The Genre-Confused Room Escape Game, a Visual Novel
Join yourself on your quest to gain entry into a superhero league! Travel a villain's mindscape, unlock its secrets, and flirt a bit along the way.
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Hey there! Just got back from a trip, and I'm ready to jam! Since I'm coming in late, I've scaled down quite a bit...since my goal this jam is just to put out a finished product, I'll be using an engine I'm familiar with, Ren'Py. Here's the general flow of the game:
Opening cut scene -> first room -> interim cut scene -> second room -> interim cut scene -> third room -> final cut scene
Each room will feature a simple point-and-click room escape puzzle with the theme of the villain's psyche, and each cut scene will both give you a bit of story and offer a tiny dating sim, flirting with the judge who's alongside you for the journey.
I've done a bit of concept art, but in light of the reduced deadline, I've decided just to digitally alter stock photos instead. Here's some anyway:
Concept art for the player character, who appears as a shadow in the villain's mind
I'll try to write in this as much as possible, and I hope you enjoy reading along! I'll be posting separate, more formal posts to show my progress and ask questions, but I also put a little progress tracker here for more informal thoughts.
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Learning Goals:
- Creating custom UI
- Implementing custom art/assets
- Time management strategies and planning
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Ultimate Goal:
__ Finish and publish a game!
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Progress Tracker/Journal:
7/28, 1:30 AM - Wrote this post and psyched myself up. Still have the rest of the day ahead of me. Current thoughts: Should I make the love interest's gender ambiguous? How am I going to do an imagemap in the context of a room escape game? Will image manipulation really work? I found some tutorials on inventories and custom UI, so I'll need to look through them. To do: sleep.
7/30, 12:45 PM - Busy past couple of days, not a ton of time to work. Managed to tinker around a little bit and set up a good position for the player character sprite. Working on each room's concept and execution. Current thoughts: Should I stick to regular digital art, which I'm more familiar with? To do: finish room concepts/puzzles and begin writing interim scenes.
8/2, 1:33 PM - Making progress on the code and script...not so much on visuals and sound. I've decided to scale down, so it'll be more of a demo than an actual game. It will probably only have one room, or maybe two rooms with recycled assets. Current thoughts: How on earth do I make text appear one character at a time with sound? To do: do things.
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About Me:
I'm a beginner game-maker who has one class on Java (from 4 years ago) and one class on Python (last year) under her belt, as well as some idle dabbling in Ren'Py and RPGMaker. Although I've started a lot of projects, I've never actually finished one--or even gotten partway. So this year, I'll be trying to finish and publish a game, which will hopefully lead to me finishing and publishing another game, and so on. Wish me luck!
