Hi all, new to the site, and participating in the jam with 2 friends of mine!

Introduction:

Magnolia Sky Couriers (MSC) is a project that was thought up of a long time ago, but never really took off due to my lack of experience with programming and game design. I thought this jam was a great opportunity for my motley crew to push ourselves to try something new.

So, while Im probably a bit familiar with Unity now, I never really had a hand in doing Art. Thus, I decided to have my 2 friends handle the programming side of things while I get down and dirty with coming up with all the art assets.

[EDIT]Props to nagabenang for teaching me how to put images! :)

Overview:

MSC will have you manage a airship and its crew of different races (3 - 4 planned) that travels around carrying packages in a fantasy world setting. Along the way, you will encounter various things that threaten to your ship and cargo. The goal is to reach to the destination port with the both ship and cargo intact!

Gameplay:

The game would have you directing your crew mates to man facilities (much like a RTS like game), which will automatically get to work. Manning the right facility to the right crew will allow you to utilize your ship to its full potential. Trying to sort some stuff for now, so I won't divulge too much gritty details here!

Assets:

Art will be pixel based (attempted by me) while music and other miscellaneous will be sourced as long as its CC.

[EDIT]Goals Added!

Goals:

• While my friends are looking forward to learn and pick up Unity. I wanna try out the art side of game development!
• Exploring a new genre
• Hopefully make a complete game, and a fun one at that.

More to come with WIP and as the days go by!

Feedback and suggestions welcomed! Good luck and have fun everyone!

Hi there! You could put images on replies by clicking the <> (HTML) icon on the top of reply box, then type:

<img src="link to the picture">

Looks like this site doesn't support image uploading, so we should upload them on other site. Hope this helps, and good luck to you too!

Quick, concept of the 4 races (not all finalized):

From left: Human, Elf, Wolfmen, Undecided race

and a initial sprite sheet for my friends to try sprite animating in the Unity

Day 1 Log:

Just coming up with the sprites itself was already quite the challenge. Makes me appreciate the artists out there...!

Looking up tutorials and references helped alot. The rest was raw effort!

We're trying to give the game a focus on the crew itself. Some of the mechanics I want to try experimenting for include:

• Leadership - Assigning leader to your crew grants it bonuses specific to the race
• Race x Race - pairing specific races may grant bonuses / incur penalties

Friends are hard at work, so technical side updates will have to wait!

Final Notes: Juggling between school and this project is a good challenge, got to keep up the momentum!

WIP of the elf race (almost finished!)

Figured I should give the elf a bandanna to give it a wayfarer look :)

Day 2 Log:

While the programmers are still hard at work, It really feels good on my side, to feel that I'm somewhat improving my attention to detail on the sprites. I also figured it would be good to plan and design what armaments the ship should have for its journey.

Facility design @ WIP as well.

Final Notes: Tomorrow, hopefully I could get to show the technical side of things~

Day 3 Log:

Quick concept of the ship (on the left side) and putting whatever is done together among us! Introducing character movement with the finished wolfmen crew!

Programmer Notes: One of the problems that we're gonna face is handling 2 cameras at once. trying to make sure everything is in the right place!

Final Notes:Took awhile to figure out what the last race is going to be :< ... soon to be done with the character sprites. Looking forward to redesigning the ship as well as get to work on the facilities!

Day 4 Log:

WIP on the last race! :D Adding feelers to the generic fairy worked out pretty well I guess... logo early draft on the right.

TODO:

-Taking some time to also conceptualize the logo design. This is going to be one of the hardest challenge I reckon...!

-Time for a ship make over!

-Preparing the initial facilities for the programmers to work with.

-Write out dialog for the crew (for better distinction of race and characterization).

Final notes to self: Organize all the layers! and do the ship sprites on another file :/.

Day 5 & 6 Log:

Another putting together session. Plus some intensive bug fixing! Redesigning the ship took a full day...:(

Fixing the breaking the 4th wall bug :/

And finally, when art and technical side comes together!

The (almost) finalised design of the ship along with a few unfinished placeholders here and there.

Also switched pixel creation from photoshop to piskel. Hard to grasp at first, but the tools it provided were a lot more effective to work on sprites! (everything aside from the characters were done in piskel)

Day 7 & 8 Log:

With school coming up, its gonna be hard to keep up with the dev logs...gonna try to keep it to maximum 2 days per dev log if possible.

In other news...putting more interactions on screen now!

Featuring another type of enemy with the raiders, dragons! Testing out attacking interactions and feedback...raider ship is still WIP

Facility interactions. Needs more feedback though...

Created more sprites with Piskel over photoshop (still relying on CC references for modifying though...). Never looked back having discovered more tools and little tricks! :D. We started little challenges (both technical and art sided) to push ourselves and improve, which made for an awesome weekend!

Final Notes: Having met the half way mark. Really feels satisfying to have joined the jam and attempted this project. Theres still much to be done, so gotta have to put our focus on the more pressing game mechanics at hand (as well as the art assets that is required for it).

the title of the game rly caught my eye and im a big fan of the concept, setting, and the design direction. i think the sprites are coming along rly nicely and its super impressive that youre taking an opportunity to do sth youve never rly done before! your friends are doing a great job on the programming as well, seeing how much the games developed so far is rly cool. im excited to see what youve got at the end of the jam!

The concept is really cool and I love how it looks so far!!

Woah, the dual screen view is really cool :O Reminds me of FTL!

Day 9 & 10 Log:

Thanks for the support and liking the concept so far. What really got me going was the support from the community aka you guys! :D

And now....Update!

In-game combat... so one sided the dragon never knew what hit it ;) (just kidding, its lacking feedback)

Gave the ship a proper make over with new furniture and toys to play with (Above the screenshot features one of the defensive measures of the ship, the shell gun)

• 2 more facilities planned and on the way to finish up the ship.
• Lies in the ship center is the ship's core, powered by a magic crystal. thinking of adding a game feature to the crew to allow more active management for the player.
• Time for the team to get our hands dirty and sort out all the nitpicking details (enemy variants, what feedback to put in for now, levels...difficulty, UI) despite the time remaining for us.
• Logo needs a reworking over :<

Final Notes: With 4 days left, I might help out with some technical aspects of things (adding sounds for example), though I'm pretty confident (and proud of ) with my teammates at this point :D!

Day 11 & 12 Log:

Some screenshots of what to expect from the game

crew leader system...with only UI assets left! :) Also, our logo in the background!

combat with the finally completed raider ship! Facilities WILL malfunction if the ship takes too much beating.

Whats left:

• 1 or 2 mechanics left!
• game rebalances
• 1 or 2 proper levels of differing difficulties
• game instructions (so players will not get overwhelmed with what to do!)
• The rare bug fix!

Final Notes: It is really unfortunate I could not have found time to design a better race oriented system, planning on getting the technical team to try something simple, and hope we will have a proper game submission at the very end!

omg this looks so great!!! i love the races (esp wolfmen!!) and the concept is really neat!

Day Final Log:

And....its done! >:D

After some serious crunching, managed to get up a playable level with my team!

Link to the game: http://lithal.itch.io/magnolia-sky-couriers

Feels really satisfying, even if its not complete. Its like the project which I've always wanted to realize has took its first step, thanks to this jam! Its just a prelude to something better, I do want to experiment more before I set a direction and wait for a appropriate time to continue working on it.

Sprite work is really tough, but I'm really glad that most of the art assets were created by me. Learning how to use piskel was a super plus during the jam, and my programmers definitely improved as well!

Lastly, thanks to everyone whom liked the concept (a huge motivation booster!), would appreciate some feedback from you guys and hope y'all enjoy the game!