Touhou Fangame and Chill Jam 001 Devlog

[Retron]

Okay, to preface, the reason I'm making this devlog before the jam is over is because I'm losing motivation to finish this thing, so I'm going to make this thread as sort of a "contract" that has my soul bound to it, ensuring that I don't chicken out of this game jam and get the game done. So, with that said, this thread will probably just consist of me rambling about technical issues, ideas, progress, etc. But if you want to pitch in your own ideas, nobody's stopping you.

Okay, to start, the theme of this jam is OC's. Now I never had made a GOOD OC before, emphasis on good. But there's a first time for everything, right? If you're expecting me to talk about the OC I created of this jam, well I'm not gonna, since they're not really, what you'd call "fleshed out" yet. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about the game itself.

I wanted to try something new this time. Most of my previous games have all been some variation of a platformer, so I decided to go for a top down zelda like game. It was my first time coding a real time combat top down game before, but it shouldn't be too hard, right? Well no, I was very wrong. There's several problems I ran into, but I'd bore you if I'd go over each one I encountered. Instead, I'll share with you the 2 biggest problems I had: scope and chests. Let's start with the first:

The Problems that make me want to Persona 3 myself
Scope creep is a problem I have with all my games, and I end up really disappointed when I couldn't fulfill everything, but also too lazy to go back and add them. For this game, I planned 6 different dungeons, one big overworld, 3 villages and 22 different enemies, not including bosses. "planning these locations out shouldn't be too hard," I said to myself "and once I got the basic enemy wandering code, the rest shouldn't be hard. Again, I was dead wrong. Dungeons turned out to be way harder to lay out. Right now I only have 3 done, and they're on paper, not the game itself. I still have to implement that. And for the overworld and villages? I still haven't done that. The enemies... oh the enemies. When I finished the wandering script, I thought it would only get easier from there, but it just got worse and worse. Right now I only have 2 functional enemies. Just 2! At the end, I decided just to go with 4 dungeons, 1 village and 1 overworld. For the enemy count, well we'll just see won't we?

Now my second problem, chests. I hate these things. To save you from the technical details, if you open a chest, you get an item, right? Then it should be empty, right? Well, it does become empty, that is until you exit the room it was then go back in. Then it has a, I'd say 50/50 chance, of not remembering that you got the item. This basically means that you get an infinite item glitch. The worse part is, it's only sometimes, I can't consistently replicate the bug. I still haven't found the problem. Well, let's just hope future me suddenly transcends godhood and figures out how to fix it.

Jpegs to stare at
You must be pretty bore by now just reading me rant, right? Well luckily for you, I have some pictures! Not good ones mind you, just pictures.

So this is the layout of the first dungeon. Hakurei Shrine, graphics still pending of course. The concept I had for this game is instead of playing as the regulars like Reimu or Marisa, you play as a normal human kid whose looking for her older brother since it's getting really late and he hasn't returned home yet. Asking around the human village, you'd find out other people who went out haven't returned yet either. After reading like 5 chapters of Lotus Eater, I concluded that the villages see Reimu as some sort of guardian. Well not Reimu herself per se, but the Hakurei Shrine (Though I guess not enough to spare donations). So, I thought it make sense for the first destination you'd go is Hakurei Shrine, to seek help. But Reimu isn't home right now, since there's an incident (hence the missing people). With the absence of the miko, Yokai start thrashing the place. Do you see the water pool at the very end of the first image? That's the first boss arena. It's nothing water related though, it's just a bigger Yokai. Let's call him Zakoni.



This image looks a bit more interesting, right? This is the second dungeon of the game, Moriya Ropeway Caverns. After almost dying and slaughtering an Oni, our young protagonist decides to visit the new shrine everybody is going to, Moriya. The path is made safer too after the instillation of the Moriya ropeway. Though one problem, it's not working. Looks like somebody turned the system off. Since nobody else is going to do it, you got to. The switch is located within a cave nearby, that suspiciously looks like a snake (this is my proudest moment of dungeon design, let me have it). Hakurei Shrine was supposed to be tutorial dungeon, to get you acquainted on how the basics of basics work. Moriya is supposed to be the first real challenge, incorporating puzzle elements and such. I don't want to spoil the puzzles, but it's really not that hard. In fact, I think you could get what to do just by looking at this layout. Well, as for the boss of this dungeon... that's my first OC (let's pretend the protagonist isn't counted as an OC). Again, I haven't fleshed it out, so I won't get into details, but basically the gist is it's a double battle. Somebody will be shooting arrows that home to the other guy and that guy will redirect the arrows in a random direction and more bullet hell stuff. One of them is a Yokai that can manipulate the course of any moving object by touching (or something like that) and the other is a skilled human archer. That's all I'm saying






Well, that's all I have for now. Not much, not even close to finishing. I wonder if I can pull this off? And if you're wondering, yes the last 2 bosses of the last 2 dungeons will also be OC's. Well, I'll do my best to post everyday, till the jam is over to keep whoever is willing to read this updates. Oh, and I got to do art and music, both of which I'm not good at. I hope I can actually pull this off, I got over ambitious and now look at where I am.

orz

 

[kymoh]

I hope I'm allowed to jump in and talk here-

Looks like a good start so far! It's cool to see someone closely replicating retro games instead of adding an 8-bit artstyle and calling it a day. And the concept of playing as a human instead of Reimu/Marisa/Youkai is interesting too. Hope you finish it!
What game engine are you using? I use Unity to make games and for your chest problem I'd either assign an id to each chest, or create a variable for each chest that keeps track of it being opened.

As for your scope problem, I have some advice: Don't plan too much. Especially for a small game jam like this. Even if something is perfect and detailed on paper, actually making it in-game will take much longer and will DEFINITELY alter gameplay in ways you don't expect. For example after adding an enemy with a unique mechanic, it's actually not very fun to fight, it's too hard to balance, it's too buggy, etc. And often times, spending all that time matching your plans is not worth it.

Solution? Keep long-term plans minimal. It's fine to plan something broad like "I want to make 6 dungeons and they will have these themes," but anything else would be too much, even things like the name of the dungeons or amount of enemies. FOCUS on getting basic gameplay done first, like functional enemies/npcs and the chest problem. It's okay to make generic enemies with no creative mechanics, it's okay for the graphics to be blank squares, it's okay if your game steals ideas from other games. I finished making a game a few weeks ago, and I pretty much followed this process- make a few levels with basic functionality, come back to them later, touch them up and repeat.

Completion is better than perfection.
I am excited to see where your game goes and I wish you luck :)

 

[Retron]

Okay, time for update #2

Progress is slower than my brain processing power

As the header states, there wasn't much progress today. Finished all the puzzles in the Moriya Ropeway dungeon, but still haven't added the enemies. Haven't laid out dungeon #3 or #4 in the engine and haven't mapped out the village and overworld left. On the bright side I finished making a bossfight trigger system, though it's held together by masking tape and chewing gum. From this, you could probably already tell that there won't be much pictures for this log(not like there was a lot of images in the first one), but that's not to say there is no images.

Anyways, there's like 6 days left in the jam. Will I complete the game in time. I'm hoping so, but leaning more towards... no. A pessimistic optimism, or optimistic pessimism? Well, all I can do now is:

(　ﾟ∀ﾟ)o彡°

Feast your eyes on crunchy af jpegs

So these two pictures show my attempt at translating my very rough sketch on paper for the first boss into an actual sprite. As you can clearly see, it did not go well in the slightest. The first one (leftmost) was just an edited sprite of one of the bosses from the Zelda oracle games. After putting it in the game, I found it was too small for my liking, so I spirited another one (rightmost). I didn't like how any of them looked, so you probably won't be seeing any version in the final game. If you for some reason are wondering who exactly this is, this is the first stage boss. I initially called him Zakoni, because Zako + Oni, but decided on the name Mitsume, cause it's based on the Yokai Hitotsume. Hito means one thing, I think, and Mi usually correlates to 3 and this guy has 3 eyes instead of one, so... yeah. If anybody reading this happens to actually understand japanese at a complex level, please tell me if Mitsume means something else or is correlated with a derogatory term because the last thing I want is to unintentionally insult somebody or something.

P.S. You may be wondering "Why do these images look so blurry and the colors so... wrong". Well that's because these images are extremely small (1 pixel is actually 1 pixel), to maintain a consistent pixel size in the game (hopefully). I was too lazy to properly upscale these sprites for this post, so I just used the forums resize tool.

To the people who actually read this log
Well, first of all.... thanks (b^-^)b

What game engine are you using?

Well, as for game engine, I use Unity too. I'm using Scriptable Objects to store data in between scenes. Each scene has a dedicated SO that stores data about what chests have already been opened, doors have been unlocked and bosses have been defeated, all in the forms of boolean arrays, each item having it's own index in the array (e.g. array hasOpenened has a length of 2 cause 2 doors and hasInteracted has a length of 4 cause of 4 chests) so I guess you could essentially say it's like an ID. Looking back, I probably overcomplicated the system, but I still don't get why the date sometimes doesn't persist through scenes.

And it's still not fixed, but eh. I'll solve it somehow... or at least I hope. It's pretty game breaking after all.

As for your scope problem...

I totally agree, but it's really hard to do sometimes, y'know? Especially in the planning phase. But, I'll give your solution a go next time. Oddly enough, I never considered that type of strategy before. Seems pretty effective, actually. Let's just see if I can pull it off without somehow overscoping again.

Well, that was uneventful.

orz

 

[Retron]

Update #3, things... are actually going a bit well all things considered, but I don't want to jinx myself by saying that.

Bugs can go build a bridge and jump off it.

To confirm, computer bugs. Coding bugs. If I didn't clarify, Wriggle would flail my ass. Anyways, contrary to how the title may seem, I was able to fix a number of bugs today. One being the stupid chest thing, yeah it's finally fixed! I had the problem at the start of the jam, which I think was 7 days ago, until now. And... it's gone! You have no idea how happy I am. And for some reason, if you want to know how I did it, I essentially created a json save system, whatever that means. Thank you Stack Overflow. Other than that, a bunch of small bugs were also fixed, if I got into the details, I'd probably go over the word limit here (not sure if there is one though.)

Obligatory Image Posting

Feast your eyes on the biggest dungeon in the game. Right now, the working name is Suzumiya manor. Why Suzumiya? Well because I totally forgot the last name I made for the boss in this stage except that one detail that it sounds like Suzumiya, like Haruhi Suzumiya. This would be the 3rd dungeon in the game, being heavily focused on elemental puzzles. Well you can't really call them puzzles, it's more like "hit a switch or find a key to open a door". The dungeon is 3 stories tall and, as I mentioned before, the biggest dungeon, no, area in the game. Pretty sure it's larger than the overworld. Speaking of the overworld...

This... is the overworld.

...ever since that stupid minecraft movie, I never heard that word the same again. Anyways, it may seem kind of bland now, but that's because I haven't added enemies or npcs yet. Ideally, there would be a bunch of enemies in the grassy plains and some npcs scattered about to give you hints on future puzzles and such.

You've probably noticed the giant rectangle shaped hole in the middle of the map. That's where the human village is supposed to go. Yup, still haven't made that yet. It's going to be a separate map though. So you could say the giant hole is actually a load zone. That- doesn't really make any sense does it? Actually, while writing this, I almost forgot there are more overworlds I created, albeit smaller than this one. Think of them as sub zones to the regular ones, not really like dungeons, but kind of. It's easier if I'd just show you. But unfortunately, I don't feel like doing that right now, so if you really want to know, I guess you just got to play the game when it comes out : /. Or I'll probably post all the maps to this thread once development is done, who knows?



P.S. the sites image placement is acting up, so excuse the poor positioning.

Properly Conceptualizing is Harddddddd

What I mean by this is actually putting all the important and fine details on the vague idea you had. In this case, it's the bossfights. In the mainline Touhou games, we all know the bosses are the centerpiece, the main attraction, right? Not only is their personality important, but their spellcards too. It should be interesting, flashy, fun to dodge (Not like you Junko). I currently only programmed one boss into the game, so 3 more to go. What makes creating these bosses hard is finding a fun attack pattern. Now, I can't just create a crazy Danmaku pattern like in the shmups because the control scheme is based on Zelda, so I have to keep the bosses from that series in mind too. But, I also want to retain the bullet hell aspect of Touhou. On top of that, bosses reflect their personality and abilities through their attacks. I don't really know how to explain this, it's just something I know, or at least I think I do.

Other than boss patterns, you know what else is bugging me during development? Dialog, yeah dialog of all things. My game, being a rpg, is bound to have dialog pop up here and there. I didn't think it be this damn hard to write dialog that feels like it would actually be said while still taking into account the speakers personality. Oh, that's another thing, personality, and to an extent creating an OC. These things, at least in my opinion, are hard to design. You got an idea for a character, cool. But how are you going to make them pop out? You can't just give them a frilly dress, an oversized bow and say, boom, it's a Touhou girl. No, you got to create an interesting personality, dynamics, make their characteristics 3 dimensional, make their clothes stand out with their personality, their abilities, etc.

If you've gotten this far...
And actually read everything, it would seem like I'm rambling like a madman. And to that I say, congratulation, you figured it out! On a serious note though, I'm slightly happy, just slightly, on how everything is turning out so far, but I really need to pick up the pace, considering I still need to make all the art and probably the music too. Again, still not close to finishing. Or at least I think. Let's hope I can get everything done before the deadline.

orz

As always thank you for letting me evaporate your braincells. Even just by seeing people view this thread, it gives me just a little bit more motivation to not tap out, so yeah, thanks...

No, seriously.

 

[kymoh]

You're making some quick progress! Making all the art and music is WAY tougher than you think though. It takes a lot of time (unless you are already very experienced with both arts) so I recommend free assets/music. I like making music, so if you tell me what kind of theme you're going for, I might actually make a track for your game

 

[Retron]

Update #4
By the time of posting this update, you can probably already guess that I wasn't able to make it on time. orz. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean I'm just going to scrap the entire project. I'm kind of close to finishing it actually. You can play the whole game, from start to finish. All I just need is replace all the placeholder sprites with my own, put music and sfx, code some enemies and make a title and credits screen. I was so close ;-;.

But, enough sulking. Since I'm not really bound by a deadline, I can start making adjustments to the game that I thought would take too long. But, I'm not going to overhaul entire chunks of the system because I just don't want too. I'm hoping I can finish this before the end of May, but we'll see. For now, meet Mako chan.


This is who you'll be spending all of the game with. I honestly hope I can make her an interesting character, since I, admittedly, am not the best at writing stories, let alone writing dialog. It doesn't help that her character design is kind of bland too -_-

You're making some quick progress! Making all the art and music is WAY tougher than you think though. It takes a lot of time (unless you are already very experienced with both arts) so I recommend free assets/music. I like making music, so if you tell me what kind of theme you're going for, I might actually make a track for your game

Thanks, appreciate it. I'm honestly not really sure what I want the music in game to sound like yet. I do want to also learn how to make music, so I think I'm going to try to compose most if not all the songs. But if you ever do end up making a track, I'll be sure to put it in the game ^^

So that's all for now. Actual game updates may or may not be coming soon, I mean look at the time between this post and the last, you think you can trust me with consistency?


For now, enjoy hina spin

 

[kymoh]

Sucks that you couldn't finish it on time. But it's good that you're still continuing the project. And even better to hear the entire gameplay is finished! After your finishing touches you should definitely post the game here for everyone to play :)

 

[Retron]

Woah- I remember this. Too bad my motivation got shot by a 12 gauge exactly 27 times and crucified. Truly unfortunate. Anyways, I couldn't stop thinking about completing this game before I do other stuff, but everytime I try to continue, I just don't feel like I really have the same passion as I did when I first developed it. So as you can already figure out, this has hindered me making new things, since I'm always thinking that I MUST finish this first

Am I dropping it? It may sound like it, but no, I am not. I am postponing it, shoving it under the carpet until I one day trip on that suspiciously unfinished game shaped lump and decide to finally complete it.

Is this bad practice? Hell yeah, don't be like me. Actually finish your stuff.

So am I posting the unfinished product? No, it's probably going to a miserable experience for whoever is gonna play it. If you were really looking forward to playing it (I can't imagine why...), then I'm truly sorry.

With that being said, look forward to my future projects. Hopefully I learned my lesson on over scoping. Seriously, this has been like the 5th time it has happened? Oh yeah, sorry again for anybody who had hope in me, this should teach you not to do that.