International Love Ultimatum 2 #iluJam

ILUJam Game Dev Blog #8

As a final dev blog post for the ILUJam I thought it might be a good idea to do sort of a post mortem on The Draw and talk about what I learned, what I should have done, etc.

Overall I was pretty happy with how the game ended up turning out. I was worried I might have scaled it back too much since things generally went pretty smoothly, but I don’t think that ended up being the case.

Keep reading

#ilujam #postmortem

mindysoung

Hey guys I made a game!

well, it’s not a full game just yet but it’s a game you can play

http://cakenap.itch.io/food-court

It’s a dating sim about dating food! Please play it if you have the time!

I did all the artwork in the game (excluding the backgrounds)

otomesexy

Games — Tour de Akiba and the #iluJam

For the past month my friend Jia and I have been plugging away at our entry for the dating sim game jam I organized, #iluJam. We released our game the other night, Tour de Akiba, just before the upload deadline ended. We’re both pretty proud of what we turned out!

Tour de Akiba is a Yowamushi Pedal fan game (yes we know technically the French is wrong, but it makes the title unique and endearing). Think of the game like an interactive fanfiction. Doujinshi games like this have an active community in Japan and are sometimes even sold at events like Comiket. Both Jia and I are huge fans of Yowapeda and working with the characters in such a fun space really drove us to complete our deadline goals.

It was also such a pleasure to work with my local friend Jia. I have always loved her art style and it was so thrilling plugging in her new portraits and backgrounds and seeing them paired up with my dialogue. She’d come over and I’d sit her down to test things out and she’d squeal, exclaiming “they’re alive!” It was adorable and super fun. And she was extremely dedicated to the project, going above and beyond to implement corrections and additional art to flesh out the game.

Initially we planned to include a representative of each major team in the game that the player could choose to invite to Akihabara. We originally settled on Makishima, Arakita, and Midousuji since they were favorites of ours. As the jam weeks progressed and we realized the workload that would be required we first considered Makishima a end-game bonus stretch goal. Then came the point where we settled on finishing just one route, and half the work was already done for Arakita’s. We still kept a Midousuji teaser in there in case we want to keep making character routes at our own pace. Imaizumi and Manami could be on the horizon as well if we want to keep it up that long.

I intentionally designed the game to be able to expand and contract depending on the situation, in order to make it safe to complete in at least some kind of deliverable state in a single month. The game would have an initial decision branch where the player would explicitly pick the route they wanted, rather than having to deal with a common introduction and multiple character stats. And that way I only had to keep track of one hidden stat in order to determine one of two endings the player got.

I wrote the game in third-person because I wanted to give the player the feeling of directing the action but not acting as a stand-in for Onoda. I worried it could seem voyeuristic but I also hoped it might help people who aren’t used to this kind of game feel less weird about it. And the content itself is about as PG as you can get. Just guys being dudes.

I plan to make a post later about my experiences using the TyranoBuilder engine to create the game, and share some of the tricks I learned a little too late to make my life easier.

The #iluJam itch.io page contains all the entries uploaded for the jam—16 of them! Now that my game is done I look forward to playing through everyone’s games!

spacecatboyfriend-blog

This is an adventure where you can romance a cat! A cat from space!

Hello, world! We are Pink Coffee Studios, a brand new indie game development company based in Oregon, USA. We are super proud and stoked to announce our very first first draft of our very first game, Space Cat Boyfriend. In Space Cat Boyfriend you are a human who encounters cats…from space! It is done in the Otome (Japanese dating sim) style and the player gets to romance their choice of 4 very adorable cats. Writer @peachyaenne, artist @iamsarahbuck and programmer @seraphki worked like crazy in the month of June to submit a product for #ilujam and we are super happy with what we produced.

We would love for you to follow us here on tumblr and on twitter ( @pinkcoffeegames ) to keep an eye on our progress as we perfect this wonderful project. Please, download the game, play it, let us know what you love and what you didn’t love so we have feedback as we continue our Space Cat journey.

vamichaelalaws

“Love: it’s easy to find and it’s easy to spark. The challenge of love is actually maintaining it.”

When a man becomes the victim of a car crash that costs him his entire sense of sight, he has no choice but to try and live on without it. Treated with kid gloves by both his best friend and his sensitive girlfriend, he tries to make the best of his situation and becomes adjusted to using his remaining four senses while still being himself. However, can he keep and protect his love without being able to see her or her hardships?

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A short dating simulation story by Michaela Laws for #ILUJam Genre: Drama/Slice of Life/Dating Sim(BxG)

Credits: Writer/Programmer - Michaela Laws Composer - Christopher Escalante Art - Kopianget (Rizky Prahesa) Voice Talent - Warky T. Chocobo, Michaela Laws, James Brown Jr., & Hayden Daviau

Available Now

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Support Michaela on Patreon!

everydayfoxlife

Submitted our dating sim for #ilujam earlier today! We’re working on getting a Windows version made, but in the meantime Mac users can download it from itch.io.

We worked our butts off on this game so we hope everyone enjoys it! Feedback would also be welcome as we are already planning our next game. I also intend to write about the process behind creating this game with TyranoBuilder as I learned a lot, so feel free to come at me with any questions.

#iluJam Closing Ceremony

Wow, that was quite the month! Hope everyone is rested and recovered.

We had 16 submissions to the itch.io game jam page! That is a lot of new games! All having to do with love and relationships. I'm so proud of you all! And I'm proud of those who didn't feel up to submitting but tried something for the jam! Maybe that idea seed will germinate some day. Even today I'm still being influenced by game ideas I planned out years prior but never did anything with. You never know.

Now is a good time to consider gathering your thoughts for a game postmortem to share. Lots of developers like to express what they feel went right, went wrong, and what they want to improve on next time. It's not necessary but it can be cathartic and helpful for future devs considering making games similar to yours. I’ll be sharing any I find on this blog.

I did a simple post explaining my game but I plan to expand on it with a separate post about my experiences with TyranoBuilder with any tips and tricks I learned along the way during the jam month.

Laura over at BoingBoing’s Offworld did an article about the jam’s games! She picked her five favorite and wrote about them!

I’m looking forward to making my way through everyone's games!

See you next year! ♥

#ilujam #news #games

#iluJam Submission!

We’re down to the final day! Hope everyone is finishing up and I hope everyone learned something new about game development and scope!

When you are finished please make your way over to the itch.io game jam page in order to submit your game! The deadline to submit is 11:59 PM on Wednesday, July 1st.

I recommend not pushing yourself too close to the hard deadline because you never know what technical hurdles might present themselves last minute.

I’m looking forward to playing everyone’s game once I finish my own! I’ll be trying to mirror posts to all the entries here after they’ve been submitted and I can play through them!

Thank you for love jammin’!

#ilujam

ILUJam Game Dev Blog #6

Part of the reason I decided to do the ILUJam was because I wanted to try out TyranoBuilder, which is a visual novel game engine/editor that recently showed up on Steam. Since it is mostly visual, it seemed like it might have the potential to be for VNs what Twine did for text based interactive narratives.

After using it for a bit I think it has that potential, but there are a lot of odd idiosyncrasies with the editor.

Keep reading

How many games do you think will be submitted?

It’s difficult to say! I’ve seen at least 10 projects among the Twitter and Tumblr tags being worked on by different people. But once July 1st hits we’ll have to see how comfortable they feel about submitting them!

#faqs #ilujam

ILUJam Game Dev Blog #5

I was going to do the first part of a write up about TyranoBuilder, but then some more art assets came in. So instead I’m doing a character profile post, which I’ll also do for the other characters.

And I should note also that the art was done by Jones, and you should read their comic Helvetica.

First up is the love interest, Mel.

Name: Melisande Krueger

Aliases: Mel, Lisa, Sandy

Age: 18

Height: 5′10″

Major: Undecided

Scholarships: Full Athletic Scholarship (Soccer)

Position: Attacking Midfielder

Birthday: November 1

Arcana: The Chariot

Siblings: Older sister (22) and younger brother (16)

Likes: Sports, cold-ish weather, pants, bibimbap, video games, and birds.

Dislikes: Hot weather, snails, swimming, and cooking.

zmtn

[images: drawings of several costumed people. The first is a dark skinned man with short dreads in a silver and dark costume with a cape full of stars. The second is a person with dark hair, light skin and a robotic esque suit with a robot on their elbow. The third is a woman with a blond uppercut and green mask and costume, with a bug look. The fourth is a tall, muscular man with dark skin and lighter skin, with a costume that resembles swirls of air. The last is a woman with dark skin and curly dark hair, with a roman inspired fire themed costume. ]

I’m working on a game for #ilujam, a sympathetic dorky supervillain themed dating sim! The working title is DS Squared: Dorky Supervillain Dating Sim. I’ve finally finished the character designs for all the routes. c: In order:

Ophiuchus, an astrological themed supervillain who redistributes wealth from those who have it to those who have not, and times it according to the stars

Synchro, a robot-building technopath with a desire for social change, a dislike of the status quo, and a distaste for the label of “villain”

Katydid, a wild-card villain who sometimes henches, sometimes has her own schemes, and always has fun

Hurricane, or sometimes Derecho, a weather powered villain looking for the next big score, with a soft spot for animals shhh

Caca, a fire-breathing art thief who wants to know: are you going to let her take the piece or let the rest of your collection go up in flames?

The protagonist, Harrier, is an unseen superhero with telekinesis and the ability to talk to birds. Maybe while fighting crime, they’ll start loving crime ??

bishounensexual

Development Update #2: This is a screenshot on how Jenny is coding twine for our game. We have both have been writing a route for the game and are currently in chapter 2 with a writing schedule to follow before the end of the month.

Please enjoy these brief characters bios!

Olivia: Eighteen years old. September tenth. Blood type O. A serious girl with a big weight on her shoulders who is class representative and not very friendly towards others.

Emil: Seventeen years old. February fifteenth. Blood type AB. A rather eccentric boy that likes to take naps, though he seems quiet, he is actually quite popular with the girls.

Nikolas: Seventeen years old. October twentieth. Blood type B. He goes by the nickname “Nick” and is a rather carefree teenager who is friends with nearly everyone is his class, but isn’t quite sure what do with himself.

“So tell me, can rabbits really die from loneliness?”

ILUJam Game Dev Blog #4

As I mentioned in the last blog I wanted to talk about writing next, because I decided to write the game’s script first in Twine before putting it into TyranoBuilder (which I’m using for the game’s engine.)

I initially thought this would be a clever idea, and in retrospect it turned out to be a really great idea!

For those not familiar with Twine, it’s a interactive storytelling engine. It’s both fairly simple to use, and also decently powerful (if you don’t mind doing a lot of scripting.) Also the editor it uses is very visual, letting you see how your passages/scene are connected together in a sort of flow chart.

What you see below is how my game looks in Twine. Basically each block has at it’s end three choices, which then lead to one of the blocks on the next line. That is until you get to the bottom where they converge, but then what block you get there isn’t a choice it’s instead based on the confidences of the characters.

Now it’s not technically the way the story is actually structured, but that’s only because I was lazy and made common route stuff part of each branch/passage rather than its own. Which I did initially because I thought the blocks on the same level would be more different than they ended up being.

So using Twine proved to be super useful because:

It’s meant for interactive/branching narratives. So I was able to write the story with branching paths without having to do the weird workarounds you need to with a normal Word processor when writing a branching story. Which made it easy to do, but also lets you see what you’re doing in a visual way.

It also let me quickly prototype the game without having to worry about any of the assets. This has been especially useful for testing the romance system, and balancing it since even before moving over into TyranoBuilder I can play through the whole story. So instead of having to playtest that and balance the system towards the end of development, I’ve actually got it basically done.

I will admit that there is a bit of a learning curve with Twine, since you need to learn it’s syntax for things. It also helps a lot if you know how to script since that’s how you introduce variables and expressions. But if you can learn that it’s a really powerful tool (luckily I managed to learn this stuff by taking part in the Twiny jam, so experimenting with it for a game jam is probably a good way to learn it.)

So until next post if you have questions either send them through Tumblr or over Twitter.

vamichaelalaws

This is why I need a new muse. My muse has RIDICULOUS ADHD.

My menu for my gamejam entry to #ilujam

Blind Love

–More Info Soon–

yaoyaoyaoo-deactivated20240704

弱虫ペダル同人ゲーム Yowamushi Pedal Doujin Game

ACosmosさん(@acosmos )とコラボして坂道受けのフリー同人ゲームを作っております！6月30日/ウェブ配信メインリリースはみどさかと荒坂。6月30日以降、新たにルートを二つ(巻坂、今坂)配信する予定です(*´ω｀*)

興味のある方がいらしたら、日本語版も出してみたいのですが、翻訳はとても難しいのでおそらく出しません…英語の分からない方すみません

The Yowamushi Pedal Doujin game is going to be released at the end of the month with MidoSaka and AraSaka routes! After that, 2 more routes (MakiSaka and ImaSaka) are a possible expansion, but they are up in the air! Some more progress shots

zannendame

This will be Jia and my entry into the iluJam!