Posted September 03, 2018 by cherrymacka
#yuri jam 2018 #carmen #development #scope
With Yuri Game Jam 2018, I'm hoping to Keep It Simple while still achieving a self-contained, playable short. Since I'm hugely inexperienced with game creation and (currently) working alone, I decided to use a game development document to help me understand the scope and stay focused. Here's what I've figured out so far. Note: I'm a n00b and don't know all the correct terminology for this dev stuff.
The cornerstone of this project is the point-and-click games I grew up on. King's Quest, Simon the Sorcerer, Inherit the Earth, and demos of others out there took up hours of my computer time. In particular, I want to draw on Dare 2 Dream - I distinctly remember my disappointment with that game/series. The feeling from the bulk of the first episode is lost after going through the sewers and is completely gone in the second episode. So I want to isolate that first area and what resonated with me there.
From that, I can narrow down the project's quest area to approximately 10 room screens. The whole game might be 15 screens total, although right now, I've only got 13 on my list. Not worrying about parallax means that number of screens = number of background images.
Another advantage of using D2D instead of Sierra-style is that I don't need to figure out animation. Objects, characters, and backgrounds are relatively static. This, again, helps keep the visual art considerations limited and hopefully manageable.
To make up for my artistic limitations, I can lean on written descriptions and dialogue to convey information. I have no idea how to estimate the word count needed, but I do know that this is my bread and butter and way less daunting than any of the rest of the stuff that goes into game development. I don't want this to be a text-heavy game (it's PnC not VN for a reason) but do like having flavor text for depth.