She Snapped!

Two kids snap, but in different ways

No, really! Your neighbor finally snapped and sent you to this weird dimension where things are nice and cute but...not?

But how can you tell? Maybe your trusty camera can help? after all, sometimes you catch the true personality of someone in an image, especially when they're not looking.

survive the tests within this strange place to finally confront the girl who put you here, and hopefully get yourself back home safely.

Programmer: Alexandre Choiniere (@Choinheap)
Designer, Character Artist: Kayla Bonney (@failforwards)
Writer, Background Artist: Kinda Wassouf (@kindawsgames)

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So here is our first day's worth of work:

first, I got a color scheme going as well as the basic look for the levels. We're currently aiming for 4 puzzle levels, each one with the game mechanic of picture taking, and then another final level for the final boss. Here's what I came up with:

Kayla designed the main character, which ended up looking pretty cute:

        

She also started making the villain:



Alex proceeded to make the picture-taking mechanic. It ended up looking seriously cool. (The tiny character there was a place-holder as well as the background in the first gif)

Today so far we've got some more work done on the villian.

Getting a feel for the normal villian:

And a beginning to find her 'battle mode':

These are all

Very silly.

This looks really cool already & I love the idea of using the camera to see through the illusion

Very cool! I love the art style. I'm going to be watching this one :)

Thanks! Here's another update on my side:

I finished making the maps of the first (both inside and out) and second floor of our tower, which is the setting our protag is in.

The difference is minimal when you first look at them, but a lot of small things are changed between them like the patches on the wall, vines, leaves, and grass tufts. Also, even though the backgrounds look similar, the puzzles in these levels are going to be quite different as well.

Also it looks like we're just going to be using the same characters that I designed for the mockup in my first post, so I went ahead and animated the little ghost character in them. Will be uploading him later and working on the animations for the flowers and other animated background elements. Other things I've finished animating so far are the fountain and "your demise"sign. Both are very simple, but overall give life to the envirnment you're walking around in.

Most important progress to date

Anime weapons have nothing on fidget hands

Here are some animations that were done for the first level as well as some vines to block the entrance until you complete the current puzzle. Once completed, the vines animate and go back into the ground.

ohhh those new sprites and animations definitely add a lot of life to the game environments!! this is looking really nice ;;

Howdy partners. This is my first time using RPGMaker MV so I figured this jam would be a fun thing to to see what's new about this program. This isn't my first time working with RPGMaker however. I'll strictly be using just eventing, very little use of additional plugins or javascript.

So the fun thing about this game is that it has a photo snapping mechanic, although it is limited and not as quite robust or free roaming as a 3D first person game like Pokemon Snap or the camera in Wind Waker. The fun part is designing with what little you have (at least in my experience). See you can't look through your camera, only look at what you snapped. There are some interesting ideas you can do with this.

So the goal for me is to make:

1. A method to take photos in a designated spot, photos change depending on characters or environment triggers in the levels. These photos are written and remembered in a set order depending on the player.
2. The only menu in the game without words in which you can browse your photos, these photos should be displayed in the order you took them in. Sorta like an inventory.
3. A prompt in which an NPC asks for you a photo to select in order to show them the photo.
4. Some kind of film(ammo) mechanic to encourage more exploration
5. ...And any kind of sequences or puzzles within the levels + adding in art and fitting it properly.

Hopefully somewhat efficiently.

So in the first day or so I dealt with number 1 rather simply. If you have a camera, and you step on the placeholder circle, and press the action button, it'll execute a common event that'll show a referenced picture doing a little animation and then lets you look at it before pressing a button to make the preview go away.

So an event like this

◆Show Picture：#1, pol_1, Center (640,-100), (100%,100%), 0, Normal
◆If：Script：Check.any_inrange(21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 1, 1)
  ◆Text：None, Window, Bottom
  ：Text：You already took this picture :(
  ◆Exit Event Processing
  ◆
：End
◆Control Variables：#0012 PhotoTaken = 1
◆Save BGM
◆Common Event：PhotoShot
◆Replay BGM

https://pastebin.com/TEctqHeN Triggers this line of stuff

But what about remembering the photo and when you took it in relation to other photos? Well I have a list of variable slots that'll store the ids of each picture taken. The variable: Photo Taken is the main thing I'll be using to assign to the "slots" of the inventory. This will be essential for the ordering part of the menu part (number 2). But here lies the weakness of RPG Maker MV, there's no variable pointers!!!!!! This article explains better than I can about what the older rpgmaker was capable of https://rpgmaker.net/tutorials/523/, but it's handy if you want to quickly use a variable based on another variable.

So................ I'm just going to copy paste a bunch of conditional branches that check all the photo slots in order. If the variable is above zero that means a photo has obviously been taken, if it's not it'll write the given photo id that I put in the camera circle event.

https://pastebin.com/n0zhwvgJ

Oh yeah, and there are other behind the scenes stuff I added in that's a setup for later, like PolaroidMaxShots getting increased to 1, that'll be used for in the menu so it knows when to stop scrolling the photos or for ammo and stuff.

That's about it, stay tuned for more.

P.S if anyone knows how to effectively recreate variable pointers in MV let me know!

Here's some art assets!

Kinda's nice new background and some flower animations:

Evil Mode Villian sketches by moi:

Choosing a palette for her normal form and getting a sprite together:

And getting some animations done for our main character!:

           

(First one needs some edits)

Thanks everyone for your interest and comments! It's great hearing from you!

Late night thing, but Kinda wanted the camera circles to not be so obvious, essentially appear when they're within a certain proximity.

So I basically had to write in a brand new page for camera spots, to detect where the player is in relation to the camera circle. I used a plugin with self variables to make this a lot more easier in the long run so I can just copy paste and insert stuff more casually.

◆Control Variables：#0043 Self Var CircleX = Map X of This Event
◆Control Variables：#0044 Self Var CircleY = Map Y of This Event
◆Control Variables：#0043 Self Var CircleX -= Map X of Player
◆Control Variables：#0044 Self Var CircleY -= Map Y of Player
◆Control Variables：#0043 Self Var CircleX *= Self Var CircleX
◆Control Variables：#0044 Self Var CircleY *= Self Var CircleY
◆Control Variables：#0043 Self Var CircleX += Self Var CircleY
◆Control Variables：#0045 Self Var Radius = 4
◆Control Variables：#0045 Self Var Radius *= Self Var Radius
◆If：Self Var CircleX ≤ Self Var Radius
  ◆Set Movement Route：This Event (Wait)
  ：Set Movement Route：◇Image：!Flame(7)
  ◆Control Self Switch：A = ON
  ◆
：Else
  ◆Set Movement Route：This Event (Wait)
  ：Set Movement Route：◇Image：None
  ◆Control Self Switch：A = OFF
  ◆
：End

And here is the result:
http://i.imgur.com/XBoPQ9x.mp4
This makes finding places where to take the pics a bit more of a scavenger hunt, hopefully it works out. I've also cleaned up a bunch of eventing so things will be much easier to implement from here on out.

Today was mostly hardcore animating for me.  Alex and Kinda discussed some level design and Alex made this

Which is pretty darn cool

I also have a few new additional sprites and animations for our protag.

My files get increasing confusing every night at a rate that makes me feel like I'm losing my mind

More folders.

Must have. More folders.