Development blog for project Sad Plant Game. It's a game about being sad and watering plants. Developing it in RPG Maker VX Ace! Trigger warnings?: This game deals HEAVILY with depression and suicide. Tread carefully and prioritize your health and well-being
Remember when I said I had to go on a 1 year hiatus.
Well it’s been a year now. Here we are.
And here we go again probably.
Medium story short, i STILL don’t really have time to dedicate to developing the game, but the foundation is set up for me to be returning to it soonish. I have some life matters I need to get settled first, and there’s also the matter of sorting out questions that I want sad plant game to answer that i myself don’t really yet have the answers to yet. That might take longer. But it’s important.
Anyway, I wanted to thank everyone here for sticking around and want to reiterate that sad plant game continues to be one of the most important things to me, and I fully intend to see it to completion. However, being so important to me, it’s unfortunately going to take a lot of time. I hope for your patience.
Hope to see you all when I return for more regular updates.
Hiatus details under the cut!
So the hiatus achieved mostly two things: 1) I’m done with school and 2) i successfully developed my senior project into an ongoing webcomic. Being done with school means more time to focus on sad plant game. Working on a webcomic means less time to work on sad plant game. I also am on a job hunt so that’s it’s own time sink.
Isobel is an important story to me and one that I’ve wanted to tell for a loooong time, so ditching the comic in favor of working on sad plant game isn’t likely. In fact, I’d prefer to use the time with working on Isobel to enhance my skills enough so that sad plant game is even better. Just during the 1 year hiatus I learned so many things that will help in the development of the game, and I’m sure there’s more still that I can learn.
If I’m not returning to development within another year, I’m gonna need to sit down and re-evaluate all other priorities, because I want to make this happen so dearly! I’d like to try to get my life sorted a bit first though. There’s a lot I need to do and a lot I need to figure out.
Sorry for the infrequent presence, but thank you for following along. Hoping for more developments here soon!
This semester though, I have an animation course where it’s all about using After Effects and I’ve been gaining a better understanding of the interface and stockpiling tutorials and I’ve found some that made me realize the kinds of videos I want to put in the game are VERY POSSIBLE for me to do! My earliest concepts were awkwardly cobbled together in flash, but After Effects blows the door wide open to possibilities! I’m very excited about that :D
Hey y’all! I can’t get back to developing the game quite yet, but I would like to take some time for any fellow gamedevs here to draw attention to this series I’ve been meaning to recommend for a while now!
Deep Analysis: Life Is Strange
This series is a full playthrough of the game Life Is Strange which features moment-by-moment dissection of what the game does right and what it does wrong; highlighting narrative and design techniques and explaining how to use them and why they work in game design!
Some techniques the series helps discuss and demonstrate include:
color grading/lighting
theme
dialog
immersing the player
level design
significance of the shapes of your levels
player choice
character blocking
camera tricks
camera angles
and more tbh, this series is super great with a LOT to learn!
The analysis also does VERY well in acknowledging LIS’s imperfections and discusses what the game could have been done differently to better serve its design and theme, which is really great to see! Learning from a game’s faults is just as important as learning from its successes, y’know!
There’s so much here that is worth taking a listen to! I’ve watched it two or three times now and I’m probably gonna put it on again soon hahaha. I HIGHLY recommend it for gamedevs and frankly anyone creating content in a visual medium (games, film, webcomics, etc.).
Either play the game or watch an LP first, because this series is not a letsplay in the sense of experiencing the game. This is an analysis of design techniques! It’s best to go in knowing the game experience, and then be prepared to deconstruct everything!
Hope anyone will check it out and enjoy it as much as I did!
Summary: Despite the already 3-month hiatus, school and life obligations need my attention and the result is going to be approximately a one year hiatus. I’d ideally like to have time to work on and post some character/setting concepts to fill that void, but the next twelve months are going to be pretty rough. Please rest assured that this project is still INCREDIBLY important to me and I fully intend to see it to completion!!! Thanks for sticking with me this long, and I hope to have your continued support!
In-depth details under the cut!
Greetings from Sad Plant Game!
If it wasn’t clear already, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus! I didn’t announce it properly because I didn’t know how long it was going to go, and it wasn’t intended to be a hiatus actually. Just got busy and, huh, never stopped being busy. Welp. That was a semester’s worth of time.
I thought I might be able to get back to the game in the summer for sure, but it turns out my summer is actually going to be pretty consistently busy, and the upcoming schoolyear is my senior year of college. Given all the work I’ll be taking on now and in the near future, I’m estimating that I’m not going to be able to work on this project for about a year.
Here’s how that span breaks down for me:
Currently I’m enrolled in two summer online classes. I also have a graphic design internship pending that should start up within the next week or so. When the school year starts up I might have a job on the library graphic design team? We’ll see about that. Most of all, as an art major at my school, I have to take on a senior project which involves putting together a gallery show. For this project, I want to try developing and completing a comic I’ve wanted to execute for quite some time. I’ll probably make a post about that here as it becomes more relevant, but yeah it’s going to be taking a HUGE chunk of my time.
The senior project might have to be finished by some point in the first semester if my show gets stuck with an early deadline, but I’d ideally like as much time to work on it as I can get. I’ve gotta write, thumbnail, lay out, and complete an entire comic book between now and then! x___X (Wish me luck everyone!) But yeah, these next bunch of months are gonna require some major crunch time and concentration. And lots of naps.....
SO THE MANAGEMENT LOOKS APPROXIMATELY LIKE THIS:
✿ Summer classes
✿ Internship
✿ Possible school job
✿ Fall/Spring school workload
✿ Senior show gallery + book
✿ Suffering
Sorry again for the absolutely HUGE delay. This project is near and dear to my heart with a message I really want to get out there because I don’t see enough works that handle suicide quite realistically. So I hope you all can believe I will not let this game fall apart so easily. Between now and when I get back to it again, I’d like to try to include some concepts/holiday greetings type stuff to give the blog some life, but yeah, it’s going to be a while.
Thank you for sticking with me, and I hope to have your support throughout the future development of this game!!! ;-;/
OOPS 200 followers snuck right by by me!!;;;... And 300 FOLLOWERS hit sad plant girl right in the face!!!!!!
WOW! 300!!!! That’s so many people and it warms my heart to have each of you here ;-; This game’s been a long time coming and it’s still got a long way to go, but I hope you’ll be able to stick with me to the end of it. I want to make this game the best I can to tell the story I need it to, and to be an experience worth your time! Until we get there, thank you all for your support everyone!! Let’s keep going!
yeah having to switch from reading dialogue at the bottom to narration in the middle is a bit off putting imo. love what you've done with the description bubbles though
Thanks for the feedback!!! I’m gonna keep working on it, and hopefully arrive at a good solution soon!
I really want to be able to do some semi-animated cinematics for the game, so I rolled around in After Effects for a while to see what I could figure out. I’m not the most proficient in it, but I feel at least one step closer to achievement ;-;
Anyone got a safe link for that? I’ve gotten one or two too many virus bundles before and I’m not too much into the idea of walking into one of those again.
titsay
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