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I absolutely loved this. It made me feel nostalgic right from the get go. I love the emotional touches of being able to interact with nearly everything, and would super, super love to see anything more from this world some day!

I played it, but anyone scrolling down to read - I really suggest you play it for yourself. It's roughly thirty minutes of your life, spent in a delightful attic full of memories and commentary, with clever but solvable riddles. 

Day one:

(note: all assets used are placeholders. I intend to replace as much of the visuals I can with my own art later.)

hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. My plan for today was to go into what I thought would be the most difficult and probably least enjoyable part of the process for me - the battle encounters. I don't enjoy whaling on things in games, and anything I ever make in the future has at least a 90% chance of me trying to subvert that.

This is true here, too. I went in to make a placeholder enemy, made the special item that they need to drop, and gave them their custom attack.

So everything is going fine, here. I go in to playtest, and it's working fine. The mob hurts themselves, and not you. That's exactly what I want. The problem comes in with Hope.

Apparently I can't remove her ability to attack without using plugins. Which, I found the plugins that make that possible, but I'm hesitating on the idea of jumping into using plugins for this. I kind of wanted to see how far I could go on my own steam. But I'm also not willing to sacrifice how I want these fights to go. If you choose to get into these encounters - Hope's only options should be to wait and do nothing, or to try and calm the mob down (healing them, but ultimately for less damage than they do to themselves. There's no way to stop the mob from taking itself out.)

Hope's ability to attack is an immediate wrench in my plans, and has me already thinking "well, those things I wanted to add on to the mobs if I had time should probably become plan a, instead."

What was that everyone was saying about scope creep, laughs.

So I'm putting a pin in that for now. I'll revisit the idea tomorrow, maybe, or the day after, and am moving on to try and make some actual progress.

I went from watching tutorials about making and implementing new skills to watching tutorials about variables and self switches. After the trouble with the battle (I had three invisible players after deleting the other default actors RPGM MV gives you...........) this was... disturbingly easy. Which makes me assume I've done it in the worst possible way, laughs.

The idea is that you begin the game in this small area, surrounded by mirrors. When you examine them, you get a small snippet of Exposition, and a +1 to a variable. However, I didnt want the player to talk to the same mirror three times and progress, so I added in a self switch to make them give +1 and only +1.

After a few minor kerfuffles where I realized I had them on the wrong layer, it seems to work.

The fourth mirror is intended to actually be the antagonist, who speaks to you after you've had your Required Minor Exposition. I need them to leave, and open the way for you after that.

After the self switch A is turned on, the event is still there, because I dont know how to make it go away, but I made it lose its image and changed it so that the player walks through it. It exists, but it doesn't do anything. That feels messy to me, and I wish I knew how to clean up after myself so the event just stops existing, but you dont have any reason to come back to this map, so I guess its alright??

This is extremely silly looking with the statue bases instead of the actual npc, I kind of love it. The stone just. Ascends right to the heavens. Bye, stone! I will remember you fondly.

I'm still suspicious of how little fiddling I had to get this done, but at the end of the day, I think this is all of the actual mechanic required for the first, starting map.

Progress made:

*structure of the entry map mechanics is there for me to build off of
*already considering completely cutting the mob encounters for something that will take way too much time because I'm being Particular about how they look and work.

If they're just ideas, then what makes them important? Why should I care about these not-actually-people? They're not real people

To a degree, this is something I'm already concerned about/aware of. I'm worried about how to make such a small little blip of a game be engaging, while not overextending myself.  There are certain things I want to avoid (backtracking, useless combat), but I also dont want something that just ends up numbing and boring to go through.

The majority of the "people" you encounter are actually going to be some version of a combat encounter. I'm not going to be trying to sell anyone on anything but the titular character, and one not-supporting but also not-quite-an-antagonist character.  Everyone else, while I want to show them some love, are also are probably not going to be much further defined than a  fear for you, the player character, to witness//to build on the player character as someone for them to resonate with. It's a selfish way to treat them, maybe, to put them there for Hope to reflect back onto herself, but that is the plan at the moment.  (If I have time, the encounters are the first and last thing I would devote every minute to to improving, to be honest, to try and give you more time and choices with them, but Hope/Other are the priority.)

Your point is a fantastic one. Hopefully as I go through development, you'll be able to tell me if I'm succeeding in engaging you with Hope, or if you feel disconnected from them.

As an aside from my own attempts - this was actually my only real critique after I played LOZ: A link between worlds. Mechanically, I thought that game was near flawless. Heart-wise, though. ....I was going through hell and back for people I spoke to one to three times, if even that many. I was really disappointed in how little time I was given to care about people who meant the apparent world to me.

I'd hate to end up a victim to my own critique, laughs.

I am super excited for this already. Suri is so stinking adorable, Elanor looks fantastic. Plant friends are the best friends a person can ask for. I love it.

A Scrap of Hope - 

Not all dreams are realized, not all wishes are finished. 
You play as Hope - one of those lost dreams in the world. Interact with the world around you, meet people who have lost their own hopes and dreams to fear, while trying to find out what sort of wish you were meant to be.


///

o/ Hello friends!

A scrap of hope is going to be a fairly tiny adventure in RPG Maker MV. I have zero experience with any RPG Makers at all, and am using my days leading up to the jam watching tutorials and hoping I'll learn enough to be able to google my way through.  I've never made a game before, so my goals for this jam are pretty simple.

I hope to make three maps, with 3-4 cutscenes (an intro, an outro, and either one or possibly two in the middle, depending on pacing), with 8 different conversation-cued encounters.

I will also need to customize the battle mechanics to reflect the themes of fear, anxiety and hope.

There are a few more things I'd love to add to flesh it out, but only if I  magically find time to do it at the end. This looks and feels like such a tiny amount of work on paper, but I also have experience with animating and know that sometimes it takes a solid ninety hours of work for a second and a half of movement, so I'm pretty committed to getting the foundation done before I worry about bells or whistles.

Visually - I will also be trying to make as many of my own assets/tiles as possible. I have very clear mental images of what sort of shape languages I want in this game, and I'm also imagining the main/middle map to be somewhat wonderlandeqsue, with a blend of manmade construction, mirrors, and heavy forest paths. I'm not too worried about the visuals - I know what I'm doing here, at least.

Because it's such a tiny little thing, I feel bad calling this a game, haha. I think it will be a very short moment in time for these characters, and I can't imagine it will take very long to get through. But I'm also very aware of my limitations and how much I have to learn, so I hope it'll be a nice moment in time, and I look forward to seeing you all on the other side!

ETA: Oh!! I forgot to mention - I am SO very open to concrit. If you're following along with me making this game, and you notice that I'm doing something poorly, or inefficiently, this is my blanket statement to please, feel free to tell me how I could do it better! I'm here to learn, and I guarantee you I will be doing things wrong. That how I've learned everything I've ever done, haha, by doing it wrong first. If you know how to do it better, I'm all ears!

Thank you for confirming!

Thankfully I do already know that, even though I didn't know what scope meant, haha. "Perfect never finishes," is something that someone said to me when I was younger, and it's something I think about every time someone asks me how I know when an art piece is done.

It's never done, it's just when I stop working on it, laughs. You can noodle with something forever and never ever finish it.

Pardon, but what does "scope down" mean? Does it mean just like. ... narrowing your focus on your broader idea to get some smaller specific things done?

1. Hi there! What's your name? Want to introduce yourself?
Hello pumpkins! My name is Noel, and I Make Art to survive. Not games though. But maybe that'll change someday, who knows!

2. Did you participate in the last jam we held? If so, what do you plan on doing better this time? If not, what's your reason for joining?
I did participate in A jam - I dont know if it was the last one or the one before. I didn't end up finishing my game because I was hitting a wall of what the program I was learning was able to do. I did learn a lot about the program, but mostly what I learned was that it wasn't for me, which is a-okay.  So we're trying a new one this time! Maybe this time I'll make something that someone else gets to play!

I don't think I'll ever really fully be happy until I learn a coding language for myself, so if my program cant do something for me, maybe I can make a plugin, but that's a bit further off of a goal.

I specifically joined this jam because a friend of mine went "Hey Noel, are you gonna join the game jam this year" and I went "what yeah when is it happening" and she goes "in like ten days." WELL. Guess I better get ready!!! I also, in general, just really would love to make games. I've got a lot of stories in my heart that I'd like to share!

3. What games are your favorites? Did any of them inspire you, or made you want to make your own?
My favorite games are Threads of Fate, Legend of Mana, also pretty much every Harvest Moon type game ever.  An eventual goal is to learn how to make that sort of living your life sim. I really love games where you interact with the world, and it interacts back. Peacefully, quietly growing your own home, changing the world around you, shaping it on what you do. Not like minecraft or the other voxel games - very specifically I love the peacefulness of the more story driven type sim games where you can do whatever you do or don't want. It's okay. Build a town, build a world. I love it.

I'm also a big fan of silent hill ( one and two. Get me started on one at your own peril - I know it's the lesser loved of the games, but I can talk for a solid hour about how I think removing its lore from the franchise - specifically removing Alessa from the franchise - makes the entire thing weaker. Be still, my heart, storytelling.), and I've been playing the zelda games for. Uh. Ever. The first game I ever played was The Legend Of Zelda as a wee bab. Granted, it was my dad's save, and he didn't want me to mess anything up, so all I did was run around in the fairy fountains but wow, did I love it. The last of us, disgaea 2, final fantasy (nine and five, in particular.) I just really Like Games, haha. I can list things for as long as you keep reading them, I think. (Up to and including less story heavy things like tetris - fight me in Tetris, I'm a beast. I'm not even kidding.)

4. Do you have experience with game development? What did you do/with what engine?
I have a lot of experience with a whole lot of different programs! Just enough experience to learn "this isn't what I want either." I'm not quite goldilocks here, expecting perfection, but I do enjoy sticking my hands in different methods and finding out what I do and don't enjoy. Some have been "maybe later" or "maybe for another type of game, but I'm not feeling it right now."

5. Tell us about something you're passionate about!
Oh gosh I think I maybe answered this one above without realizing it. If you didn't read those - I'm passionate about stories. I'm passionate about games where you can relax and be yourself and be in the world and not have to worry about anything else. I'm passionate about stories with families of choice, finding your own home, finding where you belong in the world. I'm also Super Into fairy tales, laughs.

6. What are your goals for this game jam?
I want to make a game (a "game") that at least one person enjoys. I don't expect it to be much of a game. I don't expect it to have a lot of things in it, or to be very long. If I can get just one mechanic in it, that's probably a win. I don't expect to even make a GOOD game, laughs. I'm not here to make a masterpiece - I'm here to make SOMETHING, and then learn something from it. But I do hope that, however clumsy or awkward it might be, I hope that I finish something that lets someone else enjoy their trip into my space of the world and creativity. I hope to finish something at all - even if its just two maps and one encounter.

I know I'm not actually DOING much, just putting together puzzle pieces that other people have already made, but by golly playing around in Construct is a Lot of Fun.

Im just using rough sketches that may not even remotely look like the final project and coloured blocks while I am learning, but I AM learning! Figuring out controlling the different animations, etc. I'm not super happy that the hit box is so wide - lil bird can stand off of a platform without falling, so I'll have to figure out if i want to make the hitbox not include the head and tail later on, maybe.

This looks precious, ahh. I am weak for farming sims, and this is just!! The colour and style is so endearing, I love Jill already.

HELLO I am UnicornTracks (you can also call me Noel) and I know nothing about making games. Nothing. Actually, absolutely, 100% nothing. Whats an event? I dont know. Whats a script? Unless you're talking theatre, I don't know! What's an object? I ... might know that one. Maybe. I'm hoping that I do. If I don't, then I'm sure I'll figure it out along with the rest of this.

I've thought that making games could be an awfully fun adventure for a while, but didn't resolve to do it until I saw a post for this Game Jam on Tumblr ... yesterday. Gotta jump in with both feet, right?

Program:

I'll be using Construct 2 to make a simple platformer.

Why construct 2? Because the internet gave me a list of beginner programs with a free version option. I basically said eenie meenie miney moe and landed on this one, because - you guessed it, I don't know how to use any of the programs, either.

I DO know that I'm gonna MAKE A GAME! Of some level of quality.

The Game (plan):

The game I intend to make is one where you are a newly hatched phoenix. You fell from the nest as an egg, and now if you want to grow your fiery wings and tail and take flight, you'll have to find your way off of the cold, wet ground and head towards the sun and sky.

I don't have any grand plans here as far as mechanics or levels, yet. I'm more concerned with the idea of learning how to make a foundation before I think about anything fancy.

Goal #1: Go through the two basic tutorials for Construct 2 so that I can get at least a little familiar with the program, and start muddling my way through. Doesn't get any more basic than this.