! We created a level that the characters would be in and it would be something that they'd enjoy based on their favorite games. Then we presented them and talked about them. First was Grenna's level, which was an RPG about Black Fortress, and based on our old RPG Maker 95 game, Cypriss the Elf.
Then Pubby's level was a 2D platformer with endless runner aspects (until reaching the boss). It was heavily inspired by Sonic levels, and based in Neo Obelisque City, which is where he hangs out with his friend Lonny.
So I had a lot of fun with this activity! We tried to think outside the box for more different activities than we usually do, since this is our 6th time doing this activity. It's always fun to do these creative little activities about our characters!
It's been awhile since I last got really deeply into working on The Nays, but it finally happened! So I have a lot of progress to share on The Nays this time for the CUPdate.
I started by writing the SN World Eventure with my brother. We finally found a day that we were both free, so we wrote that Eventure together in one day.
So after that, we were inspired to continue a project from ~5 years ago where we drew The Nays in the style of Shonen Jump manga panels. So I did a few of those.
During this time, I was also playing Deltarune and replaying Undertale. So all of these combined is what really brought my inspiration back and got me in the mood for working on The Nays again. So the next thing I did was wrote a new Eventure on my own! It's been awhile since I did that. January 2024 to be exact. So this is part of why I've been feeling burnt out, since I really haven't been taking time to write and work on my project. So it felt great to just sit down and write an Eventure. I wrote the Forbidden Beddy Bye World Eventure, which was pretty short, but had some cool new moments that I made up on the spot.
It led me into a whole string of Eventures that I wanted to revisit. There were a few plot points I was considering connecting to Aiml World, so I decided to revisit the Aiml World Eventure. I wrote that Eventure last in 2018, so I figured I could refresh it a bit and flesh it out more. So I decided to completely rewrite all of the parts with just the M Nays so it could include more depth.
After that, I was inspired to draw a NAD for one of the new characters, Mesay. She's Skine's sister. I started with a sketch of her, but then decided to turn it into a full-body drawing as her NAD drawing. I also experimented with keeping the lineart a bit loose and trying to do a faster coloring/shading style. It didn't speed things up a lot, but maybe a little bit.
Then I decided to draw more sketches relating to the Eventures I was writing. I also planned to rewrite the Muko Inc. Delivery Eventure because it's related to all of this. So I did some sketches of some story moments.
So to say the least, I finally found my inspiration and I'm having so much fun working on The Nays again! Starting is always the hardest part, and my exhaustion and lack of motivation is what really held me back. Now that I've started though, it's hard to stop. When I start writing Eventures and planning story moments in The Nays, it's really addicting. It feels great and I've really missed this since it's been almost 2 years since I experienced inspiration this deep. I'm happy that I'm finally recovering from my burnout (for now) it seems!
It's
been awhile since I made a CUPdate blog post here! I still have these
bi-weekly meetings with my friends, but I've mostly just been sharing
smaller updates and talking about various projects from sharing my
Notion pages during these.
I decided to take this week to cover the various projects I've been working on lately!
To start out, here's the first drawing I did this year of Cipo. It's always a tradition to draw him as my first drawing of the year so I drew him from an Eventure moment.
I also already wrote 1 new Eventure this year with my brother: The Frank Lady Eventure! We've been trying to write all of the older Eventures since those are the main ones we skipped over in writing. It's been fun to reimagine those moments with our modern abilities. I also like going back and finding old music to listen to as inspiration during those parts to really bring me back.
I've also been reading Eventures and proofreading them a bit. I've been wanting to get back in and write a solo one, but haven't figured out which one I want to write yet. I did sketch a few moments after reading some Eventures though.
A side project I did one day was check out RPG Maker Unite since they have a free demo. I tried it out initially when it was in early beta, but now it's officially released so I thought I'd give it another try. Unfortunately there are still some bugs that make it a bit more difficult to use than MZ so I'm not really interested in using it for any full projects. But it was fun to test out and I do like some of the new features and what they're trying to do here.
The ideal way this game is meant to be played is with the physical version on TheGameCrafter, but I wanted to make free digital alternatives that anyone could experience. So I'd recommend getting the next best experience by downloading the free digital version of the game on Steam Workshop, if you have Tabletop Simulator. That game's pretty cheap especially during Steam sales and is great for playing other board games digitally.
And lastly, I did make a mini-demo of 2 of the game modes that's available on itchio. I couldn't get it to upload and embed in the browser due to some plugins I was using, but it's available for free to download on itchio if you're interested!
So with this update, I did finally publish all of the pages above! Publishing on TheGameCrafter was surprisingly easier than I was expecting. Because I already bought 2 versions of the game physically, it was just a push of a button really to get it live and up for sale. I previously took precautions to split it out into different versions in case people wanted to buy cheaper and smaller alternatives to it. So that's all been implemented.
With those split out versions, I also bought a version of the game for myself. With the base set, I made a new small box to hold just the base set of cards, and it fits nicely into the bigger box.
And while the 3D printed Gek figures aren't included on TheGameCrafter, I do have the 3D print file available on Thingaverse. And I printed and painted 2 versions which I talked about in a previous post.
And finally, after sorting through everything and making sure it was all ready to go, I wrapped the present up to give to my brother for Christmas.
So overall, this was a really fun project! It was very different and involved a lot of moving parts, but I'm really happy with how it all turned out. I love having physical aspects to these kinds of projects, so this was really cool to have overall. And it's the first time I printed 2 versions of a physical gift so I could keep a copy for myself, so that's fun too.
While I didn't make quite as much progress on the digital version as I originally thought I would, I'm okay with that. It was an afterthought and not really the focus of this year. I still learned a lot about JavaScript and RPG Maker from it and I can use that in other projects, so I'm happy with where I ended up.
My favorite moments were seeing the physical game pieces with my art and characters on it. It just all felt so official! I haven't given the gift yet at the time of writing this, but I'm also really looking forward to giving the gift to my brother and playing it with him and my mom as well. I had a lot of fun playtesting with my friends the one time I did a couple of months ago, so I'm looking forward to playing it with others more.
And with that, I've had 15 devlogs about the process on this project. I'll leave you with some final photos I took of the final cards:
Thanks for sticking through these posts and reading about my process!
For the past month, I've been working on a game for the RPG Maker 2025 Game Jam. I finished it 2 days before the deadline!
The game is called #No_Hacks. Join Murou on his journey through various console-based puzzles as he strives to reunite with his best friend Zandra in the virtual reality world known as ComplexNet.
While I've been documenting my game dev journey through blog posts, I wanted to create this final post to mention some of my final thoughts on the project and showcase some final screenshots. I also took a video of myself playing through the game.
Overall, I'm happy with how the project turned out. My pacing went fairly well on this project, and it was a lot more relaxed of a timeline without any crunch really. I spent ~140 hours on the project over a month, which honestly wasn't a lot of time. Compared to the GGJ project which was a weekend and only a week or so of fixing up the week after, that one was around ~102 hours. So it evened out.
Going into this project, I knew I would be out of town for a week during that and that it was during a fairly busy time. So I scoped fairly small and made a game that was fairly easy to make in terms of mechanics being mostly puzzles and dialogue. While I had some brand new things I had never done before, it all was fairly familiar and smaller scope than some of my other games, which made it fairly easy to manage with the time I had.
Speaking of new mechanics, the entire console and saving to files was really new for me. I focused a lot on diving into JavaScript with the new things that I did on this project. I really learned a lot about node.js and how much of it is available to use in RPG Maker. It was fun implementing more of this as I made the game. Almost every puzzle I made ended up having script blocks of code where I wrote pure JavaScript to accomplish some of the more complex puzzles and mechanics. I learned a lot during this.
This was also one of the projects where I felt the most organized with my events, code, and Notion page in general. Using what I had learned from previous projects, I organized my Common Events a lot better. This included grouping HUD events together and using emojis in the titles of the Common Events I was referencing the most so I could come back to them. I also used the VisuStella Events plugin for some of the interactions with terrains, so I reserved some of the earlier Common Events to associate the same numbers with those.
With the HUD, I do want to look into organizing those Common Events a bit more in future projects though. There were sometimes when I would make additional switches or variables when I needed them to show or hide in specific situations, and it did make it a bit harder to manage. Usually this happens during playtesting and after the game is complete to stitch some things together, so I wished I had solidified that a bit more earlier on. With my next game, I want to create a smoother system for this.
That also goes for the character portraits. In this game, because I only had a few character portraits, I dimmed characters in the same image file with who they were talking to. It wasn't really scalable for a larger game, but in the future, I'd like to look into a system to just dim whichever other character is on the screen without having to save out so many different files. It wasn't a priority for this project due to the small cast, but it's something I'd be interested in learning more about for next time!
With the dialogue though, I was able to finally solve an issue I had with dialogue in previous projects where it would flash between characters. This was because I would essentially be erasing all of the pictures between each character talking. I updated the Ink plugin to include a method for erasing pictures just at the end of the stitch and not between each line of dialogue, and it worked out fairly well!
I also made use of tracking variables for story progression instead of switches, to help keep the progression streamlined. Learning from the World Bub GGJ game from this year, I set up all of the dialogue to use debug switches to show temporary dialogue until I had the Ink scripts set up. This way, I could set those to show during playtests but not the final version. I learned this when we had forgotten to unskip a dialogue scene towards the start of the game when last-minute playtesting our GGJ project.
My Notion page was also fairly organized this time around. I was archiving tasks that I didn't end up doing and also keeping bugs in a database and setting their status as I tested. This was the most organized I felt in playtesting and tracking those bugs.
I also made use of GitHub a lot on this project. Usually I use GitHub for collaboration and sharing projects, but this was my first mostly solo project that I used GitHub a lot and I'm so grateful I did. I had a few instances where I had to roll back to compare what I changed in versions of the project, and GitHub really helped me do that easier. I also learned a bit about branches and their usage during this project when I was troubleshooting.
This all goes hand-in-hand with the more efficient decisions I made to optimize and reuse code throughout the project. I've really enjoyed using more Common Events for code I want to reuse instead of copying events on the map. It makes updating them a lot easier overall.
And with this, I used the VisuStella Event Core plugin to create event templates that I could spawn onto other maps, to only have to make them once. I combined this with a lot of loops to loop through and spawn or apply code to multiple events to make it more efficient and overall just easier to edit in the end. This saved me a lot of time and made my code more consistent.
I learned more about some of the other plugins I had been using as well. This included the keyboard commands plugin. I've had issues where every time you press a key, it repeats the Common Event even if you're in a dialogue message or some other event. I finally figured out how to fix that and only fire it once if you're in the middle of seeing dialogue from that event. This is something that will make my games run a lot better!
I also had been trying to make custom options in the Options menu in previous games and never quite got there. This time, with the Kick Assist option, I really researched for a day to get a switch that the player can set in the menu. I still have a bit to learn and it's not perfect, but I was able to set up an event that detects if the Options menu is closed, and then call that switch's status and have it match what's in the menu. So that's something I was proud to make more progress on and can carry over into other projects!
A then a few of the areas I'm looking to improve for future projects is just more polish, which comes with more time! I really want to look into ways to make still dialogue feel more "alive" and animated. Maybe that means character idle animations, animations on text boxes, etc. I'm not sure what it'll be, but I think more effects like that is where I can take my games next. More of those "juice" special effects too, like more sound effects. Just more of those little polish things can make it go a long way!
Lastly, I'm looking to expand into more unique art styles in the future. I was really happy with the overall look of this game where everything was in one coherent theme, but I do feel like this game and my previous one had a feeling of being very "zoomed out". It works really well for these games and the style, but next time I want to make something that looks completely different! I was playing around with a zoom script at first that showed the details of the art a bit more, but it just didn't work with the text labels that I wanted for this game, so that's why I didn't go with it. I might look into drawing small sprites again but using zoom next time to add more focus on the character sprites.
So overall, I learned a lot from creating this game and I had a lot of fun with it! These are just some of the big areas that I learned and am planning to take with me into my future games. But those ~140 hours really taught me a lot and were just a lot of fun overall. I don't know which project I'll be working on next, but I already can't wait to apply some of this to the next one!
