DAY 1 - DESIGN PHASE

Greetings all! I'm super stoked, once again, for the Speedgame Challenge. This would be my 6th time participating and I always enjoy working on something and seeing what everyone else has done for their projects. God bless you all and inspire you to make something awesome!

Romans 15:4 jumped out at me immediately out of all three verses because I'm attracted to its potential for storytelling. I love storytelling and spinning a good narrative. My last game, Envoy, done for last year's Speedgame jam, was heavy on narrative but lacked any real gameplay. I won't be making the same error this time around. This time, I'm going to make sure I have some good, provocative narrative that is also coupled with neat gameplay. That's the plan at least! I pray the project scope fits my time and schedule. Anyhow, I digress. What I like about Romans 15:4 is its potential to tell a story about a text that has clues to instruct, encourage and bring hope.

For my game idea, I'm excited to try my hand at developing a game similar to Phantasy Star, and specifically Phantasy Star 4. So I'm shooting for an RPG with several characters, a good amount of enemies, and several areas to explore. An ancient evil stirs and you must seek the ancient book of lore to discover how to defeat this evil. The text will provide clues by telling you how to overcome certain challenges, and will encourage you to succeed and give you hope for the future. You will find pieces of the text first, and bring it together as a whole.

Now, I know I can't make a game like Phantasy Star in a few weeks, such a game probably took a year or two for its developers. And they were a team! What I will do is try to distill that game down to its essence, and try to replicate that essence. What's the skeleton of such a game? I must try to build such a skeleton...

That's all for my first post. Looking forward to this journey with you all!

Peace, Raul

DAY 2 - DESIGN PHASE

So continued some more design work and started thinking, albeit loosely, what it might look like to code my game - thinking about what the systems will look like and how they will function, etc.

Phantasy Star 4' skeleton is about exploration, story beats, and combat. You walk around different environments, talking with NPCs, discovering new areas, items, things, and even what kind of creatures inhabit the world. The story beats are moved along by chatting up the NPCs and getting major narrative info. Another way the story beats move forward is by reaching certain areas or interacting with certain characters. Combat is the result of exploring a dangerous world, and encountering dangerous individuals. Combat is cool because it's so immersive and is rewarding on multiple levels. The thing about it is you grow your characters through combat, learn new skills and techniques to try out, discover the dangerous fauna of your world, and strategize how to best approach certain combinations of enemies. You can macro your way through some combat scenarios, which is like automating the decision making process, or you can be more hands on if you so like. Other gameplay rewards are rooted in discovery, management, and collection.

Now, if I were to simplify that skeleton down to an even purer essence, and translate it into a game that's maybe completable in a game jam it would be:

1) Explorable Areas - Instead of navigating the maps with your character, you would point and click on objects of interest and move immediately to that object, with a contextual menu coming up with either dialog or letting you know what you encountered. So, I'd do away with walking and having to animate a world sprite, I can just use a floating head or something to convey the player character.

2) Story beats - Clicking on an NPC or object of interest will move the story forward by telling the story or causing a major combat scene. So this part should retain its essence from the main skeleton. There's not much simplifying I think that needs to be done.

3) Combat - Combat may not change much, except for the presence of fewer choices. So, instead of hitting the COMD button, to then see a list of possible actions such as: Attack, Skill, Tech, Defend, Item, I may just implement ATTACK, DEFEND, RUN. I'll reset health at the end of each battle, and you'll be able to manage items outside of combat. Now, I'm still iffy how much I want to simplify combat because this is a meaty part of the game. But I'm also trying to be cautious and conservative about how much I know I can implement since combat involves a series of data structures talking between each other, crunching numbers, and doing turn orders.

So, the game will feel a little more point & clicky as I've envisioned it. But in essence you'll still be exploring, talking, fighting. I'm just trying to prune the main systems down to their essentials so I can complete them in time. Then I can worry about polishing and increasing the complexity of the features. I'm also still working out if this design is optimal for fun, enjoyment and telling the game story together with the verse. I may take upon a totally different game play structure.

GamesForFun has also given me a good idea which is to use RPG Maker. That will certainly save me time as most of the systems will already be completed, I just need to focus on writing out the story and making some cool art to use for the game. I have less control over the systems however, like if I wanted to change some things, it would not be easy. I would also require some time getting familiar with RPG Maker, having never used it. Decisions, decisions!

Hopefully by today I'll lock down what I want to do, find what my game's about and come up with a name. Stay tuned!

DAY 3 - DESIGN PHASE

Today I spent some time creating a concept and design document containing game design info, a weekly plan schedule, story and world building details. Not much more to update as it's late right now, but tomorrow I will update more substantially. I will also begin to work through what it might take to build my game, programming-wise, as well as work out details related to gameplay. I expect also to start doing some concept art and begin envisioning what the world will look like. Stay tuned!

DAY 4 - DESIGN PHASE

Today I spent some time doing some art, thinking about my characters, creating an asset list, and further expanding on the game story and world details.

The white boxes with exclamation marks, a smiley face or an angry face represent events. Gameplay wise you'd click on them, a dialogue box would come up like above, with a character portrait, and they would say something about that event you clicked on. Maybe it might be a dialogue by itself, or it could be an enemy you'll have to fight. I'm planning for about 5 to 6 different areas in the game. A cave, a city, a forest, a ruin and the overworld you see above. Final area would be an underground fortress. When an event is a combat event, the screen would change to a first person combat view, with your characters visible from behind, and the enemies in front of them.

These are some sketches of my characters, names are below in the next piece. I'm thinking of having two different kinds of portraits for my characters: Battle portraits and normal portraits. The sketches above were done first to get an idea for how my characters might look for the higher quality battle portraits. I used some photo reference so I could speed up the process of ideating, normally I would just sketch, fix, sketch, fix, until I get the look I want. Photo reference helped minimize the amount of time I spent, since I want to use my time as wisely as possible.

These were some concepts I quickly painted up and where I explored what the character's design might look like in-game. I spent maybe about 30 - 40min on each. I'm not too worried about perfecting these, they're just steps to ideating what the characters could be. Once I start working on the battle sprites, then I can go back and iterate.

Now for some story time!

Backstory

Long ago a great darkness enveloped the land. The ancients fought back with all they had and found no way of routing the darkness. It wasn't until they discovered a book of unknown origin and age that they learned the truth about the evil present in their land. They used the instructions from the book to fight back and eventually prevailed.

However, there were those who had sided with this evil, and once their masters were imprisoned, they stole the book. Unable to destroy it, they tore its pages out and scattered them across the land. Today, treasure hunters, explorers, and the brave and courageous seek the pages out for the power they grant and hope to find all the content from the book again.

Now as the dark moon rises, evil stirs in the forgotten realms of the world. Soon the ancient book of lore and its pages will need to be sought out again. For power, not for personal gain, but to bring light and hope which are fading fast...

***

This backstory gives the game some history and context upon which I'm going to be placing my characters and game mechanics upon. Want to know how the verse fits in to my proposed game mechanics? Tune in tomorrow!

DAY 5 - DESIGN PHASE

So today I spent some time thinking about the systems and flowcharting what it would look like. Doing this should certainly make things easier when I go in to code. But not yet! I'm gonna need to break down that flowchart into sub-flowcharts and also do a sequence diagram to get an idea of what objects and classes I will need and where they go. I'm spending some good time on the design phase because the stronger the design, the stronger the end result will be. I also scheduled the design phase for a week, so I'm still in the green. Before week's end, I also expect to do a prototype with some boxed out code throwing print to screens to make sure everything is talking to each other.

Now it's time to reveal how the verse fits in to my proposed game mechanics! So the verse states that was written was written for our instruction, for encouragement and for hope. Mechanic-wise, players will grow in skill and abilities when they acquire pages. Some pages will suit certain characters over others, so there's going to be a word that is specific to each character. While other pages will provide upgrades for everyone. Thinking on that, I think leveling up should somehow also be controlled by page acquirement. Hmmm, I'll have to think on that last one.

Tomorrow I'll share some background on my characters and their classes! Keep on devving, folks!

DAY 6 - DESIGN AND PROTOTYPE PHASE

So yesterday I spent a huge chunk of the day working on this project, about 9hrs and 22min, the most I've been able to dedicate to the project in one sitting. I continued working with my flowchart, finetuning and identifying the programming logic necessary to make this game. I also spent some time researching what would be a good option for handling large amounts of text. I think the best thing I can do is use some arrays to hold my values for now.

Then I began to set-up the prototype for the game, first in Unity. The bulk of the time was spent on this. I ran into an issue in Unity that had me spend almost 4 hours trying to find a solution with none in sight. The issue at hand was the basis of the point & click system. 

When the player's mouse cursor hovers over an object area, there should be some effect, followed by clicking on the object. Well, the manual's instruction on the onMouseOver function and the onPointerEnter function seems to be off, because despite following the instructions correctly, I could not get it to work. Googling the issue found a lot of people struggling FOR YEARS with the same issue, with very few fixes in sight. Some people found results, but I was unable to implement those results. There's a video I've added into my  Watch Later list on YouTube that may provide the solution I'm looking for. I really need to find a better way of handling deadlocks, because they are usually timesinks for me. I think that after the first hour, if the solution was not coming up for me, I should have just bit the bullet, sat down, and spend some 20-30 min watching some videos on how to get it work. Instead, it was nearly at the end of 4 hours that I almost decided to do it, but then stopped because I had already spent waaaay to much time. I then pivoted.

I went to GameMaker Studio 2 and in less than 20 min had the basis of the point & click system up and running. I can hover over objects and they change color, I can click and it takes me to the next room. Last task I left unfinished for the evening was printing to screen some information related to an item and an enemy. That is my next task for today, and then locking down the prototype. For next week, I then begin to build the code, art and game.

DAY 7 - DESIGN & PROTOTYPE PHASE

So today felt like I made progress then I went backwards back to where I stopped last night.

I went back to Unity to see if I could resolve the issue I had yesterday. I was able to find the solution I needed for the mouse events and even learned a few things along the way. Hooray! Then I ran into another issue where the instances of my prefabs were firing off commands all at the same time, even if I wasn't clicking them directly. It wasn't breaking my prototype, but it just felt weird. I found a way to stop that and have only the objects I clicked on notify me by a print screen. You'd think I'd be happy, but deep down I felt like I was still missing something, and that as I further built the game, something was going to pop up and cause trouble. I chalked it up to still having gaps in my knowledge on Unity. Especially in regards to having multiple instances of a prefab, but needing a prefab variant to account for room warps, items, and enemies. What if clicking on a room warp would somehow cause the item object and the enemy object to fire off their own commands too, all because I'm not sure how to make each specific instance do its own thing and call its own version of a generic script. Anyhow, that cemented my thought to move away from Unity for now and go back to GMS2. So that I did.

I went back to GMS2, fixed a few things that needed fixing, and now I'm back to where I ended yesterday. Although a tiny few steps ahead, as last night there was an issue in GMS2 that needed attention. I got that resolved. 

All in all, at least the time spent going back and forth between Unity and GMS2 has helped me decide to continue building the project with GMS2 and later on try porting it to Unity when I'm not on a deadline. I also learned something about Unity that will be of use later on. So yeah.

That's my update! Not super happy with today, but I'll make the most of it.

DAY 8 - PROTOTYPE PHASE

We're now in week 2! So this is the week the prototype should start to be filled out. I still need to finish the prototype though, so I'm a little behind. I'm confident things will go well however.

Today I spent only an hour and a few minutes working on the project, it being Father's day. It was a productive hour where I made a simple menu and three options, each option can be moved through. Tomorrow, I'll make the options selectable and have an extra menu with data be displayed.

Currently I can move through each area by selecting a clickable object. There's a dummy item and a dummy enemy that can be interacted with as well. My plan is to have the dummy item put into your inventory, and the dummy enemy to start a mock battle with you. If I can get that going without issue, I think I'll be in the clear with getting all the content filled out. From there, the real work will start, building the world!

DAY 9 - PROTOTYPE PHASE

Not much to report for today. Finished working on the character UI option menu and implemented an inventory system. Still needs a little work, so that as the list grows it doesn't go through the bottom of the screen, but continues towards the top and further towards the right. Aside from that, combat system is the next step.

After the combat system is up and running, the text system will be next. And with that will begin the work of putting in content and filling out the shell of the game.

DAY 10 - PROTOTYPE PHASE

So today's progress was getting into combat, and I've accomplished it! Super excited with this next step, everyone! 

So the player currently clicks on an enemy, a print to screen message shows up with some text, and then you're taken to the combat screen. Once there, a random number of enemies will appear, between 1 and 3, and they will be of the type that you encountered in the world. With that working, the next step is to fill out the combat with content such as: player options, player and enemy queue, actions and reactions, and then combat results, such as whether to go to the next round or end combat.

This is the first time I've worked on a turn-based RPG without the help of a tutorial, so I'm excited by the progress I am making and how things are taking shape. Especially as I'm building a game similar to Phantasy Star. Can't wait to show you all more progress with screenshots and maybe a video as things come together.

DAY 11 & 12 - PROTOTYPE PHASE

Didn't post yesterday, but I assure you, I worked on this! :D I spent just about two hours yesterday, but I got the inventory to work with accepting and using items. Also worked with setting combat up. 

Today I was able to spend a more substantial amount of time working on the game, my efforts today produced some more results with combat while also working out some issues with other code. Everything seems to be working well for the most part, there's still a minor hiccup or two I need to work out. Other than that, my next step is to resolve combat by applying damage to the enemy and/or player. Currently I get a print to screen when a attack, skill or tech is done. Same with Defending or Running, although Running additionally takes you to the previous area outside combat. I'm happy to say that my shell is looking good. Now it just needs some paint, which is coming!

Here are some screenshots of what the barebones system looks like! Remember it, because next time you see some screenshots, it's gonna look ALOT prettier! <3

DAY 13 & 14 - DEVELOPMENT PHASE

Yesterday I spent some time at the COGG meetup (Central Ohio GameDev Group) hanging out, networking, and showing my work in progress of this game. It was a blast! Didn't spent time working on my game though, maybe at most an hour trying to get my item descriptions to print to screen. Today I spent quite a few good hours working on an issue with my inventory, where the names of all my items get overwritten with the name of the last item I pick up. It still counts each individual item, but it just names them all the same. When I thought I got it fixed, I ended up getting a data structure error related to an index that doesn't exist. That error in turn has to do with how I'm accessing data through a for loop. I've spent quite some time trying to resolve it with no success, so I ended up doing a Reddit post on the GameMaker reddit. Hopefully I can get an answer.

Anyhow, this week is the final stretch! Blessings to everyone!

DAY 15-18 - DEVELOPMENT PHASE

The past few days I've been working on art and code and my oh my is the game coming together! Environment art is in and character art is in. 

Currently I'm writing the rest of the combat system. You can select an enemy and attack but you can't do damage yet. I'm in the midst of implementing that as well as the code that will implement the skills and techniques you can use. After that works, the next things to be done are the text scripts and enemies you can fight. 

Prayers I can implement it on time, my sister is in town with her kids so there's alot of busyness around the house! I'm making the best of my time in the early mornings and trying for the evenings as well. 

POST-JAM REFLECTION

So I wasn't able to finish the game, surprise surprise! My sister came in on Wednesday with her two kids (it was an unplanned surprise for me) and so we spent a lot of time together these past few days. The amount of time I dedicated during those days were not enough to finish the game on time for the deadline, nor get through a code error I was hitting. I was also counting on submissions closing late on the 30th as the doc stated but submissions closed early this morning around 3am. So that cut my dev time short by a day, which I was counting on to try and fix my issue while getting in my other gameplay elements. In any case, even if I had that day, I'm not sure how much I would have been able to complete, or if the build would even be playable.

Setbacks aside, this was a really fun game jam for me, and one where I pooled together a lot of knowledge from past game jams, game projects, and studies on coding. This was also a jam where I did not depend on tutorials to get things done, which is surprising because I was making a turn-based RPG. I used data structures a lot and so I really grew with using them, both in understanding and in practice. I also explored some neat design and art direction which really got my creative juices flowing. Scope-wise, I think the scope was mostly okay. I think there are a few spots I could have cut corners with, but for the most part aiming high helped push me in several directions that provided some good creative and personal growth. Jams are one of the few spaces where I can get pushed enough to grow in different areas and come up with a project I'm really proud of.  Outside of jams, my time and development process can get thrown off and feel unstructured. I think this means I need to set hard deadlines for myself to aid in my development process. Total development time on this jam was 74 hours spread across three weeks.

I'll be leaving a dropbox link here for those interested in looking at the game. I'm also attaching some art so you can see how the game was looking like. My plans are to improve upon this game as I envisioned and get it done. I'm really excited about this project as I was able to meet my personal goal of creating a Phantasy Star-like shell. Try the prototype out so you have an idea of what it was going to be! Windows Build only.  Created in Game Maker Studio 2.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8bzl5a0xvorideo/CDN_Speedgame2019-v2Build%20-%206-30.z...