TRY OUR FINISHED GAME HERE!

Hello!

It's already almost halfway into the game jam and we're just making our first project post ;;v;)/

We are a 6 person team consisting of 2 programmers, 3 artists/animators, and a story writer! This is our second game jam and we're really excited (and nervous lol) to share our game concept with everyone, so any feedback is encouraged!!

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“Everbloom"

Post-Apocalyptic Puzzle Horror Adventure

Made with Unity

Everbloom (working title) is a story-driven puzzle adventure game, set in an unnamed European country still recovering from the devastation of the First World War. Having been sent away by your parents to live with a caretaker after the war, you receive a mysterious letter from your father after years of silence. Filled with questions, you return to the old town, only to find it in ruins…

PROGRESS!

Our programmers want to wait until they've made something more coherent before sharing any screenshots, so we'll let them slave away a little longer before posting anything regarding that :>

Their progress so far:

• Basic movement
• Sprite order rendering
• Dialogue system
• NPC interaction
• Item and Inventory system

(Dw we'll pull all nighters :'))

Our animators are currently working hard on some custom game sprites but they should be done by this week! In the meantime, I can show you guys the character designs and concepts we've made so far.

Here’s the MC, tentative name “Aster”. He’s quiet, detached, and anxious, and he finds solace in being alone and surrounded by nature. Like many other children after the war, he struggles to find a sense of belonging.

For our next character, we have Edgy-chan our main female protag.  She’s a mysterious girl that seems to be somehow connected with MC’s past.

All these portraits will also be going into the game.

Lastly, here is concept art of... a thing.

Sorry we don't have much actual game progress to show this week, but thanks for reading till the end! :D

Programmers:

•  Exsomni 
• HikaruRen

Bg & Character Art:

• Cloudkourin

Animations & Items art:

• Lit-ly 
• Rad-chul

Writer:

• Smallcritter

We're just starving uni students help pls hideTHePain

Now back to suffering...

LOG 2

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Artist Updates:

Lit-ly & RADchul:

The sprite is still in progress, but the guy looks like this, and he swaggity swag under 6 frames.

Cloudkourin:

I managed to finish 2 backgrounds and I’m halfway done the bg for the main plaza! Feelsbadman when you slave 8 hrs for 2 backgrounds that will only take up 5 minutes of playtime… but I guess that is the life of an art monkey :’ ) My goal for this week is to finish 4 more main backgrounds (at least), but then I also have an essay due on friday so pls pray 4 me.

Here is one of the maps I finished!

I also really wanted to change the style of the dialogue pictures since the previous drawings I posted gave off too much of a ...moemoe VN vibe, which isn’t what we’re going for. Here is the new style I decided to go with, I guess this would be more fitting for the hand drawn bg and spooky vibe?

PROGRAMMER UPDATES

Exsomni:

Hello your resident half dead code monkey here. I’ve been hammering away at the scripts this week and trying to set down a bunch of the basic mechanics. The art assets are not completely finished so we’ve been using dummy sprites for all the functions, the completed game will use custom hand drawn art by our in house art monkeys instead. Look forward to them!

Below are a few previews of some of the major completed functions,. Please excuse the mouse drawn dummy art lmao. (“It’s Mr. Weed man our new MC” - Cloudkourin)

Inventory system:

Cutscenes:

Password locks:

Looking forward, we will need to implement a checkpoint system for character death, and lighting controls for dark rooms.

Hikaru:

School is suffering. It’s been tough trying to balance school and this at the same time haha. We’ve implemented some other stuff that we’d like to keep a secret for now. All I can say is that we hope you will be surprised when you see the stuff we’ve added (and good at running too!).

PLOT UPDATES

SmallCritter:

I wrote some words thanks bye

Jk, here’s a preview of some of the backstory and world items that you’ll be able to discover and encounter throughout the game world:

Most of these will be purely optional to read and just for flavour, but there may be some items you find that will be a little more relevant in your adventure..

Hope you look forward to our finished story!

Thanks for following up! Next week is when the real cramming begins...

Hey guys - we'll be posting another update shortly, but for now, I'll be introducing a new member of the team!

Games are often  only as atmospheric as their soundtracks, so we're counting ourselves super fortunate to have our friend Nanoneko on board! Please check out his social media (Soundcloud, Youtube, Instagram), he does some pretty cool stuff!

The music already sounds really great, and we're excited to share everything once we start wrapping things up.

Cheers to the last week of the game jam!

Hello your friendly neighborhood greasy-been-in-moms-basement-for-weeks code monkey here with updates brought to you by our fresh blood and salty tears.

Game is slowly coming together, but we had to leave out a lot of planned content due to a lack of time. Hopefully we'll still be able to deliver something enjoyable for you peeps by the deadline. The suffering is real.

Please pray for our code monkeys not to spontaneously die at the keyboard from malnutrition, and for our art monkeys not to get carpel tunnel. They still have exams.

Here are some previews minus spoilers. (Rip Mr. Weedman.) 

A NICE HOUSE

A SPOOKY ROOM

Cya guys next time on judgement day. ಥ_ಥ

LOG 3

HOWDY PARDNER. The jam submission period is over, and we can’t believe we actually managed to release the game without any huge bugs. Our goal was to make a game that could be played from start to finish and we somehow scraped by.

Words cannot describe the amount of collective bricks we shat while trying to upload the zip file during the last 10 mins before the deadline…

Below are some of our final thoughts on the completed project!

ARTISTS

Lit-ly:

This was an incredible experience to come together with friends and create something both creative as well as challenging as a team. I thank Radchul for the wonderous animation sketch - honest to god her animation has a super saiyan foundation. I will always be second to you like Vegeta is to Goku. These are some of the highlights of our collective efforts.

Spoiler Images:

• https://imgur.com/a/lr3KrMT
• https://imgur.com/a/WAFlklO
• https://imgur.com/a/TFPK2e4

Radchul:

I can’t believe I made drawings looked like they moved! I did the rough sketches of the animation movement, and Lily wonderfully lined and coloured them. I’m so thankful that she was able to translate my chicken scratch to a decent looking animation. I’m sure there are many mistakes in my animations, but this was super fun and challenging to attempt!  Thanks for checking out our game :’)

Here’s some process gifs of trying to convert cloudkourin’s god style to a sprite:

Spoiler - first draft of an animation:

• https://i.imgur.com/XGADEij.gif

Cloudkourin:

Holy crap look at how wholesome our animators ARE AKJHsjhf ^^^^^

Honestly being able to work with such great friends is probably what motivated me to stay up till 5am drawing backgrounds and endure the late night sUFFer.

I’m still pretty new to drawing backgrounds, so I’m glad I was able to convey a kinda creepy atmosphere despite not being able to draw anything with a colour saturation under 50%. I can not control my hands they thorsty for that COLOUR.

Even though the past few weeks were really stressful, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of the game dev process. This is the second time I’ve worked on a game and I still can’t get used to how cool it is to have the characters I design actually come to life??? LIKE WOAH THEY CAN ACTUALLY WALK AROUND AND INTERACT WITH STUFF. There’s still a lot I have to learn about making maps that are more suitable for gameplay, but I hope you enjoy the game as much as I enjoyed drawing for it, and leave some feedback so we can further improve the game!

Here’s our super lit title screen:

PROGRAMMERS

Exsomni:

OH MY GOD I think this game shaved 20 years off of my life. Random issues just appeared on the last day, Murphy's law prevails.

The game was running fine in the Unity editor but once we built it, a game breaking bug randomly appeared. That was some stressful 5am debugging with no error messages or Debug.Logs to work off of. My Unity program also stopped compiling scripts 3 hours before it was due so I had to spend another 40 mins updating it despite the game not being completely finished. It was not fun. (I really need a new computer.)

A lot of planned content had to be cut out for the sake of time, so while the game can be played to the end, the world we imagined for the game wasn’t fleshed out as much as we wanted. We also couldn’t add a lot of special effects we originally planned to make the game more intuitive. If you noticed some of the hilariously inconsistent item art… they were the ones drawn by my mouse, and did not have enough time to get updated by the artists.

Still, I’m glad we managed to get a working game out with a beginning and an ending. None of us are seasoned game devs (this is my second real go at Unity) so I’m happy overall with the result. I hope you’ll give it a try!

Have an image of our unofficial mascot Mr. Weed Man in celebration of the end of jam:

HikaruRen:

This whole game development progress was a crazy experience. We actually found out about the IGMC a little over a week late so we were actually already behind everyone else in development time. I was worried for a bit there as the initial week into development ended with only base system programming with little progress into the actual game itself.

I think the highlight (Exsomni: not highlight more like lowlight) of this entire game jam was the last hour rush before the submission deadline. We managed to finish out the final bits with around 15 minutes left to spare.  I remember we were on google hangouts frantically filling out the project form together and somehow managing to make the submission deadline with 5 minutes left. That was more excitement and adrenaline than I needed in my life. (Exsomni: that was not excitement that was the sound of your life shortening.)

We are by no means professional or experienced game devs. I’ve been using RPG Maker for a good number of years during high school so making a fully fleshed out game in Unity from scratch was truly a difficult process. Some of the things that I took for granted in RPG maker (Dialogue boxes, Scene transitions, basic eventing, etc..) ended up being a lot more complex than I expected to code and implement in Unity.

I think this game dev journey was a really cool experience. With that being said, we still have a ton of things that need to be implemented and fixed that we couldn’t do due to lack of time. EX: The last scene was supposed to be different but we ran into something so we had to scrap it in order to make the deadline. A lot of the gameplay can definitely be improved upon for more visual clarity and better player experience.

Regardless though, we were able to implement some pretty cool content and I’m personally very proud of this game and everyone in our team. Everyone did a super  job and I’m very happy with how our game turned out.

I hope you’ll enjoy the game just as much as I did!

WRITER

Smallcritter:

In all honesty, I signed up to just help out a little with editing, and before I knew it I was neck deep in the process, more invested than I’ve ever been with any university project hah a ha (rip grades)

Seriously though, it was an incredibly fun ride from beginning to end, and it was definitely an interesting experience to be working hand-in-hand with the programmers and artists to deliver a coherent gameworld. I do wish we could have implemented a lot more of our planned content, though, but I’m just glad we actually managed to submit in time :’)

My biggest regret is the lack of clarity for interactable objects: all the optional flavour/backstory items were very easily missable, and in general it’s very hard to tell what you need to interact with for progression -  given time, it’s definitely what I’d like to see added to the game the most.

Being able to have input on level design and the game itself was really cool, and I even ended up making the little storybook in the first part of the game! Helping make some of the smaller assets really opened my eyes to the suffering that the rest of the team was having to go through, so huge props to them for managing to get through to the end~

All in all, it was a great experience, and I’m really happy to have been a part of it. Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to follow our progress, and good luck to all the participants!!

Pat wishes everyone a great year.