After five hours of drawing assets, I'm taking a break to put together a little dev log here on the community page. So, this is my very first time making a video game ever, and I gotta say I am pretty excited about it.

Synopsis

SISTER MARIA TAKES BACK THE CONVENT is a metroid-vania sidescrolling platformer where you play as Sister Maria, a nun at St Justa's Catholic Church. One day, she finds her convent overrun by demons, and is anointed by God to take her rosary and go kick some demon-butt! As well as banishing the evil back to Hell, she must also rescue her fellow nuns who are still inside holding their own. But her biggest task is to find Mother Superior, who is up in the chapel, and help her battle Satan!

Gameplay

As I said before, this is going to be a metroid-vania sidescrolling platformer type thing. I'm hoping I can figure out how to make power-ups and equitable weapons, because I'd love Sr. Maria to get a yard stick and a Bible as weapons as she travels through the convent.

Programming

I'm going to make this in Construct 2, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. It'll be a shit-show, I'm sure.

Art

I'm making EVERYTHING in Paint Tool Sai. I've chosen to draw the entire map as one single image, and I'll place invisible platforms over the image in Construct 2. At least, I'm hoping that's a thing that will work... [fingers crossed]

[What the art looks like. Maria's sprite is just a placeholder for now.]

If you wanna see progress pictures, all of that is getting dumped on my game dev tumblr Grenadine Games

BTW EVERYONE ELSE'S GAME LOOKS SO RAD AND I HAVE A FIGHTING NUN SO [shrug]

2 AM on day whatever this is and ALL THE BACKGROUND ART IS DONE. Holy crap the image is huge but I'm super happy with how it turned out. I plugged the giant thing into Construct 2, started adding solids and now I have something that looks like a game!!!!!

All I have to do now are the sprites of EVERYTHING ELSE. ...And program fighting, and make more sprites for Maria (you may have noticed she doesn't actually jump), and figure out how to get her up the stairs....

Wish me luck!

nice!!!! this looks legit + it looks like you're progressing well!!!

OH MY GOSH THESE ANIMATIONS ARE SO CHARMING!!! your art is so cohesive and the animations flow so smoothly!! i can't stop smiling every time i see this game aaaa

I cannot wait to banish demons and save my Church from Sin

I CAN'T WAIT TO BEAT STUFF UP AS A NUN OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am going to fight satan and its going to be great

i must watch her destroy

Dear Lord everybody is so nice ahhhhhh <3<3<3

Tiny Update! Yesterday was a lull day in which nothing really got done, but already today I have made tiny but exciting strides!

Maria has jumping and falling animations, and she can now move up to the next floor! The stairs act as teleports, so when she hits a hidden sprite she gets warped to the next floor!

SO code is super annoying! I've been having lots of issues the last day or two with code, particularly with attacking. But, as a way to get my mind off of this dumb code, I did some art!

Look at all these lovely bouncy demons! I can't wait until they are able to beat Maria's shit in.

Satan is looking gorgeous! I'm looking forward to see this game complete!

omg this is the cutest idea!!! i love the sprites and movements are great!!!

Final update!

My game has been submitted! Huzzah! I'm considering it a pre-alpha build, a proof of concept if nothing else. It has it's little bugs and some spaghetti code, but it starts and plays and ends, which is more than what I thought it would do! I got a lot more done in the last two days than I thought I would, and today I finally got to a point where I was happy with my product enough to submit it.

I learned a lot the past two weeks, which I'm proud of. I was impressed by how much I started to understand how the coding/event logic works in Construct? Like? I had some major moments of 'Oh shit, I actually know exactly what's going wrong!' after days of needing to consult someone or something at every hiccup. I was able to take a lot of tutorials and mash them together to make more streamlined versions to fit my needs, and I was able to spaghetti together some nice fixes to obnoxious problems.

Another thing I have learned is that... video game programming may not be for me! Or, at least, programming the way I approached it. I jumped in way too deep without my floaties and ended up sinking like a rock after, like, 5 days. I had to step away from it all for almost a third of the jam just to recharge - and that's not good. If I ever do one of these again, I'll know to pace myself instead of spending 8+ hours a day in Construct for many days in a row.

However, I found that I LOVED doing the art! I have always been an art person, but Level Design was an interesting challenge, as well as coming up with a uniform visual vocabulary. Finally, all my design classes became useful!

Thanks to everyone in the community for all the love and support, as well as help when I had silly issues. I'm so proud of the work everybody had made these last two weeks, and I hope you all take a nice long nap on Sunday (I know I will!).

Lots of love from me and Maria

Prominence