Hi all!!! Cynthia here, this is my third time participating in an MFGJ event and I'm psyched to be here again! My other games were Room for thought and A shade of blue, two very different games on their own- the former a first person narrative and the second a kinetic short story with 'room escape' elements. This time around, I've got my learning cap on and I'm tackling a form of inventory in Ren'py (sweats...) along with honing my writing in general!

Before I get to all the good devlog stuff, allow me to introduce myself! I'm Cynthia, a small illustrator, gamedev/VNdev and HUGE mystery enthusiast - big fan of Ace Attorney, 999, Zero Escape, Danganronpa, Ghost Trick, Hotel Dusk, etc. (I haven't gotten around to AI Somnium Files so it is not in the 'etc' pile yet - forgive me).

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In the midst of a snowstorm, four employees of the newly successful music retail company Masters Records find themselves unable to progress to an awards ceremony due to heavy snow. Taking shelter in a nearby mountain lodge, the four are stressed and upset that they won't be able to receive the award they all worked so hard for. However, newcomer Rocky is quick to look at the brighter side of things and tries to help the rest of her coworkers enjoy themselves regardless the award!

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The cast!

(Main character) Rochelle "Rocky" Rhoyle

• Rocky is a casual, laid-back, lover of talking peoples' ears off, landing her the position of public relations officer. As such, she finds herself in the midst of crisis management... within the group.
• As a newcomer to the small company, Rocky still has some things to learn about her fellow coworkers...

Starr Dominic

• A well-to-do numbers person who believes everything must be earned, Starr is rather tightly wound and unintentionally callous, resulting in her being difficult to approach.

Sylvia Masters

• As the young proprietor of Masters Records, a newly successful retail music company, Sylvia is the clever businesswoman behind it all. She can be rather airheaded during certain social situations, however.

Loren Lovegood

• Loren is an impressionable office administrator that will always give 120% in whatever task needs to get done. They are an enthusiast of mysteries who often inserts their enthusiasm in misplaced scenarios...

Brigid Solomon

• Brigid is Masters Records' stern legal advisor who's always about facts in the work environment. However, her personality outside work lacks the courage her advisory side displays as she has some trouble with her self-confidence. She finds herself at the awards ceremony by herself, nervous about accepting the award since she always thought of herself as a 'second fiddle' of sorts to the grand achievements of Sylvia.

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So far the story outline has been fully plotted out! I will be working in-depth on creating the main mechanic of the game which will essentially function as a casual contradiction/objection mechanic, wherein Rocky will begin to remember select statements after the employees express their dissatisfaction on their snowed in predicament. As the other employees are spread aimlessly throughout the lodge, Rocky will take it upon herself to try and make the evening enjoyable for the rest of her coworkers by quashing their worries. Rocky's penchant for being generally nosy and remembering what people say will contribute to her trying to remedy the stressful situation the employees find themselves in.

I'm still sorting the mechanic out in my head, so please forgive me for not detailing much here. I hope to work out a form of the mechanic come this evening!

My main focus for this game jam is definitely going to be writing and programming- two areas that I feel I could improve upon in my novice stages of learning about development, so my devlogs will be on the more wordy side than visual as I share my trials and tribulations!

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That's all from me, however there's more to be seen as I have the pleasure of working alongside the amazing artist dotoriii! I am leaving the character designs in their greatly blessed hands- they are in the midst of designing the cast, so please stay tuned for their post regarding that!

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[Edit] The team consists of:

• 💻 mythridate (me!): writing & programming
• 🎨 dotoriii (artist extraordinaire): character design & artwork

And for the sake of staying within scope, music will be pulled from The Sound of Picture.

Hello I'm Yunha / dotoriii and this is my 2nd time participating in MFGJ! During my first time participating I was the main artist/character designer for My Demon Date, a short visual novel about going on a date with a demon (wow!). This time I'm also doing art and character design for Rockstars with Cynthia as writer and programmer (Cynthia's a totally cool artist too btw). I looove to make game art and then making fanart for the game itself. It feels like infinite power to me.

To share a little bit about myself - I love playing all sorts of games! Especially ones with characters you feel like you can latch onto and draw a lot of fanart of (which is Pokemon Shield for me right now haha...) Anyways I hope to help make games that make people feel like that when they play them :^)

As for my own devlog bits I'll be posting here, I'll mostly focus on some of my own thought processes behind my art as well as me and Cynthia's collaborative ideas/concepts/etc. I hope to learn and figure out different ways to provide a cohesive art direction!

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Moving on to the actual Rockstars dev content! Cynthia laid out the foundation for these characters with character/personality descriptions and mostly left me to visually interpret them myself. I initially started to sketch faces/figures one by one according to each character profile, but eventually I found it easier and  more freeing to just draw a bunch of concepts not totally tied to a certain character. This way we could pick and choose bits & pieces from the concept art to apply to each character. 

Here are those sketches I did: 

*note: for me when I design characters I usually just draw a bunch of heads floating around because it sets the direction for the rest of the design.

These sketches have numbers just so that it's easier for whomever I'm showing these to to refer back to instead of saying like "person with long hair that's shaded on the right middle side." After getting impressions and pointers from Cynthia, my next step is to make some more focused iterations using the feedback I've gotten.

Cynthia also provided these great sketches:

Ideas for an over-arching design theme of animals!

Color palettes for the whole group to convey color unity!

Thanks to Cynthia's strong sense of character direction and great writing I def feel like these characters are gonna turn out swell! :>

Minor update on my end, I've outlined the full story flow (very messily) as well as started laying down the foundation for the game in Ren'py!

Writing is the absolute hardest thing for me so I'll be dedicating a large portion of my time to tackling that... huffs.

A stretch goal of mine, if I can find the time AND patience, will be to implement a lil side image for the main character to poke her head in! Otherwise I'll just go with a side-by-side dialogue with the main character defaulting to the left side and the others on the right side.

That's all from me today! I hope to return with more visuals, specifically UI progress, if anything! I don't even know how to share writing progress so you probably won't see much of that from me, haha.

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[Edit] SIDE IMAGE YES

omggg yesss i love these designs and mockups so much already!!! i like your little plot map too i always find plotting and writing the hardest part of games for sure TT LOV THIS SO MUCH good luck with the jam both of u!!

For the past few days I've been ironing out the base foundation of the script so when I finish writing the story, I can plug it in and go! I can say with SOME confidence that all the pieces are there and all are in working order!

To summarize the game, our main character is trying to lift the spirits of her small group since they have found themselves snowed in during an awards night. The gameplay involves talking to the others and objecting to their distressed thinking, as they all believe the night is ruined.

My initial idea was to have the main character have an 'inventory' of statements she hears and when she feels like something is off while talking to the others, she can go into her brain inventory and (Phoenix Wright voice) object! to contradictory things. However, I realized while programming an inventory wouldn't exactly be necessary since the list of things our main character is "storing" only comes up to about 3 statements at most. I discovered while writing the story that the objection statements are employed quite quickly, forgoing the need for anything to be kept for a lengthy period of time. Instead of an inventory, I've decided to use a series of flags to set up a 'faux inventory' mechanic which requires a bit of going back and forth between scripts on my end but I believe it'll suffice.

Lots of setting up the script on my end! It's quite a dry process to record but I will say that it's AMAZINGLY satisfying to get things working! 45 minutes of my time spent today involved looking at a bunch of the following:

So that was fun.

On a better note, I also played with a tiny bit of UI customization!

More to come soon! Yunha's concept art is coming along swimmingly and I can't wait for it to make its debut in the game!!