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1. Hi there! What's your name? Want to introduce yourself?

Hello! My name is Katie! It's very nice to meet you all! I love love LOVE to draw and make comics, and I want to sell my own art someday! That's...actually one of my resolutions for this year. Open up a little shop to sell my art online, haha! I guess if you want to see my art blog, it's right here! I'm hoping to have some more complete pieces to put up real soon...

2. Did you participate in the last jam we held? If so, what do you plan on doing better this time? If not, what's your reason for joining?

Nope, this'll be my very first time doing a game jam, or any kind of jam in general. I just wanted to try out making a game, but to ensure that I actually complete it, a deadline is in order! So, I think this jam will be good motivation for me. If there's a deadline, I'm more likely to actually finish something rather than fuss around with the details.

3. What games are your favorites? Did any of them inspire you, or made you want to make your own?

My top top favorite games are Paper Mario 64, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Undertale. I've noticed that I really gravitate towards games that are more story-based than gameplay-based, if that makes any sense...? I'm basically more of an RPG kind of girl than anything, and I like learning about different characters and their motivations and their backstories and everything. Undertale in particular inspired me to make a game, especially after reading the artbook and seeing all of the different parts that went into it, if only because I had the epiphany that, hey! This guy made a game! I can make a game too if I wanted to!

4. Do you have experience with game development? What did you do/with what engine?

I remember when I was, like, 13, I played around a lot with RPG Maker 2003. I had a lot of fun with it, but I didn't really know all that much about the ins and outs of the program - switches were a total foreign concept to me. I also played around in RPG Maker VX Ace and made a short fetch quest game in order to just try out the software. Now, I'm doing this jam with Game Maker Studio, mostly because I really want to have free reign over what my game looks like, plus, I want to learn how to code, too!

5. Tell us about something you're passionate about!

Comics! Graphic novels! Telling a story!! My big big dream is to create SOMETHING that'll really make a positive, lifelong impact on someone. If I can do that, the rest is just cake to me. Uh...that's pretty vague, I apologize.

I'm also pretty passionate about the education system and how to improve on it, especially early childhood education. I'm actually a teacher myself - I used to be a Pre-K teacher, but now I'm a toddler teacher. I just find the growth of a child that young super interesting - so much growth happens within the first few years of a life!

Aa boy same! I love narrative games! It's really cool to see too in this thread that Toby Fox is inspiring people to make games.

Sort of related to education--teaching is a really key element of games! I think you might be interested in reading up on some game design articles related to tutorials. Games have to give resources and communicate with a player and give them the space to interact and solve problems.

Oh man oh man, narrative games are totally my favorite. I find that even when there isn't a lot to go off of in a game, I try and create conversations between the characters in my head. For example, I like creating little backstories for my animal villagers in my Animal Crossing town, it just feels so much more real to me!

Ooh, and thanks for the tip as well! I've been really going through all sorts of different video and articles for tutorials on Game Maker Studio, just to get a good feel for the software, but I think that reading up on game design about using tutorials in game will also be great too! Heck, just reading up more on game design is something that's still pretty new to me. I've recently been really pouring into Extra Credits's videos on game design, but do you have any recommendations on other people's articles or videos I should check out about game design?

Extra credits is super good! Here's a really interesting slideshow/talk about learning in games (with special regard to application development, actually).

A lot of the times I like to look through Gamasutra articles--especially for game design and game business/industry. If you follow their twitter, you can get these articles on your feed.