Dev Log

Kuday's Laika will be a pixel art visual novel about a sick boy making a wish for a dog. The player will control the dog and will interact with the family before making a difficult decision at the end. This game will have a winter theme and be an entry to the https://itch.io/jam/winter-vn-jam-2023. There will be more places to find out about this game, but this article will act as the game development log.
The purpose of this dev log is to...

• Document my progress so I can see my development, focus on my project and remember the reasoning behind my decision making
• Showcase the "good, bad and the ugly" on game development, to show a realistic perspective on game development
• Encourage other game developers to share their progress too!

Tools

These are the tools I have used so far to create Kuday's Laika.

• Aseprite, to create pixel art.
• Ren'py, a very popular game engine for visual novels.

Pre jam

In this game jam we are allowed to prepare to some extent in advance. As I knew I wanted to learn how to make pixel art this time round, I picked a colour palette in advance and decided on using Wintercode. I created two dog sprites to represent Laika sitting upright and standing to the side.

2nd December 2023

Today I am focusing on user interface design and the basic story of the game. I want it to make it clear what the game user interface will look like and what exactly will be possible for me to create, mechanic wise.
I begun searching for Ren'py resources on Itch that have a Winter theme, and found a Snowfall effect by Tofurocks which was a very quick download. I have looked into the code and have tested it out.
I liked how the user created two different types of snow. My first goal was to recreate a snowflake in pixel art. I looked at some real life examples of snowflakes and gave it a go via Asesprite.

On the left you can see the Wintercode palette I am using. I find it useful to have a preview window that shows how the art looks like in its full size.

Original	Adaption 1	Adaption 2

I currently prefer adaption 2, as I think the small snowflakes can look quite cute but slightly less 'overwhelming' and 'magical', as the story will have a sad edge to it. I'll have more time to play around with it in the future
While the default user interface created by Tofurocks is very pretty, I wasn't sure it would suit my theme. I found a very beautiful gui theme for $10 and considered it for sometime. I liked the design of the title, the use of fonts and the white border lines. But I wasn't entirely convinced about the textbox. This is probably a theme I will go back to and have a think about a little later.
When I create my visual novel, I want the best advantage possible to kickstart off the game's development. A little known fact that I didn't know when I first created the Ren'py version of Sea Hears Project, was that there existed many alternative foundation templates you can use for your game to improve its features and customising abilities.
I adore Tofurock's GUI template which focuses on accessibility. This template allows for audio captions, screennshake options and font changes.
I have also found FeniksDev's GUI template which may have some add ons from other developers that could improve accessibility. I remember someone telling me that FeniksDev's template isi a good solution to encrypting the game files, so I might look into that a little further. I looked at resources such as Bob C's Gallery to consider additional features.


Finally I did a little more research on different ways to add features to my visual novel, created this new World Anvil world for my game and called it a day.

3rd December 2023

Originally I wanted to create my game on Construct 3, which I felt would have given me plenty of opportunity to create mini games and a walking sprite. Unfortunately I don't have the full license to this software yet, so I must adapt and use the "scope knife" to create a game.
I have focused my attention on Per K Grok's controlled walk tutorial, as if I can get it working, it will allow the player to control the dog sprite at the beginning of the game. I think it would introduce the game beautifully to have the dog walk through the village in order to visit the sick boy.


This is quite a big jump from my comfort zone, so while I would like to get this working, I feel I need to give myself a hard deadline. If I don't make this work by that point, I'll have to abandon the idea and focus entirely on the dialogue part of the game.
The diffiiculties I am having so far is adapting the code to a 1920 x 1080 game, and making the jump work. At the moment my little sprite walks endlessly across the background and we're not able to get to the dialogue bit!