Game Off 2021 - YourWaifuIsALie

Blog and documentation for Game Off 2021 attempt.

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Project maintained by YourWaifuIsALie Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Game Off 2021 - Day 1

November 02, 2021

Game systems

Genres mean nothing, but we’re looking to make a (J)RPG. At worst, something that looks like a Game Maker RPG but in Unity. I would be happy with that; I loved all the Game Maker/RPG Maker games like Mad Father or The Witch’s House.

Menus

Main

Straight forward.

• Background art (potentially lightly animated)
• Start game
• Continue
  • Stretch goal. “Saving progress” isn’t vital for short scope but is obviously an important thing to learn eventually
• Options
• Gallery
  • Includes credits, full art, music player, lore/game encyclopedia, and other notes from the creator
  • All stretch goal things - unless I use outside assets in which case the credits is required

Options

Many potential options, some required some not.

Sound control

• Master
• Music
• Battle sfx
• Menu sfx
• Voice
  • Not that I’m likely to have voiced content

Visual control

• Resolution
  • As many as is convenient
  • Including aspect rations
• Fullscreen/Windowed/Borderless Windowed
• Mouse lock to window
• Brightness
• Key rebinding
  • Presumably, controls will be mouse and/or keyboard. Try to keep minimal controls
• FPS Limit
  • Menu/in-game?
• Customizable (position/scaling) HUD
  • Stretch but would be really cool
• Quality graphics/filter settings
  • I don’t even know how to do graphics, but have knobs here if possible
• Colorblind mode
  • Unfortunately likely a stretch goal. I assume it’s something like pallette swaps
  • If anything requires colors, also should have symbols to mark
  • Coolest method is full color rebinding

In-game systems

Overworld

The environment the character can move around in. Some possible styles:

• Top-down free movement, like Pokemon or all the Game Maker games
• Side view free movement, like Paper Mario
• Free camera 3d movement, like Tales of
• First-person grid based, like Etrian Odyssey
  • Convenient because first person = less to draw
  • Inconvenient because power-up glitches don’t look as good?

If possible I think I’d like to target the Paper Mario style, since it’s (hopefully) not too hard and gives the opportunity for fun animations when using power-ups. Perhaps I can also play with billboarding and allowing a freely-rotating camera too (which also opens up “camera bugs”).

Likely to be instanced rooms the player travels between (potentially allowing “teleporting bugs”) instead of some large open-world map.

If there’s non-scripted battles, then I would prefer them to be free-roaming enemies that you could avoid collision with to avoid battles.

• Only having scripted battles is an interesting option. It allows tighter control over mechanics/story elements, but likely allows the battle design to be lazier (i.e. not generally fun, but interesting enough when it happens)

Battle

Many possible styles, both in terms of mechanics and graphics

Mechanically:

• Turn-based
• “Real-time”
  • Action bar like some Final Fantasies
  • Cooldown auto-battler like in mobage

Aesthetically:

• First-person, like Etrian Odyssey
• Third-person over the shoulder, like Pokemon
• Third-person from above, like newer Final Fantasy
• Side-to-side, like original Final Fantasy

If we’re doing side view overworld, it makes sense to also do side view battles and re-use the overworld assets. Just like in Paper Mario, the characters walking around on the map also fight.

Progress

• Started considering elements of the game
  • Identified the main menu and options menu necessities
  • Determined we’re probably pursuing a side-view overworld/battle RPG in the vein of Paper Mario (in terms of aesthetics, mechanics undetermined)
• Poking the Jekyll usage further to fix my GitHub Pages build
  • Correctly use the Midnight theme and fix my local build by using the instructions at: https://github.com/pages-themes/midnight
  • Get the blog posts into actual posts
  • Display the site resources in the index for quick access
    • There’s Jekyll links that I need to get working instead of html tags
  • No it’s not pretty yet

TODO

• Figure out how to make Unity play nice with Git
• Start nailing down battle mechanics and overworld power-ups
  • Specifically, the possible “bugs” to use and how to design around them
• Main character designs and 2d “sprite” (probably cutout animation) for both overworld and battle
  • Can visualize the rest of the world around the main character for consistency

Time Spent

2.5 + 2hr