Hello everyone, I'm Talkyon and I'm a solo dev. I have no background in anything game related, besides playing video games. I am participating in this Game Jam to see if game development is right for me. More specifically, I'd like to know if I find any particular areas more enjoyable than others,  or if I have an aptitude for an area of development. Therefore, I will be creating all of the assets on my own and seeing if I have any particular ability for music, art, programming,  narrative design, all of them, some of them, or maybe none of them.

My plan was to spend about 5 days planning something very small in scope (and making sure that I don't get too ambitious) and then use the rest of the time making it. Now that I have my scope planned out, I will be posting all of my progress so far. From here on, I will make an effort to post every day, now that I have a rough idea of my game.

Here are my goals:

• Making a room scene where the player starts. Player should be able to walk around, use a menu (optional), and exit the room (optional).
• Becoming familiar with the Godot Engine

Programs we are currently using / plan on using:

• Engine and Programming Language : Godot and GDScript
• Art: Aseprite
• Audio: BeepBox
• Storyboarding: Paper and pencil
• Project Management: Trello

Days 1-4: Setting up the Project

I didn't want to begin planning until I knew the theme. "Cold" can lead to many possibilities, but it's limited enough in scope that I was able to think of something decent. "Freezing" and "Winter" come to mind, and so I will be using that for the setting.

From there, I needed to decide on the engine that I wanted to use. Any engine was fine, but I consider myself to be very analytical and, much to my detriment, "just pick one" is unacceptable. While I wanted to use an "industry standard" engine, I ended up going with Godot. Having a dark-ish mode without needing to pay for it was very appealing to me, since I primarily work in the dark. I also have some experience with Python, which is similar to GDScript, but I don't have enough of an understanding of core programming concepts to know how to solve problems using the tools at my disposal yet. I hope to learn this by doing.

I already had a copy of Aseprite and figured that I put it to good use. The program does what I need it to do, but I don't think that means much, since I'm no artist, ha.

I don't know a thing about music composition, so this is going to be my biggest challenge. I have Reaper on my laptop, but after some advice from the community here, I decided to go with BeepBox. Baby steps. 

Today was spend planning out what I wanted the game to look like. Personally, I love GameBoy games, and want to model my game similarly to Pokemon and Dragon Quest. Basically, I need to make a top down, 2D RPG with Grid-Based Movement and dialogue for a mini fetch quest of some sort. From basic Google searching, every single example made me realize that this is actually not as easy as one would think. Setting up the grid settings will be easy, but programming smooth grid movement is going to be the hurdle that I may not be able to do, by the deadline.

With that being said, I mentioned all of the tools I will be using, but for the sake of scope and time, this is the bare minimum that my game will need in order to be functional:

• The code for basic movement (does not need to be grid-based if that is unfeasible for me at the moment)
• The code for dialogue when a button is pressed
• A player sprite
• The 'fetch' item
• A 'board' of tiles for the player to move around in

That is all for now.

Thanks for reading!

if you're interested in making a top down RPG would rpgmaker be able to work for your needs? it sounds like a perfect game for that engine, especially if you want to ease into and automate some of the trickier dev stuff when starting out.

Days 4 - 14

While I was able to code for basic movement, programming a grid-based tile system turned out to be extremely complex. I didn't really understand the tutorials, so I decided to not implement it. It became clear that I need to know more about programming in general, but I wasn't sure where I need to go for that.

I was able to make assets for my game, however. I'm still trying to get a hold on what my 'style' is. I see lots of pixel art not use a bottom outline, for example. The 4-color palette that I limited myself to was difficult in general. I wanted to use certain colors for certain things, but I ended up using 2 colors for the outlines - one for the lighter shade up 'top side' of the sprite, and one for the darker shade on the 'front side' of the sprite. This worked well for the more box-like assets, but I really struggled with the futon (top left) using this style.

I tried to implement the mood and atmosphere of winter with the colors that I chose. The first few colors that I had picked were actually pastel and basically not suitable for the type of game I want to create. I learned how important colors were and I certainly would like to know more about how to pick colors for a palette.

I didn't implement this in the game, since I had prototypes of these sprites a little before the jam started, but I wanted the player characters to stand out in the cold and dull environment, while still maintaining the theme, so I created the 'boy' character and gave him a palette that reminded me of the sun setting, and a 'girl' character and gave her a palette that gave off snowy vibes.  Then, I made walking animations in each direction. It ended up as a 9 cell sprite sheet. I still need to make diagonal movement, so I decided to not put the characters in for now.

 

Making a grid based movement system was tough, but so was making a dialogue system. The tutorials completely lost me, and I'm sure there are simpler ways to make one. But in the end, that was something that I couldn't implement either. 

Finally, music was a no-go. Didn't have enough time and, like programming, it seemed difficult to produce anything with my current skills level. 

Here's what I ended up with:

In conclusion, I have a long way to go, but I enjoyed all of the support from the community. 

I also have to appreciate how much easier it is to make games like these in RPG Maker. I admit that perhaps prototyping the game using it instead of Godot would've been a better idea.

Thanks for reading!