Biggert City Battle Show: Global Game Jam 2024 Devlog

Last weekend was another year doing the Global Game Jam! This was my 9th year and we got super ambitious with this one. We got a game up and running on the page by Sunday, but I did admittedly spend a couple of days after just fixing bugs and polishing up because I really liked our project and wanted it to be the best it could be! So I'm going to go through what our process was and how it was made.

💾 Download and play the game here:

Monday - Wednesday: Concepts & Project Setup

The theme (Make Me Laugh) was announced on Saturday before the GGJ so that gave us more time to think on it. We honestly had this game idea a bit earlier and it's something we've been wanting to make, so we just had to make some tweaks to fit it into the theme! At first we weren't sure about the theme, but we quickly started coming up with ways to incorporate it into our idea and it started to be a lot of fun and pretty fitting.

At work I've been learning a bit more about GitHub, so I started by making a GitHub repository for our project. We never shared an RPG Maker project over GitHub before, so this was going to be a learning experience for us, but I thought it'd be easier than Google Drive, since that's just how we transferred our projects in the past.

Then we started brainstorming in documents and sending inspirations to each other over Discord text chat in our GGJ channel. Some ideas were ones I thought up before bed or in the shower, but we both started building off of each other's ideas as they came to us.

After we exchanged ideas over text chat for a bit, I got really inspired to start sketching some ideas! So I got my sketchbook out after dinner on Tuesday and decided to sketch out some of the ideas we had for some of the UI, menus, and scenes in general. I really liked the idea of this being a TV show and focused on the overall performance, because I thought that'd add more of a whimsical touch and keep it more lighthearted.

Then I set up the RPG Maker project, mostly just adding plugins that we might want to use. I started to look through potential plugins and make sure the most updated versions were in the project folder. I also have been wanting to get back to making a custom title screen for our games, which we haven't done since we upgraded to MZ. I never knew of any good MZ plugins for custom title screens, but I discovered that Moghunter actually updated the title plugin from MV for MZ, so I went ahead and imported that in. I put some placeholder old art I had done and some extremely quick assets just to get something in there to make sure it was all working properly with MZ.

Thursday: Brainstorming Session

Thursday night we got on a call and talked through some of our ideas and tried to figure things out. We were still having a hard time figuring out what we wanted the battle system to be, but were starting to understand what we wanted for the recruiting system. We wanted it to be different from a class turn-based RPG, but still have support abilities. We didn't end up talking quite as long as usual, but we got some basic ideas brainstormed.

We knew our main character was going to be Lupita, so I was trying out a bunch of different styles with pixel art, but nothing was quite turning out how I wanted. I tried a few different styles, views, colors, etc. but nothing was really turning out how I wanted.

We decided that maybe pixel art won't be the way to go since it was taking me longer to figure out what style to go with, so we might just go with a more simplified drawn style because we have a lot of characters to make.

Then I started on making a spreadsheet for the audience members that you can collect. I was mostly just coming up with attack names and who we wanted. I put 18, which we won't have time to make all of them.

Friday: Art Assets & Battle System Coding

Friday was the first full day of development! I took the day off of work so I could get a head start on some of the asset creation, since that usually takes awhile. To start, I mocked up what the battle screen could look like digitally so I could figure out how big each character should be on the screen. I used an old drawing I made for last year's GGJ just to figure out placements.

Then I worked on a style/look test. One idea we came up with is to use pre-rendered 3D backgrounds, so I tested drawing Lupita overtop an existing 3D background my brother made previously. I also added a few Photoshop effects to make it look more "drawn" to fit in with the style. And I added a stroke around the character to make it stand out a bit more too.

Then I drew Lupita in all 4 directions with some movement animation. I wanted to keep it fairly simple. I then wondered if there was a way to make spritesheets more quickly than I usually do, so I found this video which directed me to this Photoshop script. It worked pretty well but now 100% how I needed the spritesheet to be for RPG Maker, so I did a little manual work, but it was still a lot quicker than the usual method!

I imported that spritesheet into RPG Maker and got him walking around the test scene!

Then I drew a few more characters. I finished the sprites for Chiz and then finished the linework for Josinda's as well.

Next, I decided to dive into the actual programming and game parts. I started with the main part of the game: The Battle Show. I created the basic loop for the battle that initializes the variables and then goes through each character. At the beginning, it takes information from the Actor Database and puts that into variables so it can be replaced with the specific characters that are on your team.

I put some basic scripts together to show specific sprites based on those variables, then play a specific sound clip for the character when they attack. All that's really left is to add Ben's commentary and then to make the attacks actually do something in battle. I have the basics of a health bar set up from one of my other games that I can mostly reuse the same ideas for though.

Then I imported my brother's 3D model background into the game and imported a few of the super rough border templates in just to get the layout. I also got all of the buttons clickable with a plugin so saving and viewing the options is done with some of the defaults, and then the others pull up a common event for the time being.

Saturday/Sunday: Character Sprites & Game Dev

As usual, Saturday and Sunday always blend together a bit because we stayed up all night into Sunday and didn't go to bed until about 6pm.

So I spent all day Saturday (until 4am) drawing all of the characters and animations for our game. We planned a lot of characters and at the time thought they'd be extra and not implemented... but we actually did it surprisingly.

So after a lot of drawing, I came back to the RPG Maker project and worked on the Battle Show portion. It was Sunday morning and we honestly still didn't know what the mechanics of this part were. I was getting kind of nervous and just started filling in random attack names and descriptions in the Database so that Ben could commentate it at least.

So then we both paused what we were doing and got into Google Sheets and just started to hash out the mechanics. We decided it would be a point system that we could balance. So basically the characters that are harder to recruit would be higher ranked and stronger in battle. So we started with a ranking of A, B, and C to figure out what they would all be.

From there, I actually implemented this battle system into RPG Maker and made use of the "MP Cost" to be their attack power from the skills, since it was an easy to edit and read number. It wasn't that difficult to implement and I just was focusing on getting something playable.

So we ended up really working up until the deadline on this one and it was all hands on deck at the end. My brother was hashing out 3D backgrounds, fixing the story, and just really doing whatever we had time to do while I tried to finish up this battle system. We didn't even test the game before uploading it. Sure we had tested parts, but we had no idea if it was beatable (or even playable) or fun. So this was a weird game jam.

The group we were part of (COGG/CCAD) had a live stream at the end of the event, and they were nice enough to play through our game on the stream and they were having a lot of fun with it and I think they all enjoyed it. So it was really fun seeing them enjoy it, and I'm really glad it was playable enough for them to play part of the game at least (until they couldn't beat the first battle). So that was a really good end to the night.

Monday: Polish & Bug Fixes

So the next day, I woke up around midnight and couldn't sleep so I decided to keep working on our game to fix the bugs and things we wanted to fix. I started out by making a title screen for our game. I really wanted to work on a custom title screen for this one so I spent some time using mostly assets we already had, but really making it look a lot different. I like how it came out (and it's better when it's animated!).

With that, I also added a new options screen to have keyboard controls in there, since I noticed the person playing our game didn't know which buttons to press. I always forget this when making an RPG Maker game, but I need to get better about implementing those.

And I also customized the save screen a bit more. I noticed during the playthrough that he thought the game didn't save because it was an empty image when it saved. So I have it populate with a general background image now, and it shows your current team. I made facesets for all of them to show that in there now.

Then I added more tutorial content to teach the players how to play the game. This included more about the audience and actions. I noticed our playtester didn't try to recruit anyone, and it's no wonder, because we didn't previously mention anything about it! So I added more to our intro and a new path if you lose the first battle, to tell you even more.

I then took a break from game dev to draw all of Pobuck's ugly drawings. They're meant to be ugly and abstract, so I was able to get through all of them fairly easily. I scribbled those down and imported them into the game so there's now a purpose to actually talk to Pobuck. Though we don't currently have ways to get money or tickets (other than the default that it gives you), so they're all free.

We also had a lot of issues with interacting with characters because the sprites are a lot bigger than the 48x48 tiles, so I made Region IDs for all of the characters and set those up on all of the maps.

Additionally, there were a couple of characters that just weren't achievable (Lev and Question), so I made some new pathways to add them to your team. I also did some small fixes like fixing text boxes and word wrapping. I also updated our map image to fit into the UI better. And I added shadows for the characters who are in each area to help more.

After that, I started to balance and actually plan out the Battle Show better. I randomized their teams and who was in which slots previously, but I spent time working in a spreadsheet to better plan and scale the difficulty. I even changed the point system around and added new D and S* ranks to further balance all of it. I had a lot of fun doing this!

I finally started playtesting, and ran into a lot of things to fix. I made a huge document (about 27 pages) with various things to fix and update as I was playing. Some of these included things like changing when the text boxes are up so it didn't flash between every line of dialogue and then some overlapping text and things too.

I also added a new tutorial to the Pobuck part to better explain what that's all about as well. I fixed that map so you can't accidentally click off into another map too.

So then I playtested the entire game from start to finish! My save file said I was at about 2 hours, but I was admittedly taking notes and things during it. But that ended up being really long. And it was fun! I had a few things I wanted to polish up before posting it publicly, but it was getting very close!

Tuesday: itch.io Page

So on Tuesday I had less time to work on it because I went back to work, but I did do some more final bug fixes. I added some new sound effects and music, and fixed various other things. And then I made some new icons to add to the team and actions menus.

And then I finally made the itchio page! So it was officially live!

Wednesday: Final Playtest

And then on Wednesday, I did some final playtesting! Jinny playtested through the game and was able to beat it, even if there were some pretty noticeable visual bugs (and Mellichin's weird glitch with his stats). So then I did some final fixes and hopefully fixed all of the bugs! One of her suggestions was to add their stats to the team selection screen, so that was something new that I implemented in addition to just fixing bugs.

Post-Mortems

I intended to spend more time writing up my thoughts and reflections for this year, but this post is already getting pretty long, so I'm gonna keep this part kind of shorter than I originally intended. I might write another post later after I've reflected a bit more on it.

But this year, our project was huge and ambitious! We had a pretty big one last year, but this year it scaled up a lot. I really liked the idea and we had a lot of fun with it, but it meant we didn't have time to playtest it and do bug fixes really before the deadline, so I did spend a lot of time the week after just fixing things up and polishing it in a better spot.

I know for a lot of our older GGJ projects, we had a lot of ideas for more characters and mechanics to add if we had time, but we focused a lot more on the core mechanics and MVP, whereas this year we kind of got carried away with adding a lot to it, so it ended up being a little too big for a one-weekend project.

We still did it and I'm happy with what we put out there, but I guess what I'm saying is that maybe next year we can tone it back a little so we can have more time for polish and playtesting during the weekend itself. While I didn't mind doing extras on it this week, I do still wish it was a little closer to the level it's at now on Sunday instead.

But overall I had a lot of fun with this project! I think it was one of the more gameplay focused and less story-focused games, which was interesting to make. I learned a lot and had the most fun balancing mechanics and working on the actual Battle Show parts. With more time I would've liked to balance even more and maybe let you progressively unlock things instead of being able to unlock it all at any time, but that'd be if we decided to come back to this project and add more to it.

I'm happy with how it came out, considering how much we accomplished and the little time we had to do it. So again, GGJ continues to be one of my favorite weekends of the year. This post got really long, so also thanks for reading all the way through if you're still here, and I hope you had as much fun playing my game as I had making it!

The Nays Origins Devlog 3: Music, Game Progression, and Placeholder Art

I made a lot of progress on my game this time! I started with music, then worked on some game progression, and got some placeholder art assets in there to help with the progression and testing.

So I started out by proofreading the script and sorting some parts of it. So the script is officially ready to go!

Then I actually decided to make some music, because there were a few parts that just didn’t sound right with the songs I had. I found this free online MIDI site that has a basic piano roll (https://signal.vercel.app/). It ended up being really useful! I made three of the songs that I wanted to make. I might come back and edit them later, but for now they’re good to go. 

The first one I made was Rotle’s "private times" song. This was based on a song I used to hum as a kid when playing with toys. I started with this one:

I didn’t really like how it came out, so I tried again. I used my MIDI keyboard to make a basic melody and then cleaned it up a bit and it improved.

I also ended up converting this into a MOD with Open MPT to use in GB Studio! I made some discoveries about the template.mod file. It was adding all of these weird sound effects, and I found out if I delete the noise instruments from the template, those aren’t added to the final GB Studio version, which is good. So I just edited the template that I use for converting. I still need to play around with them a bit more because my MOD files are sounding weird in GB Studio still in some ways.

I also made a few other songs. One was for when Rotle meets The Gek.

And then the other one is for some of the parts involving Pearl.

I made all of the base image files that I'll need (copying template files) for all of the backgrounds and character art. That way I can add the templates in and then just replace the art files to upload them. With that, I can start to prototype more quickly without needing to worry about the art yet.

So with that, I laid out every scene in GB Studio! I used my script and sketchbook layouts as a guide for where to place them so it would make sense with where they connect.

And then I started to actually create the events in GB Studio! I’m basically just connecting all of the scenes and putting them in order so that they can transition, using my script and sequence of events as a guide. This is so I can start putting together my MVP. I was able to get the whole game progression done so I can play through the whole game from start to finish, in terms of progressing through scenes at least.

While I was laying out the levels and the MVP, I realized it was a little hard to test the progression through the puzzles with the default backgrounds. So I decided to translate my sketchbook layouts into very rough placeholder digital art that I could use as backgrounds during my tests. This way I could lay out the triggers in the scenes a little better. I still have some work to do on layouts and figuring out the size of them, but the placeholders have been helpful for this stage. 

Some of them have too many unique 8x8 pixels because I haven't optimized them yet, and some are actually just too big, so when I've been testing, they do turn into some weird glitches, but that'll be fixed when I have the actual art in there.

I have been trying to resize some of the maps though to fit better with how the player travels around them. I’m mostly cropping some of the bigger ones and making them smaller, especially for some of the flashbacks that the player doesn’t move on. That way I can simplify them a bit. I’m also measuring how big sprites will be in them so parts of the backgrounds aren’t overly huge.

To do this, I made a template that has a border around it that I can drag on the maps. I also have a default textbox in there to see what areas will be covered during the dialogue, and a 16x16 square to know how big the character sprites will look on there.

I also got my old GBA from my parents' house so I finally got to try out the EZ Flash Junior. It was pretty easy to set up and I was able to actually get my demo project working on the physical GBA! It was exciting to see, even if I am still in the rough stages with default sprites.

So overall I made a lot of progress this month! There’s still a lot to do, but I’ve also come a long way and I have enjoyed seeing things come together.

The Nays Origins Devlog 2: Music, Writing, and Level Concepts

I finally came back to this project after about a month and a half. It's been awhile, but I'm getting back onto this project! I ordered the EZ Flash hardware and I'm planning to get one of my old GBAs from my parents' house when I visit next week so I can start to do some hardware testing. But for now, I worked on the writing, level designs, and made some music discoveries.

So to start out, I was looking at my plans and where I left off. During that time, I did do some planning though. On a plane ride that I took, I planned out the entire backstory of The Worlds, including information about Malik, Sagun, and Jesper (formerly known as The Man Who Does Not Speak). I also came up with CourtNay, and was able to bring her in to play a major role in the intro to the story for this game. I talked a little bit about this on my CUPdate post here.

After that, I decided to actually flesh out the story a bit more. I updated my sequence of events script page and put some of the notes I had in there. Because my notes were kind of all over the place, I organized them into that page so I could better figure out how all of those ideas fit into the storyline.

And because I was coming up with story, I was about ready to start writing. But before that, I had to find some music. I can't write without music to set the mood, so I decided to take a sidetrack and find GB Studio-compatible music. So I did what I would normally do with an Eventure, and wrote some key story moments in a Notepad txt file and started to listen through GB Studio community assets (found here) to figure out what would fit with each scene.

I ended up being able to find music for most moments, but there were a few moments that just didn't sound right. For example, the Timeless Abyss. I've always associated the Timeless Abyss with Gymnopedie, so I found a midi of it online. The song is public domain, so the good news is that it can be used in The Nays media officially.

I discovered that midi files can be converted to mod files (thanks to this video!), which can be used in GB Studio. This was great news, and I felt a bit more hopeful that I could find more songs (or even make my own?) that I could use, outside of the community assets that most people are probably using in their GB Studio games. The process is pretty manual, so I ended up writing my own steps (here) so I could remember them more easily for next time.

So I ended up converting the Gymnopedie midi to a mod file and was able to get it working in GB Studio! I have to change the music format to use mod files, which means I can't use the built-in UGE editor, but it'll be worth it if I can use all of the external resources that I found. I may even be able to find a midi music creator that I can learn to create my own if I end up doing that for any. Because of the conversion process though, some of the instruments and notes are a little off, so I do still have to play around with it at some point.

I also ended up learning more about how OpenMPT works. Previously I had only ever used this software to convert midi files to mp3s so that I could use them in my Twine stories. But now I understood the interface and how to edit songs. So I created an unsettling remix of Gymnopedie using that midi by playing the patterns in reverse order. This was made for an unsettling scene with CourtNay that I planned out. I might still mess around with it a bit more, but it gets the overall mood I was aiming for.

Then after I found the music, I was finally ready to start writing! I decided to do this where it feels most familiar: in mIRC! I spent the first night writing the whole intro (which includes 2 dungeons) and the first R Nay character's dungeon as well. So I made a lot of good progress!

Then I continued to write these parts throughout the week and ended up finishing the whole story. It ended up being pretty long (~12,500 words), so I'm hoping I can actually fit all of this into the game!

I also did a lot of quick doodles for ideas of the levels for the whole game. I made these really quick prototype layouts in my sketchbook just to get the basics on where things are located. This helped me stay really loose and only show the MVP, which was really helpful to know the bare minimum on what's there. I designed every map that I'm planning on having in the game, which actually comes out to quite a lot (~90).

With all of the story written and levels designed, I also made an asset list. There are a lot of assets, but I'm hoping since these are tiny GB sprites that it'll be a lot quicker to make a lot of these. I can also reuse in a lot of places.

And that's all for this devlog! With the story and level designs in a good spot, next I'll likely work on starting to create some blank scenes using the story and sequence of events as a guide. I also may start working on some art from my asset list, but if I don't get to that until next month, I'll still be working on it according to schedule.

The Nays Origins Devlog 1: Learning and Planning with GB Studio

Welcome to the devlogs for The Nays Origins! These were written last year as I was creating the game, but I haven't publically posted these until now. So you'll get to see what I was thinking back when I started this project. I originally wrote these in Notion just to present during CUPdates.

As I may have mentioned in a previous CUPdate, one of my goals for this year [2023] is to create a GameBoy game and actually port it to a real cartridge. So far I’ve been learning GB Studio and basically trying to figure out how I can use it to create a game.

One of the first things I did (other than reading the documentation and taking notes) was that I found some of my old RPG Maker 2003 games and tried to recreate a few scenes from them in GB Studio. This was a fun exercise to help me learn the engine and compare it to something that’s familiar: RPG Maker. So I started with The Nays Detective Game and Intense Nay Eventure.

I also started to plan some ideas. I had about 20 different ideas for games I could make when I was just writing down ideas and looking back at my old game idea documents. One idea I came up with was actually what turned into our GGJ project, Tag World Roots. That was too complex so I didn’t end up going with that for this GB project.

The idea I started concepting is a game called The Nays Origins. This is a game about The R Nays and The First Generation Nays, and exploring what happens with those characters before they’re introduced in The Nays.

Right now I’m leaning towards this being more of a puzzle adventure game where you unlock characters with unique abilities that will allow you to progress through levels. I got inspiration from Dragon Ball Z: Buu’s Fury on GBA, where you’d need characters to be at a certain level to be able to break down specific doors. I originally was thinking of doing something similar, but the action battle system is more of a secondary idea for this game that I’m not sure if I’ll have the time to actually implement, so I figured abilities and puzzles might work out better.

I started by concepting some menu ideas on paper, I was trying to go with a really simplified layout because creating in GB Studio comes with a lot of limitations. So I started pretty simple.

And even with those simple designs, some were a little harder to accomplish than others. I started with the easy built-in menu. I wish I could center this or customize it a little more, but this might have to do for now. I at least laid out the different options available (though First Generation Nays was too long so I changed that to just Origins). I’m not sure if I’ll need an Items screen yet, but I did get the rest of them started.

Then I started to figure out how the individual menus worked. I started with just a series of choices, but you can only have up to 8 choices, so that wasn’t exactly going to work for the R Nays or Origins menus. So I decided to make it more visual. I figured out how to add one background picture to a menu that you can technically navigate, but I haven’t figured out how to change that background image based on variables or which is selected, so I might just have to switch between different scenes depending on which is selected. I’m not sure if that will be too wasteful of resources that I don’t have a lot of though, so I’m still working on that. Once I figure it out, I can duplicate it and turn it into the R Nays menu as well.

I also made a mockup of the Worlds menu though. This one was easier and more straightforward.

Then I wrote out a detailed sequence of events, where I detail out each scene and the progression of the game. There are a few parts I’m still figuring out, storywise, but I’m sure I’ll get there! For now, I at least know the progression that I’m planning. I also read through some related Eventures to get inspiration for this game, so I could get some of the facts correctly related to the story.

I also started to program some of the mechanics. So I started with coming up with a basic plan for what a map could look like that has all of the abilities in it. This was just a quick doodle layout and I ended up changing a few of the abilities later anyways, but it was just a quick idea.

I also originally concepted some ideas for HUDs while you’re playing the game, but because I’m limited to only 20 actors per scene, I don’t think I want to waste half of those just with HUD elements. So instead I’m going to make the start sub-menus be a bit more detailed to save on some screen space and actor limitations.

I did a little test on how I want to set up the abilities for each character, and set up some variables for each of them. Some are triggers and others are actors, so that will actually be a good way to make use of resources more efficiently! I was able to get scripts set up for all of the ones that had actors, but wasn’t able to figure out how to get the scripts to work for the triggers, so I might have to just copy and paste those events and hope I don’t need to change anything big for those!

Then I started creating a name box for the dialogue. I didn’t get far on this though, so that’ll probably be a post for next time!

2024 Plan

It's time to talk about my 2024 plans!

This post expands upon what I went over in my 2023 Recap blog post here. You can read that first to learn about the context around some of these goals.

Before I get into goals, here's my updated art improvement image (open the image in new tab to zoom in and view it fully):

So as I mentioned in my previous post, my goals will be less drawing-focused than they may have used to be. A lot of my goals still involve drawing, but I won't have any goals like drawing daily or posting drawings monthly.

My goals this year will focus a lot more on projects overall. I want to keep working on The Nays as usual, so I want to again try to make at least 2 Twines this year. If I get farther, great, if not, at least 2!

I also really want to write more Eventures again. Now that I'm on track and have proofread all of the existing ones, I'm hoping I can dive in and start to rewrite more and finish more of those beginning ones. At minimum, I want to write Complex.net and potentially the Frank Lady Eventure. Obviously I'll want to do more.

During our bi-weekly Nay Days, we usually don't actually work on The Nays, but instead play games or talk. I'd like to organize those a little better and maybe get back into talking about The Nays and maybe writing or at least planning Eventures during those if we can. If we can do more full day chats where we write, that'd be great, but life will likely get busy again like last year so I'm not promising anything.

And then now that I've read all of the Eventures, I'd like to really dive in and connect more moments and check on overall consistency as much as I can. I would also like to go back and write the scripts for every Eventure Trailer. This will help me recap myself on where the story was at so I can rewrite parts more quickly without having to reread everything every time that I want to write. I might even record some of the voice overs for them after I've written them.

While I know I said I wasn't making drawing-based goals, I do want to revisit my Nay-A-Day project where I draw full body drawings of characters that I don't have a detailed drawing of yet. I'm not committing to how often I'll do them or anything (certainly not every day), but I do want to do at least a few more of these throughout the year. So my goal can just be to try and do a few of these when I feel like drawing something! And then I do also want to just sketch for fun without it being a project. So I'll try to draw when I'm feeling motivated to!

And then I really want to work on games more, so the rest of my goals will be game dev-related. First, I want to just work on a game this year. That could be a whole game on its own, which I've been brainstorming ideas for, or it can just be to revisit Compass Nays and make progress on that. I'll have more information about this after I make a decision.

Going along with games, I've been working on a game dev portfolio and resume, so I'd like to finish those. I've been making game dev vlogs that I'm putting on there, so I'll continue to make these when I'm motivated as well. This goes into my goal of wanting to talk about my projects more. I'm not really going to make it a goal of a certain number I want to finish or anything, but I'll want to make a few throughout the year.

And going along with talking about my projects, I'd like to attend more game dev meet-ups and talk to people about games. There's a local game conference called GDEX that I'm thinking I might try to attend this year. I basically just want to talk about games. Usually I'd be pressured into attending these for job hunting, but because I'm in a position with a stable job that I enjoy, I'd like to get back into this more with a different perspective and how I wished networking was. I'd like to genuinely make friends and connect with people who make games for fun, rather than the stress of asking for a job. This might force me to talk about my projects more with people too. So my hope is that I'll be able to attend one at least this year!

I also have been wanting to publish a game on Steam. So my thought is that I can go through the process and learn how it works by taking one of my Global Game Jam projects and put it on there for free. I basically just want to have a game on Steam and know how it all works. That way, if I ever sell a game in the future, I'll have this part under my belt.

So overall, here are the goals I'm working towards:

• Write at least 2 Eventures.
• Create at least 2 Twines.
• Write (all of?) the Eventure Trailer scripts.
• Draw a few Nay-A-Day drawings.
• Make a game (either progress on Compass Nays or a new game finished).
• Finish game dev portfolio and updated resume.
• Create a few game dev vlogs.
• Attend GDEX (or another local game convention).
• Publish a game on Steam.

I know this looks like more than last year and I said I'd try to do less, but most of these are fairly straight-forward and not super intensive. This will just help guide me to creating projects and continuing to work towards my life goals now that I'm in my 30s.

So anyway, I'm looking forward to 2024! I feel a lot more focused and I know what I want to do, so I'm excited to make progress on my projects with this plan.