Summary
this year for my brother's birthday, i worked on a game called Coming Home. it's a very in-jokey visual novel, written uniquely "australian" with many references to local areas growing up. the game is humourous, cute, light hearted and made entirely for my brother to enjoy, but as all my projects are, this is avaliable to the public!
Process
this is my first game. i bought RPGMaker in november and worked on it part time, whenever I wasn't at my job, or doing something else more urgent. this project was a great opportunity for me to learn to sprite, program, compose music and learn to work within the non-linear pipeline of game development
RPGMaker 2003 is incredibly welcoming to beginners. a lot of the coding is nested into helpful UI. i was still very confused at the start, in terms of how to logically get some of the tools to work; things like how the order of the pages for the events actually matter for how the process plays out. it was a lot of logic puzzles like that all through the months of development.
for sprites, i know i could have used aesprite, but i decided to use something familiar to me, so i just made all the art with the free program Paint.NET, its basically paint with a bit more photoshop-esque qualities.
i also tried my hand at Garageband for the first time during this project. i've had an ipad for just over a year, and the program comes free with all apple products. the program also had a hurdle of understanding the UI at the start, but after that, it was just a bunch of music theory away from being useable. i watched a lot of youtube videos on music composition and theory since starting. i did music back in highschool, and played guitar for a band, but it's been years since i thought about theory, i only knew about aesthetic.
Final Product
you can download the game here https://iamprikle.itch.io/coming-home
you can download the soundtrack at https://iamprikle.bandcamp.com/
