My Friend Melon

Pitch: Pan and Melon are the best of friends. With work and school keeping them busy, it’s good to set aside time for relaxing together. Help them prepare for a chill day of hanging-out at Pan’s new apartment: explore their quirky homes, collect ingredients for Ultimate Snacks, and find some cute treasures along the way!

Gameplay:

• Choose from two playable Pans: bunny or bear
• Switch between Pan and Melon as you complete unique objectives in each space
  • Collect snacktime ingredients to cook up tasty treats
  • Find interesting trinkets by interacting with objects (you never know what you can find in the couch cushions until you look...)
• “Couch Multiplayer” encouraged with controller handoff! Rock-paper-scissors to see who plays as Pan and who plays as Melon, perhaps. Don’t have a buddy? Just play as both!

Engine: RPG Maker MV

Art & Assets: Medibang Paint Pro

Music & Sound: Ableton Live 9 (Lite), Audacity

Day 1:

A bit late since I had work in the evening, but I thought I’d post progress from yesterday.

• Production schedule for week one
• Broke up required assets & components into manageable chunks via checklist
• Preliminary pixel sprite sheets for Pan (bunny) and Pan (bear) in Medibang
• Bunny version has 4 total variations on outfits
• Bear version has 4 total variations on outfits

Day 2 Goals:

• Finalize Pan sprites (resize)
• Melon sprite sheets
• Ann & Cherry sprites
• Expression/speech portraits for all characters

Day 3:

Plugging away and taking steps. Got immediate character selection for Pan to function in-game without any hiccups via this plugin. It was a little harder to find a solution to custom animations outside of combat (I was likely overthinking exactly how you'd achieve that), since most tutorials cover the combat animations.

For anyone curious, you take the same principles of the attack animations in terms of frames/cells. This video was a helpful resource for understanding the parameters and generally how you break up the frames, layer them to create the animation, etc.  It also explains it much better and more concisely than I could. Once you import your animation sheet and get everything flowing smoothly (and scaled down by 50% to keep the sprites a consistent size), you create a new event. There's a "Show Animation" option under the second page of event commands, and from there you simply choose the animation you created and make sure it affects the "Player". I'll be using this technique on Pan and Melon when they collect key items like snack ingredients, and for "snack crafting" (...cooking) animations such as the one below.

So far so good!

Progress:

• "Pan Selection" is up and running
• Special cooking animations for both versions of Pan are operational
  • Animation frames complete
  • Event implementation works
• Rough draft of Pan's apartment floor plan
• Found useful "Quest Log" plugin; may simplify for facilitating game objectives

Day 4 Goals:

• Tilesets: floors & walls for Pan's apartment
• Tilesets: floors & walls for Melon's house
• Tilesets: doors & basic furniture
• Sprite out Key Items (ie snack ingredients)
• Draft "Item Get!" animation frames

Day 4:

I was probably a little too ambitious with my daily goals for today. While I didn't make much headway with the Key Items or furniture, I did manage to finish the walls and floors. Broke away from my laptop screen for a bit to make the title illustration, as well, which I'm rather fond of. Hopefully I'll get to catch up with all the little doo-dads that need attention in the next couple days!

Progress:

• Title screen is finished
• Pan's apartment: floors & walls complete
• Melon's house: floors & walls complete

Day 5 Goals:

• Tilesets: furniture, doors & misc. objects
• Key Item sprites
• Melon's House map
• Pan's Apartment map

Day 5:

Furniture tiles are coming along, though veeeery slowly. Got a bit hung-up on what each space needed and kept drawing blanks. Decided to map out the final 1:1 layout of Pan's Apartment anyway with some placeholder tiles, which definitely gave me some more direction for my next foray into the furniture sets. Melon's House now has a floorplan sketch like Pan's place did. I think my next steps will involve switching into BGM/SFX mode and working on illustrated bits while I'm away from my laptop to avoid burning out on all the sprites/tiles.

Progress:

• Tilesets: windows, misc. furniture
• Floorplan for Melon's House
• Map for Pan's Room and Apartment (mostly placeholder graphics)

Day 6 Goals:

• Music: Title theme
• Music: Pan's Room
• Music: Melon's Room
• Music: End Credits
• MISC: "Credit Roll" illustration/splash screen

This is super cute. I love it!

aaaa these sprites are soooo cute and your game premise is really charming! i'm excited to see how this game plays!

This looks and sounds plain adorable! I hope you'll get out of your block soon. Good luck and take care of yourself.

Everything about your game is incredibly charming. Please keep up the good work!

Final Jam Day:

Before I say anything else, I want to thank everyone—the hosts, commenters, awesome devs and everyone in between—for a great jam! It’s been fun connecting with all of you through our mutual love of video games, and I can’t wait to try out the submissions!

“My Friend Melon” is still in a very skeletal phase (not much to play around with in its current state), so it won’t be joining the submission pool. Development on the game WILL continue post-jam! You can count on that! Pan and Melon’s little world is one I’d like to share, so if you’re keen on staying informed, I’ll be sure to post updates to my Twitter (@Little_Egg_Tart). I’m considering creating a MFM-specific Twitter account, so that announcement will happen here and/or via tweet.

I had a bunch of other things I wanted to say in terms of reflection and personal hurdles, but I’ll save them for another time. Until then, congrats to those of you who submitted, and to everyone who had some fun participating!

Love and hugs,

Omulette, Pan & Melon

Future Goals:

See this project through!