Heya. I'm Ash and uh, this is my first time joining the jam. I don't know anything about making games so basically I just jumped right in, in the hopes that I can put together something that's interactive. HAH. I figured I'd be more productive if there's a time limit to a project, so here I am.

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Characters/Concept:

To make things easier I decided to go with my characters from my old comic called Morsel, starring cat people and their daily goings-on (it's available here but it's been a year and half since I last updated so uhhh it's not very good. ahaaha.).

These are the main characters. They are siblings, and the main character of this game will be Eloise (girl in the middle).

I just want this game to be more of an exploration game, I suppose? The game happens on a cruise ship and the main character explores and gets to interact with her neighbors. I'm not the best writer in the world so this won't be anything ~AMAZING~, mind you.

Engine:

RPG Maker VXACE. I guess I really love that pixel look, so I'm gonna try my best to learn the essentials. We'll see how it goes

Art/Assests:

My strong point, I think, is in drawing. However, asset-making is not something I've done before, so I'll be looking for assets by other talented creators~ As far as character portraits and sprites -- I will be making those on my own.

Goals:

My ultimate goal is to just make something that's playable. My progress so far has been just reading about RPGmaker and testing things out, so no in-game progress yet! But I'm gonna try tackling making the maps first before figuring out The Hard Stuff. I hope to have fun with this project~ (kind of really anxious, but I'll try my best)

Um, anyway, thanks for looking! :0

Log #2

Mmkay, so far in this engine:

• I've learned a bit about shift+click mapping which is useful!
• been searching mostly for bg music too
• I've read/watched helpful tutorials about events and switches. But i still need to learn more about it. i'm still confused a bit
• I wrote down the maps that i want to make. so far I have 5 rooms planned + a simple hallway map (not sure how this will all turn out because my assets are still quite limited)
• i learned a little bit about parallax mapping

The image below is all parallaxed. It's not particularly interesting, but I wanted to combine certain tiles with one another. I also wanted to move items in certain areas which was not possible with regular mapping in RPGmaker...

Also, my placeholder character shown below is able to go behind the laptop screen (instead of above it) and that was thanks to parallaxing.

yay but

New problem: when i go to a different map, the laptop overlay image is still there (bottom right). LOL.

not sure how to fix that but I have errands to do, so I'll come back to it later. and gonna try drawing character portraits.

Log #3

Managed to fix the parallax problem from the previous post.

I figured out how to incorporate bust portraits when characters are talking

(I'll draw a better portrait later. The dialogue is just for show, so I'll rewrite it too)

Alright, time to go build a main map, I guess. Not too concerned about writing here. I'll just write as I go.

Log #4

Aight, so I didn't have time today to work on it, but I managed to learn how to set up events yesterday and how to trigger them only when certain conditions are met. And man, having an event and a cutscene happen after a string of conversations was really time consuming and involved a lot of trial-and-error. *bloodshot eyes*

and again, the default human sprites bother me but I'll worry about them later. :'D

once you nail events + cutscenes you can pretty much do anything hahahfhsd. i still cant get over your character sprites + i really like the borders on your text also!

Log #5

I'm just gonna go ahead and say in the end, I won't be able finish this game. There are still some dialogue, events, and one or two more rooms that I wanted to add (plus I wasn't even able to create a walking sprite for my main character). I just don't have the time because of my job and I won't have time tomorrow for the deadline. /Sadness

A few things I've learned though:

I really like game development! I'm not particularly good at it since I'm such a beginner, but it's really fun. I'm thankful for this game jam cuz it made me explore game-making and I really want to expand my skills on that now! But next time, I'll probably choose a more versatile engine. I heard GameMaker is a pretty good engine for that. For now, I'm proud of what I was able to learn in RPGmaker and although I didn't meet the goal exactly, I'm happy that I've started something anyway! Hurray! Maybe you'll see me around with a better game in the future. Haha. Thanks for looking and good day. And of course, good luck to fellow jammers. I can't wait to try out some of the games that people worked on :)