Ali's art blog

As noted above, this is a turn-based RPG, currently being exclusively developed for PC in Gamemaker. I'm a first time indie dev who's been experimenting on and off for several years at this point, I feel like this game has a chance to be something pretty cool so I'm putting my weight fully behind it!!

I'm going for a sort of "saturday morning cartoon for adults" vibe with the game world and writing - trying to strike a balance between lighthearted earnest goofiness and character drama and a dash of genuine creepiness. For reference my inspirations for the game include other RPGs (Trails in the Sky, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, Pokemon,) 80s-90s pop media, the sword and sorcery genre...

But I'll save information about the characters and world for a later post.

To start, here's an abridged version of the development timeline so far (likely to be expanded in a future devlog as I buy myself precious time:)

November-December 2022: initial character and story concepts

2023: prototyping, first attempts at character sprites, wrote a lot of music. Figuring out the tone, aesthetics, and genre of the game. More on that in another post because the journey to get to this point is pretty funny!!

2024: slowly refining things...letting everything sort of gestate...by which i mean I didn't work on this much this year. There's a big gap in my internal devlog entries for this year, I think a lot of progress I made on it was incremental besides the thinking big picture stuff.

2025: did a little bit more experimentation and refining of the concepts, gameplay, a lot more figuring out of the art process, a lot of development with the intention of finishing a demo of the first part of the story, meanwhile the rest of the story, characters, themes, ideas, etc have been more or less solidified by this point.

Because of job and life stuff, the past half year has given me the best conditions to work on this game since 2023. Hopefully things stay more or less stable this year.

My ultimate goal would be to take a few months off work to focus on really pushing progress on this game in the latter half of the year, but we'll see how things go. Whether or not that happens, I'm hoping to have the game finished or like 95% finished by the end of this year.

Which finally brings us to now!!! 2026!

All that said, what does the game actually look like right now...?

Kind of a total mess since my focus has been on testing features and writing before implementing things into the engine! I'm embarrassed to share it, but I think people like seeing messy first drafts and behind-the-scenes of things (I know I do,) so I might as well rip off the bandage and post my wips.

A ton of time has been spent experimenting with finding the "best" way to tackle each part of the process...gamedev is a lot of moving parts. Only very recently do I feel like I've gotten a confident enough grasp on how I should be going about everything. So there's a lot to fix, revise, and finish, but I don't imagine any major roadblocks along the way...just a lot of work, especially artwork and mapmaking.

Here's an overview of some of the gameplay stuff that I've worked out while fiddling with everything else-

Battles- they're tactical, turn-based. Chosen actions are executed one after another based on speed stats (more based on Pokemon-inspired priority moves than a character-based turn order if that makes sense?) Movement is loose rather than grid-based (characters can move anywhere within a set range) so positioning can be kinda cheated to attack opponents in different types of ranges... I like the sort of haphazard chaos a looser battle system affords - ideally this game will strike a decent balance between a linear story and fun somewhat-emergent experiences in both major and minor battle encounters.

Transformation - characters can shapeshift in this game due to weird magical bullshit baked into the world! This takes the place of what would otherwise be a standard equipment system. Raw materials found in the world can be stacked onto a character's "graft slots" to adjust their body composition and thus change their stats, allow them to use new skills, and even change their form. So it's sort of a hybrid between crafting and something like FF7's materia slots? But also extremely weird and silly.

(Voila! You are now a slime guy!! I hope you wanted this!)

Traps and overworld effects - skills can be used in the overworld to interact with enemies before combat starts; traps and other effect tiles can be placed to be triggered by monsters and change the nature of encounters (or vice versa, you can wander into traps in the world.)

You can even summon friend(ly meat shield)s.

So that's about it for the overview of the game. I hope it piques and satisfies the interests of people hungry for more character-driven RPGs like me!

Some of my goals for January are-

Mapmaking for "chapter 2"

More base animations for more of the characters/monsters

Squashing a lot of little bugs

Get screenshots for steam page that don't look like absolute toilet water so I can make a pretty steam page

If you stuck around this far, thanks for reading, and I hope I'm able to share more very soon!!!