Overview
This game is an RPG inspired heavily by indie games like Stardew Valley. It was made over 48 hours for a game jam called GradJam 2021. Gradjam 2021 took place in May of 2021 and everything in the game was created by me. While the initial sequence of the game is playable and able to be downloaded on itch.io, it is still a work in progress and I intend to add to it and make it better.
Design and Solo Jam Experience
Being a game jam game, the design was fairly straightforward. I had this idea for a 2D pixel art space game for a while, and I wanted to see if I could get a start on it. As previously mentioned, parts of the game took inspiration from Stardew Valley. Mainly the art style and the dialogue system.
When doing a solo jam, the most important part is to scope small. My goal was to have a functioning dialogue system by the end of the jam. I wanted this system in particular because it seemed difficult to implement and the jam gave me a good excuse to sit down and get it knocked out. I ended up completing a basic dialogue system plus a bit more! Furthermore, I struggle with art, so I worked to create one tileset and a few characters. I chose not to animate them as that would take too long, and would definitely test my patience as well as my questionable artistic abilities.
Dialogue Boxes
I wanted the dialogue system to feel like a classic 2D RPG, similar to a dialogue system in Pokemon, or Stardew Valley. I wanted to have the text type itself out, and be in an interesting box in order to make it more interesting. I also wanted to add an NPC portrait and name next to the text so the conversation is more personable, and so I can, in the future, add portraits with different expressions. This way players will be able to tell more easily how the NPC is feeling during a given conversation. Lastly, whenever the typewriter effect finishes writing the given text, a symbol appears in the bottom right of the text box so players know they can advance the dialogue. I intend to make this animate so it will be more eye-catching.
Programming and Technical
Dialogue System
Before this game jam, I had never really utilized scriptable objects. Someone explained them to me once in a convoluted way and I wasn’t able to grasp the concept. However, I really wanted to make a dialogue system, and after talking to some mentors, and some googling, scriptable objects appeared to be the best way to accomplish the task.
Once I figured out that scriptable objects are essentially just containers for data that persist across scenes, the rest was fairly easy. I was able to create scriptable objects full of dialogue and attach the dialogue to characters. Then I was able to link these to characters and print them out in order as well as change the scriptable object based on states!
Overall I am very happy with what I was able to accomplish with this dialogue system in the amount of time I had. There are definitely some areas of code that need to be cleaned up so they can be expanded upon, but I definitely intend to use this system again and will clean it up, after the game jam! I learned a lot about scriptable objects and I realized that I should have been using them more in other projects. Moving forward I will definitely be making use of this magnificent feature.
Robert Andersen Games 