Introduction
Hello everyone! My name is Victor (aka Crowno) and I've been an EZA fan since the beginning. Unfortunately I missed the start of the jam (got distracted by E3 and life stuff) so I'm starting development on my project very late. I still have some busy days ahead of me and the chances of me finishing this game are slim, but I've been so in love with Glinny's Cauldron and the idea of a game jam based on it that I absolutely NEED to give it a shot, regardless of my chances of being successful.
I'll be working on it alone and on my free time, so bare in mind I will be doing this project for fun and with no stakes. Let me know if you want to help with anything, but have in mind that this game might not be finished and/or released.
Anyway, figured it could be cool to share a devlog with you guys since it could be entertaining or informative. Plus, documenting my progress might help me get motivated. Feel free to leave your feedback and ideas!
Gah! Bonelord! (temporary name, maybe?!)
So, for my game I decided to choose Glinny's recipe instead of Cahrsurraurher's. Both of them have themes I'd absolutely love to incorporate, but I feel Glinny's may give me more flexibility to work with mechanics. It was a very hard choice to pass on "full voice acting by 1 person" and "character portraits are different on the menus", but sacrifices have to be made. That being said, these are the primary themes I'll be attempting to incorporate:
- You have a 1% chance to not be able to double jump
- Spells that inflict status effects virtually never work on bosses.
- The first waterfall you discover has a secret cave, but the following 23 do not.
- Instant death from touching the SIDE of a spike. Not the dangerous points, but the side of the spikes.
- The final boss of the game is a character first introduced directly prior to the final boss fight.
- There’s a cutscene where all the characters in your party hear news of a death of an NPC that was mentioned once before in the story. They all act incredibly devastated even though this character was insignificant.
- The game has a hunger meter, every time your character is hungry a loud stomach grumbling sound effect will play. This sound effect can drown out important pieces of dialogue or other important sounds.
- No buildings can be entered. Anytime you attempt to enter one your character says "It's not the right time for that"
- Every town has a mandatory Bad Anime Hot Spring scene
- The celebrity likeness
But what will the game be?
I've struggle a bit to settle on what kind of game I wanted to make. At first I thought a traditional turn-based RPG on RPG Maker would be perfect for this, but I figured it would be a bit difficult to adjust the pacing to fit into a short 45min game, considering all the rpg aspects such as random encounters, balancing and etc. Ultimately I decided to go with a simple action platformer.
The main idea is to give the player the ability to change between party members with different attacks and abilities, but keeping it as simple as possible. I'm aiming for 4 playable party members at the moment, but I might reduce it to 3 or even 2.
So far there is absolutely no plot and the plan is to make up as I go along. I have some ideas of characters and jokes already, but my goal is not to be too serious about it. I'll be focusing on character design, aesthetics and gameplay, which are my favorite parts.
Development so far
I usually start my games by choosing a theme, finding a style I want to work with and doing some sketches. Visually I'm taking a lot of inspiration from Paper Mario. Here are some preliminary sketches of character ideas.
It took me a while to decide between going with pixel art or hand-drawn art, but I decided to go with the latter. I work way too much with pixel art already, so I feel the hand-drawn characters will provide me with the looseness I need. I also opted to do hand-drawn animations instead of going with bones, but I need to work a bit more on it to decide if it's a viable option.
So far I have a prototype with basic platforming movement fully implemented, as well as some baseline I want to follow with the graphics. So far it looks like this:
Here's a gif of the game in action: https://gfycat.com/totaldearirishwolfhound
What is next
For now my absolute priority is to get 2 or 3 fully playable characters with different abilities, make the combat and implement some basic gameplay features (dialogue boxes, dying & respawning, transitioning between areas). Hopefully I'll return soon with some updates.
I guess that is it for now. Thank you for reading, and I'll be looking forward to your feedback.
L&R!