So! Mini Jam 105: Dreamy is finally over. This was my first time participating on a Game Jam and my first time working on making a game as fast as possible. 

So a little of the background for KOTOMASHO...

Kotomasho is an Adventure game with RPG elements. The story follows Genji, a 21 year old NEET (acronym for Not in Education, Employment, or Training) Japanese guy who was to scared of finding a job after graduating so he had to spend the whole day playing in virtual reality, specifically a VR game where you can meet up with people from all over the world to hang out and explore thousands of different user submitted worlds while wearing user submitted 3D avatars. One day Genji receives a crystal medal-looking good luck charm from his sister and while logging into the VR world is transported into the realm of Dreams transformed into a magical girl!

The gameplay was mainly inspired by the Gameboy Color Zelda games Link's Awakening and Oracle of Ages/Seasons but I wanted to add a leveling system to make it a little more RPG like Zelda II and instead of just using one main weapon I wanted to make it a weapon that changes all the time like in the Metal Slug series or Blaster Master. At first the plan was to make the gameplay happen only on an overworld map kinda like a metroidvania without the dungeons but then I had to add the dungeons as well because of the Game Jam limitation and make them procedurally generated.

The concept of the game was born from several different things, 1) I've been itching to make a game with top down view for months 2) There's a whole universe in my head about people acquiring magical powers and transforming into superheroes power rangers/magical girl style (WIZ Yesteryears, the other game that I'm working on right now is the main reason for this and I'm planning on expanding it into a whole universe) 3) I love Mahou Shoujo and slice of life anime (Card Captor Sakura is one of my favorite anime of all time) 4) I love anime with ridiculously long and funny titles and how they reduce it to just a simple short word (for example, Konosuba,  Oreimo, etc) 5) I've been watching a lot of VR Chat streams on Twitch (Shoutouts to Tectone and the whole Roflgator lobby for keeping me entretained this past week, specially during this whole Game Jam). VR Chat was a big inspiration for the main character.

Now, about my whole First Game Jam Experience

My thoughts of this experience overall are very positive, I had a lot of fun and it felt really good to set my creativity free, it's been a while after all. That being said, I will probably not participate on another short Jam anytime soon. Even though the experience was good overall, it was very stressful and extremely tiring at times, specially on the day before the deadline. Also, participating  solo on a short Jam like this might be the reason why it felt like I was participating on "Dante Must Die" Difficulty, specially since it was my first time and the type of games that I usually make are story driven.

Anyways...

The plan from now on is adding everything that I had planned but didn't have the time to make and improving the stuff that was rushed and is barely functioning correctly:

• Polishing and improving a lot of the mechanics. Specially the SUPER scuffed procedural generation.
• Puzzle rooms for the dungeon
• More mechanics like buttons, switches, etc for the dungeon
• Adding a block/evade move
• Adding more powers
• Adding eye candy (more objects in the enviorment, animations to attacks, objects, etc)
• Adding a proper main menu
• Adding a proper pause menu
• Making a theme song
• Adding Save Slots
• Adding options/settings
• Adding Controller Support
• Adding Secondary Powers
• Adding a Shop System
• Making a game a little more bullet hell-like
• Adding Character Portraits/Mugshots
• Adding More Characters
• Adding a Palette Swap System
• Adding an Inventory
• Improving the boss fight to make it feel like a proper boss
• Expanding on the story/tutorial/first chapter of the game to release a proper demo
• Everything else that I'm forgetting right now

That's it. When I finish adding everything on that list to the game I will release it as a proper Demo. It might seem like a lot but I'm pretty sure it can be done in like 2 months (maybe), so if you enjoyed the prototype of KOTOMASHO you can expect even more and even better!

Please follow me on Twitter or join my Discord for more updates, you can find me as @WalGallen pretty much anywhere but Twitter is my main social media.

That's all for now. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I'll see you on the next one.

- W