- Introduction:
Hello, and thank you for visiting the 5:Day:Summer (5DS) project thread, where I do my best to keep all of the information for this game and its development up to date.
5DS is a game developed over 33 days between the afternoon of May 29th, and the late afternoon of July 2nd, which was originally intended to be submitted to RPG Maker's 2014 Indie Game Design contest. My sister and I worked with a lot of dedication to make the best game we could, so 5DS is not only our debut, but our first real attempt at game design in general.
After a really unfortunate uploading experience (a sob story for the ages, really) only twenty minutes before the deadline, we became unable to submit to the contest, the next obvious step was to clear out all the major bugs, and make a functional release independent of the contest.
5DS is the result of several influences:
1.) I'm Brezzen, or Jampak, or Jade, or Jak, whatever you like most. I've been writing recreationally for 8~10 years now, and I've been writing more seriously for the last three years. I started taking college level creative writing courses when I was in middle school, and I've been playing video games a lot, since I was a wee child. I picked up the trial for RPG Maker about two and a half months ago, and toyed with it for a while. After the 30 day trial period was up, I was considering making another email address to get another 30 days out of it when the humble bundle deal popped up, and I knew the time was right. I got the whole package then and there, and since purchasing RPG Maker VX Ace on May 29th, steam says that I have logged 354 hours on that software. This is more or less correct. Since all of the writing, programming, mapping, etc. Were done by me, and I've been doing 10-12 hour days on the game for the last month or so (the first week was a disaster and most of the writing had to be scrapped).
2.) The primary artist is Petziez, or Bryn, or Brianna, whatever you prefer. She served not only as an excellent choice for the artist on this game (I most certainly would have hassled her to make more pieces for the game had we the time), but she guaranteed that the game came out as soon as it did by doing almost all of the text formatting and bugtesting, after teaching herself the basics of eventing over the course of three or four days. She is incredibly talented, and has proven so time and time again throughout development. This game would not exist without her. She first took up art as a hobby as a very small child: we were attending art classes together when she was in pre-school, and she has never stopped for long. She has some ten-ish years of practice under her belt, ranging across several 2D mediums. I brought this project idea to her, knowing that she was already capable of producing pixel art, and character art in an extremely charming style.
3.) Between the two of us Bryn and I wanted to make a game that we would want to play. To that end, we made a game that attempts to be queer friendly, and fair to a wide range of human experience. It features a protagonist that is somewhat atypical for the genre, and it attempts to toy with expectations and stereotypes. By making this game, we wanted to represent ourselves, and I think that we succeeded. I hope that you'll agree.
- Story:
Spoiler
The plot was designed between Bryn and I over a three hour meeting on May 29th, and the script was written by me. I had effective control over the story progression, and fashioned myself as the project lead throughout the game's production. The story itself is very quick, and the game can be beaten in under 50 minutes quite easily. However, the game is most rewarding to the player who interacts most heavily with their environment. Countless jokes, factoids, and little encounters are included throughout the world. Almost every interactable object has a piece of accompanying dialogue designed to flesh out the world.
Main Cast:
Main Cast:
- Maria: Our protagonist. Maria's looking forward to her summer vacation, spent with her girlfriend Chels, and her best friend, Toby. She loves art, games, and history, and she has a very active imagination. She often finds herself falling into vivid daydreams, and escapism is how she often processes the feelings she doesn't totally understand.
- Chels: Maria's girlfriend, and our lead supporting actress. Chels is a class ahead of Maria and Toby, and she has the aloof confidence of an upperclassmen looking away at the future. Chels is Maria's rock, but as one prepares for the end of high school, and the other for the beginning of college, their relationship may not be as stable as they thought.
- Toby: Maria's long time best friend, Toby's the math wiz, the science camp attendee, the one most likely to leave high school for bigger and brighter things. He's a little more shy and withdrawn than his two colorful friends, but he feels completely at ease with them. Or at least, almost completely. Does Toby have a secret?
The story is likely (hopefully) the most important and unique aspect of 5DS, and since I don't have much skill with code, music, or graphic design, I'm hoping that the story is what separates 5DS from other games.
Story Concept:
Spoiler
Maria, Chels, and Toby are best friends. The three of them play video games together while fending their way through the school day haze. 5DS begins with the trio playing a game together, on the night before the last day of school when there's a power outage. The group is forced to disband for the evening, but not before a worker for the Power Company shows up with suspicious speed to set the problem straight. Maria & Toby have a school project to complete before summer is over, but when they meet the Power Company Guy in town while doing research over local graffiti artists for their summer research paper. Things get suspicious.
Maria faces a lot of challenges over the course of her quiet summer, and we see the whole span of time through the lens of five selected days, leaving a lot to the player's imagination, and more to Maria's imagination as she sorts through her feelings by falling into daydreams and fantasies that verge on the hallucinatory.
Maria faces a lot of challenges over the course of her quiet summer, and we see the whole span of time through the lens of five selected days, leaving a lot to the player's imagination, and more to Maria's imagination as she sorts through her feelings by falling into daydreams and fantasies that verge on the hallucinatory.
- Art:
Spoiler
Bryn's hand at art is present at all levels of the game. She and I talked out some vague conceptual ideas, and then she designed the character concept art. She made all the original sprites using CharacterHub, and drew the original portraits herself. She performed various tileset edits throughout production, found in (I believe) Lunarea's lovely Modern Day tileset, which we leaned upon heavily, as well as Enterbrain ModernTiles from the Tsukuru blog. Other than that, we're pretty basic. A lot of the RTP was taken advantage of for this project.
Samples:
None of the following art, or the art produced by Bryn for 5DS is currently available for use outside of 5DS. Please respect the artist, and the work she put in to concept design, portraiture, and spriting.
Samples:
None of the following art, or the art produced by Bryn for 5DS is currently available for use outside of 5DS. Please respect the artist, and the work she put in to concept design, portraiture, and spriting.
- Gameplay:
Since this was the first game I've ever made, it was decided that the most realistic format for gameplay would be an interactive story. The vast majority of games released and played in our generation do not provide much freedom. Instead, many games aim to tell the player their story, and let the player walk through that experience alongside the writers and designers. This provides a satisfying story-telling experience for the player, while reducing the burden on the designer, and being an amateur game designer, making a very linear story that the player could experience was the most feasible game design that we could undertake.
As a result, we had to be pretty creative in finding ways to make the world more fun and interactive. The core story can be beaten in a little less than an hour, but there are currently between three and four hours of interactive objects and NPC conversations. A lot of 5DS's strongest writing exists off of the beaten trail, in chatting with the other inhabitants of the world. Most players of the demo found a lot of enjoyment in the fake pop culture and jokes of the world, that provide a little more flesh to the skin'n'bones structure of the narrative.
The narrative, while being pretty bare and small, is strong. It takes some chances that I haven't seen taken in many other games, and it was a lot of fun to put together.
Anyway, as a result, this RPG plays out more similarly to a point & click adventure game, made within the RMVXA engine, than what you'd expect out of a typical RPG.
Samples:
- Download:
Spoiler
Currently downloads for the game are unavailable as I'm doing a pretty major overhaul.