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[devlog] Dessert Quest!

A topic by Meeshster created Jan 04, 2016 Views: 987 Replies: 26
Viewing posts 1 to 19
(8 edits) (+2)

Hello, I am Meeshster and this is Dessert Quest! A 2D Platformer of tasty proportions!


Also logging here, so follow where you'd like!

1.6.2016 ; Changed the title name a little. It's funny, but the small 'q' was bothering me!

1.10.2016; Slight overhaul done on development direction as well as my devlog!

1.11.2016; Enemy sprites created!

1.15.2016; Overdue posting and updates: resizing Mac sprite, LVL 1 readjustments, enemy A.I., bonus enemy!?



THE GAME

Story/Objective

A very rare pastry sampler has been ordered by the town mayor! Can Mac collect all of the ingredients before the party??

Gameplay

At first, I was torn between Visual Novel, Puzzler, and Platform genres. THEN, I had decided on doing a VN/Platformer hybrid. Now... Let's just do a Platformer!

I told myself that if I feel like pushing this idea further past MFGJ, then I can always add something like dialogue scenes later! For now, let's try to get the meat and potatoes done and let Mac collect the sweets and flour!

3) 2D Platformer

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  • Avoid pits and enemies to reach the end and collect ingredient in time
  • Think Mario Bros.
  • If there is time, we'll have a time score!

The Player Character: Macalana

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image imageimage

The player character of Dessertquest!. Macalana, Mac for short, works summers at her Auntie Bonnie's local bakery. Occasionally helping in the kitchen, she is usually the first to go to for running errands as well as deliveries. As a result, there was no doubt Mac would be asked to be the sole ingredient collector for this rare recipe!

BONUS: Auntie Bonnie

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  • The owner of 'Bonnie Bakery'.
  • Considers Mac her best employee
  • Gets lost easily, so she sticks to business inside the shop.
  • Takes any difficult recipe as an honorable challenge (she's the reason why Dessertquest! is a thing)

Enemies

Hungry animals after Mac's ingredients! They're... way smaller than I thought. I figured half the size of Mac's sprite would be good, but maybe not. We'll see soon.



THE DEV

About Me

Hello, you can call me Meeshster, or Meesh! I am a recent graduate of Computer Game Design and I am trying my best to build up enough motivation and inspiration to build my two-year old portfolio. I stumbled upon myfirstgamejam and decided to finally give this thing ago; with the much longer schedule, I really had no reason to refuse this jam like I have others!

Experience

Through college, I have had some experience with Unity, UDK and Gamesalad engines, as well as Autodesk Maya and 3D Studio Max. Even though I've done a few small projects in Gamesalad and worked with Adobe Suite, my major focused mostly on working in 3D workspaces. Since then, I have tried out Construct2, which I enjoy the most out the other engines I've used!

Personal Goals

My biggest goal is to get out of this 1.5/2 year creative slump that I've been in since the end of my college career. Although I still really want to work in the game industry, I have not been willing enough to prove my worth through portfolio building and just learning and re-learning programs and tools as I should. With this game jam, my number one priority is to kick that in the bud and get started with my career, no matter how small the step is.

Other than that, I'd like to learn a few new things. Build up my pretty low experience in coding, as well as strengthening my drawing and writing skills. I would definitely be happy to meet a few friends along the way, too.

Programs I'll Be Using

Initially, my plan was to use RPGMaker since I haven't been able to mess with my copy just yet. But unfortunately, my Windows desktop is in the shop for a malfunction and won't be shipped back until 4 days before the jam ends. So, a lot of my programs of choice have changed up.

So now, I'll be using Stencyl for my engine. As for my digital and pixel drawing, I'm using FireAlpaca and Clip Paint Studio. A handful of assets, including scene business, sounds and music will be coming from free sources and will be credited accordingly!

HostSubmitted

your character art is so cute!! maybe you could play with some of the contour line colors to help the different dark blocks of color to stand out O: ?? hmm i'm not too sure, but either way i've love what you got so far. this looks like some solid planning!

(+1)

Oh man, thanks a lot! At first I was overthinking the style for character art then I sat down and told myself to just go with it and the concept would find a style itself. It's really worked so far, and it's really killed some of the free time I've been wasting thinking too hard on things haha.

And I did try to tamper with contour line colors a bit. Thanks for throwing the term at me! I've always seen it and even done it myself messing around from time to time but... Never knew a word for it lol.

I also wanted to note that I've stumbled on your devlog. Your idea looks fantastic! Very interesting~

(+1)

Hello everyone~

So, my plan today was to have some frames done for sprite Mac's animation, but work and a few other things has me too tired to do that today. Instead, I started tomorrow's objective: designing NPC characters. I only got to finishing one today, but progress is progress:

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Auntie Bonnie

  • The owner of 'Bonnie Bakery'.
  • Considers Mac her best employee
  • Gets lost easily, so she sticks to business inside the shop.
  • Takes any difficult recipe as an honorable challenge (she's the reason why Dessertquest! is a thing)

Once I've one Mac's sprite sheet tomorrow, I can start on Bonnie's! She won't be playable, so it'll be some basic ones for screentime purposes.

(1 edit) (+2)

Finally! After Photoshop deciding to not run ever again on my laptop and finding an alternative (yay FireAlpaca!), here are Mac sprites for gameplay:

imageimage

Now I'm gonna animate these babies. Hopefully I'll get done tonight. That's the goal~ Tomorrow: backgrounds.

(+1)

My hands have been numb for the past hour.

Also I'm surprised it's only been 2 hours since my last post? So I've been working on that since then... I feel like I've been at it for ages!

But I'm proud of it so far, My first 2D animation. Adding more realistic features when I wake up in the morning. :3

HostSubmitted

aaaahhhh this is such a nice walk sprite!! animating something at that size can be really tricky and it looks so good!! keep it up :3c !!

Thanks so much! Believe me, I yelled the entire time trying to get the legs right for animation. She looked like she had two left feet for the longest...

Since I had the weirdest work schedule today, I had a few hours to mess around before going in. Here's a new version of Mac's walk cycle:


I'm really satisfied with this, like beyond my expectations. I /might/ have the apron move a bit, but either way she's ready to finally be put into Stencyl~

On another note, I did have intentions to have pixel character portraits for the dialogue bits of my game (if I still finally decide on doing that). Due to time, I believe I'm going to nix that. So sketches of Dessert Quest!'s NPCs will more than likely just be for logging purposes now! Going to just focus on sprite making for Mac and the obstacles that creatures that'll be in her way!

Well, I'm at a complete standstill. Been trying to test animations on Stencyl for hours, and when I go to test the game, I just get background. None of the tiles or no Mac. :/ Can't seem to find the issue.

HostSubmitted

oh no!! do you have any events O: ?? is there perhaps a visibility option or something to do with layers? where is the camera/layout set to show? can you post a screenshot?

It was the silliest thing. I had events, but I didn't have one to follow the character. So I guess Stencyl has a 'preset' view and if nothing is there it just kind of bonks around. I searched the Stencylforge until I found something I could work with. :3

HostSubmitted

ohh i'm glad you figured it out!! this is looking so nice :3c

(3 edits)

I took a bit of a break to collect myself after some program frustration, and it was exactly what I needed! I'm unsure how far I'll get by the deadline, but I can at least say I have something on a playing field (bare with the framerate and visible clicker please it's my first recording :<):


List of things to do:

  • Mess around more with collision and jump/gravity.
  • Map out some level designs
  • Create Mac's enemies!
  • Create Mac's goal ingredients!
(1 edit)

imageimage

I WAS supposed to be working in Stencyl but... Then I got... enemy ideas. Hungry animals in Mac's way! There appearances will vary on what kind of environment Mac is in while searching. The pug will probably be in town levels while the bunny will be in the forest!

I got way too detailed on the pug I feel bad for bunny.

Style consistency is a myth.

I'll probably have one more mob for a third setting type. I'll have them into sprites tomorrow~

Submitted

The little sprite of mac is so cute, I love how her hair bounces!

Thanks! I'm really glad I decided to go with animating her hair as well. Without it it's pretty stiff!

Hungry Pug and Hungry Rabbit are now sprited! Time to animate~

(+3)

I am finally in the part of development that gives me so much joy: numbers.

How fast should my enemy NPCs patrol? Eh, let's try 10. Ten is a small number.


No.

No it is not.

I laughed for at least five minutes.

HostSubmitted(+1)

omgg these pixels are so nice!! also laffs at the speed omg///

Thanks so much! I've definitely found the inner pixel artist in me during this jam. :D

Whew boy;;;;

So, work and other errands have completely drained me this week. So it's definitely SUPER CRUNCH TIME for Dessert Quest!

Like, I already knew it wasn't going to be a finished project, but I now know for sure that DQ! will only have a one-level demo finished by the end of MFGJ! It'll be loads of fun, and I hope those of you who will give it a try will enjoy it one way or another~

Now, it's time for me to find some motivation between now and 11:59PM Saturday to go ham and finish up!

Submitted

Your characters look really cute! Also its just amazing to see black characters for a change!

(+1)

Thanks a lot! I figure this jam has a huge melting pot of game characters. We got bird people, mer-people, plant people, etc. I had to chime in some PoC into this~

mac is SO ADORABLE!!!!!!!!!! i love how this looks and the pug is so good!

Thank you so much! <3 Haha, I have a live reference always following me around, so I definitely knew the pug sprite would do some justice. :3

The layout and enemy placement for the MFGJ level (aka LV 1) is finished! I was going to post it, but I figure it'd be a good idea to keep that under wraps for when people are able to play it. I had to do some resizing for Mac's sprite down to half (128x128 to 64x64 px) to make everything look a bit more uniform. She's a bit blurry now, but Stencyl seems to do a nice job hiding that. I'll probably redo the sprite over to give it clearer lines.

AFTER THAT, next will be sprites for ingredients. Mac will have to survive these platforms and obtain the item before moving on. Only one will make it to jam turn-in, but I'd like to give the forum a sneak peak of them all.

The next step after that will be simple win/game-over/title/credit screens with a main menu. Then I'll be done! Some will be simple, one-color background screens, but I'll do my best to at least have the title screen illustrated in some way!

Stay tuned~

(1 edit)

Dessert Quest!: My First Game Jam edition, is finished!


I tried doing the 'click image' to go to page thing. Oh well!

While I would have really wanted some more detailed Win/Lose/Title/Instruction screens, they get to the point enough for jam submission! I can always go back and work on it some more, right?

I'm definitely going to attempt to continue this concept post-jam, and will post progress via my creative Tumblr when I can get to it. I hope everyone enjoys the level, and please throw in any comments if you'd like!