A 2D top-down dialogue-driven RPG game I am making in Unity. It's going to be mostly dialogue/story driven. Name still undecided. The end plan is to release it on itch.io, maybe even on Steam if I feel it's good enough NOPE ITS TOO BAD TO RELEASE FOR ANY KIND OF ATTENTION XD.
I wanna try to do my best job here though, so I'm going to set no deadlines. EDIT: I think I'll try to push this game to a point where I am no longer having fun working on it. I mean, that part already kinda passed, but that's cause I have a very low attention span. I've never stuck with a project this long so I feel somewhat compelled to keep going and see where it takes me. I still feel like I have a lot of ideas on where to take this game so I wanna keep pushing it. I guess I'll quit working on it when I run out of ideas, and try to publish it then.
I've actually been working on this since around September 2021, but school got in the way, and also lack of motivation (as always). I only now remembered that GitHub exists, which is why the commit is a bit late
My favorite kinds of games are probably story-driven indie adventure games. Think Pokemon style- dialogue boxes, pixel art tilemaps, open world exploration- with a sprinkle of cutscenes, and a memorable soundtrack. So I decided to give a shot at making one.
Also, I've always had the belief that games are powerful story telling tools. To me, games are like interactive movies. Developers create a world, and players interact with said world. And they are a modern innovation, constantly improving with stronger and stronger hardware.
I've always been amazed at how much one motivated developer can do. Some of my favorite games were developed by one person (or a team of small people). Games like LISA, Undertale, OneShot, OMORI, Stardew Valley, (and recently, I played Katana Zero which was insanely good). So, I wanted to try to become a solo developer, too. This is also known as "indie" game development.
This is made in Unity (2021.3.6f1), though I did consider using GameMaker Studio or Godot (and even RPGMaker). But ultimately, I decided to stick to what I'm familiar with. My only previous experience is my zombies project, which was a lot of fun, but in 3D, so it was kind of a different beast.
I'm (kinda) proud to say, ALL THE ART IS MADE BY ME! (of course not literally, I took heavy inspiration from real things by taking photos of my campus, and also plenty of online memes). This means a few things:
- The art is subpar. Yes, I know the game isn't beautiful. I'm not an artist. I'm a programmer. But I want to get better at art. And I want to make the claim that every pixel on the screen is made by yours truly. I'm using Aesprite as the art program of choice (which btw, is awesome and was easy to pick up, even for a monkey like me. Check it out, its free and open source)
- I'm using pixel art That's because I feel pixel art is substantially easier than vector art, especially for us programmer-minded folks to get our heads around. Just look at Stardew Valley- great game, and its all pixel art. I've already learned lots of techniques such as color palletes and anti-alisaing, and I tried to apply as much of that as I could to make the art look better. Obviously though, it looks far from a game like Eastward where the art is literally perfect. But hey, this is my first project where I'm making the assets. Give me some slack.
Also, I composed a few of the songs. I had some knowledge going in as an amateur music producer so hopefully they aren't too bad. The full soundtrack for the game is here
To summarize, I'm really trying to make this game my own. I did get a lot of help with the code part from a 44 HOUR UDEMY COURSE, though. I've seen probably like 70% of it. Some of the more specific chapters I skipped over. But I'd say like 60% of my code is original. And there's a crap ton of code, just look at the size of my Scripts folder.
More or less a game about being a depressed college student. You'll never guess where I got the inspiration for that from 😉
Hopefully I'll get to explore some themes of loneliness and really capture that sentiment of being surrounded by people, yet being totally alone inside. That feeling of time passing you by, that dreading feeling of "I'm wasting my 20s", and the desparation that comes with it. Put simply, I want to try snapshot my current life and put it in a game as a time machine of sorts 💩
Feel free to check out the devlog for recent updates!
Game is here
