The target with this game

The initial Game Theme was "Out of Control" after about five hours of thinking I had two ideas. One does a game concept where you are out of the control of the story and gameplay and more just choosing whom to follow as the story unfolds. This would be like "Life is Strange" except instead of seeing only Max's perspective, you would control an invisible spirit and follow whomever you would like, but time is always ticking the story forward. While that is not this game, this was the second idea of taking an RPG idea and removing the battle component. At first, I thought this was going to be an idle game, as you will just be providing little input. However, this game grew to have its own identity as "A management sim where you are the manager of a group of AI determined party members who are tasked to adventure and protect a western-style town." The cool thing is the western fantasy style that I plan to go further.

Cool, what is the 2.1.4 version and 1.2.2 version?

2.1.4 is the version for the Post GMTK Game Jam; the 1.2.2 is the final submission into GTMK Game Jam. Both are currently downloadable due to the team wanting to show the growth that has come. 1.2.2 is approximately 40 hours of work on 2.14 taking a total amount of about 95 hours of work. n

• 1.2.2
• While was a great concept getting about 2.8 stars overall in the GMTK Game Jam. It didn't meet the high goal of being ranked top 1000 of any one category. 
• The game consisted of 3 main screens, Menu, Battle, and Shop. Which would randomly be flipped between the three as the game progress. This gave it a very turn base mechanic, however also very static. 
•  The most common feedback was; improve the tutorial, focus more on managing the party, and showing the upcoming battles and speeding up the battles.
• 2.1.4
• This listens to the feedback and adds many new ideas. Sadly once again, the time limit ran short and not all ideas could be fully explored. But hopefully, this provides a greater scope of the path I plan to take the game.
• Improvements
• Add a Map. This was to allow the player to prepare for the upcoming battles as well as added more stress as the turn base management is moved closer to real-time.
• Added a few more items into the "Use Morale" option in the main menu. This was to allow you control over moving/directing your party member through the map. I also included an ability to see your party member battle moves, so you can make more informed decisions.
• Broke the items and equipment in the shop into five different levels, this is to provide the player more options with less money, A review I got from my testers is they would like to buy equipment before losing. So, now they can.
• Added an option to adjust the battle speed. This is so you can speed it up or slow it down to your liking.
• Added two building functionality into this version. The shop where you can buy items and equipment and the barbershop where you can get a party member healed up for a fee.
• The general quality of life fixes such as UI elements.

The adventure of making 2.1.4

This latest version has only been an adventure to work on. The first target was to make a map so, during my limited free time at work, I drew out a general style of a map that I would like to try. Spend that afternoon, figuring out to get the scaling right so you would be able to see the entire map in one view since the characters moving around is not your party but events to mimic their behaviors. The next day was to determine if I can emulate events touching other events, as the attached video was the first successful test of the mechanic. This later became how the buildings and battles work. About halfway through the day, decided to contact one of my friends to buy a licensing agreement for a song of hers, then figured out how to turn that song on and off when you bring up the menu. Added a feature now that I have more items in the game to randomize the shop each time with 1/3 the number of items in-game. Updated the menu layout, which resulted in digging into the engine code to figure out how to darken the screen so that the contrast between the text and the map screen would be easier to read. With battles roughly implemented the last day was adding all the features such as start and end of the game and the remaining battles to keep the main feel of the game similar to the previous version. Spent far to much time on fixing the animation to walk into buildings and exit without looking strange, while my primary tester for 2.1.4 helped hunt down why if you lost your party would be revived with 1 HP for one final battle, the bug we called god's gift. And within the last few hours of the first submission deadline, added the barbershop functionality. 

What would 2.1.4 plus look like?

• Deciding to upgrade to RPG MAKER MZ or shift to UNITY
• Step by step tutorial that can be running while the player experiences the game, no more documentation style tutorial
• Improve the controls of the game
• Adding even more items and skills
• Adding an AI for the party member to do the shopping for you based on a list of wants you provided them
• Pull further away from RNG towards more statistical generated randomness from data in the game.
• Make more maps with different themes and number of entrances
• Add a way to get a large party and include managing who is in your active party and who is not
• Allowing renaming your party at any time
• Adding a way for you to influence what move your party member will learn on level up
• Adding more buildings and wanderers to the town.
• Adding map based effects
• Improving variances towards the player favor