{edit} please excuse the post that this one replaced, i wasn't really in a good place mentally when i wrote it.

I'm developing a game in Unity called Frog Sleepover! In essence, you play as a frog, and you've been dropped off by your dad to stay with a friend from school for a sleepover.

I originally wanted to make this game in RPG Maker, but I quickly found that any attempts to make anything custom work with that software seriously limited what I wanted to do, hence why I chose to make this game in Unity. Because it's a carryover from RPG Maker, I want it to function much like RPG Maker did, but with a few added quirks. The game will have a few enemies to learn how to deal with, and mini-games you can play to try and learn more about your friend Marco and his family. The endgame is a confrontation with Marco himself...

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 1

So, in lieu of managing to actually fix the problem with the scene trigger, i instead decided to just parent the camera to the player, and have the whole game be a single scene that you can navigate. Hey, I don't have all month!

Anyway, here's all the art assets I've got so far: first pic, you can see your friend Marco in the bottom right. He's a fidgety sort. Second pic to the left is his mom, and the third pic, you can see his dad.

The seal on the couch? Well, she's…let's just say, she's a catalyst for stuff to happen. The cat's just a placeholder.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping to get a system ready where you can exchange dialogue. I hope I can make that much work, this entire project's kind of hinged on being able to talk.

I like the sprites, they have a lot of personality! Looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

omg this is such a cute concept... the art reminds me a lot of 90s point and click games--if you haven't already you should look at some because i think you could totally rock that aesthetic. best of luck on your dialogue system! yarn (??) and fungus are some good dialogue systems for unity!

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 2

So, essentially what's going on is, I haven't had a lot of time to actually work on this project b/c of work, so I haven't been able to properly do anything about THIS.

I downloaded Fungus, but as helpful as it could potentially be, the codes are all giving error messages. Every last one. I assume this is because all these assets occurred when Unity 4 was the model, and I'm using Unity 5? Oh well. Point is, I'm trying to reverse engineer the stuff I'm seeing for narrative gameplay, and now everything's on fire. Will report back tomorrow, when hopefully everything isn't as on fire. Sure would've been nice if the error console could at least point me in a direction of what went wrong, but I can't go asking for the moon.

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 3

Got the problems from yesterday quelled down a little, but sadly, still not much progress. This one screen is all I can make happen with the dialogue for the moment, until I figure out tomorrow how to make that little blue piece clickable. After that is a matter of putting triggers on colliders to make dialogue for multiple characters, but once that's done, then I can have some real fun with writing the story proper!

I should also think about getting these folks a real environment to stand around in. I have my day off tomorrow, so hopefully that'll be the day everything comes together!

aw man sorry to hear that about the plugin--i hope the rest of the setup goes much more smoothly for you so you can start getting into the writing. i'm looking forward to the background!

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 4

So, I finally managed to get every character to be able to fulfill a speaking role. Big steps. Sadly, I attempted to use quads to work in place of the background, and instead it only managed to cause another problem. It's looking like I'll actually need to remove these quads and create a proper tileset for the background. I'm not really looking forward to piecing together the in's and out's of UV texture mapping, but what choice do I have?

I shouldn't really complain too much. The real challenge of coding actual gameplay is still to come.

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 5

Got some tiles set up! They don't fit together right! But, whatever!

You'll also notice, I've got a standard GUI element in the top left. In theory, I should be able to click that, and it'll send me to the BattleEvents scene I'm setting up tomorrow. But, for whatever reason, the button doesn't want to be clicked. Hovering over it does nothing, clicking it does nothing. Yet another mystery to solve! Thankfully, tomorrow is another of my off days, and I will hopefully make the most of it! :

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 6

By some miracle, I finally got one scene to link to another; pressing the play button in the middle of the first screen takes you to the rest of the game.

I made some buttons for the battle system once I get it up and running. They don't do anything yet. I'm trying to stay optimistic, but I'm not convinced this game will be ready by the 23rd.

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 6.5

Dreams over. The buttons I got to work earlier don't work anymore. They don't work anymore because I imported a free asset bundle to try and get the battle systems working. It didn't work because it was made in Unity 4, and the API's or whatever didn't fit with the code I'd already scripted, so now the buttons don't even HIGHLIGHT when you click them!!

It's just fucked, you know? Unity will draw you in with how versatile it has the potential to be, and then not give you ANY working material to get started unless you downgrade to an earlier version, costing you a bunch of time you SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO WASTE.

I expected to be SO much further along than I am now!! I have NOTHING! I have a bunch of cobbled-together sprite assets, and some non-functional buttons. I just...I reallllly thought making an RPG in this engine should've been easier. This week has not been easy. This week has been an uphill battle from the beginning, and what I have is barely a game. I KNOW that that's part of the risk and the fun that comes with being part of a game jam, but I was still clinging on to the vain hope that I was going to be the exception. Why was I not the exception?? Was I too lazy? Too inept? Both??

I don't know. I mean...nobody enters into a game jam thinking it's going to go on their CV, or get them a job or whatever. So, I don't know why I'm so riled up. The whole point was to have fun, and I'm not. I feel like dogshit. I have the components in place to make a different battle system, I guess. Anything to not come away from this feeling miserable.

Frog Sleepover Progress: Day 8

Added triggers and scripts for a quest to complete by walking from one zone to another. I think importing assets screwed up the way triggers register (or, I'm just coding it wrong). Only thing I know for sure is thank goodness for Gamesplusjames on Youtube, otherwise this game would NOT be happening right now.

Frog Sleepover is out! It's not done, but it's as done as it's getting before the 23rd.

https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2016/rate/76518