Malled To Death DRPG for Dungeon Crawler Game Jam 2024!

Trotim & I joined the Dungeon Crawler Game Jam 2024 for our first project together, and only my second ever game jam. It was a genre I was only vaguely familiar with, and we decided to use RPGMaker MV + MV3D, an engine I was entirely unfamiliar with! Worried I wouldn't be able to pull my weight, but fortunately that's not how it went!

Programming: Trotim handled a lot of the more comlpex plugin setup and event scripting, but I managed not to slouch too hard with event scripting either. By the end of it I had a handle on it, enough to either make some of the simple pieces I needed from scratch, or to take parts of his events and assemble something I needed. Between the two of us we didn't really stumble too hard on any obstacle, which was great.

Design: From beginning to end I think we had some really damn solid designs. The concept of the mall, the concept of the shopping carts (getting to ram enemies with them, returning them to kiosks, etc), etc. We didn't really end up doing ANY procedural generation, I designed almost all the levels by hand, but RPGMaker was really good at making that a super fast and pretty process. We did get some randomization elements in too, mostly on item spawns and where the modules took you to once you exited one. Since the jam was only a week long, we kept our scope realistically simple, and we executed virtually all of it!

Art: I hand drew a large portion of the game's art, did pixel art traceovers of most of the other art, and used like maybe a small handful of art commissioned / drawn by friends. In the end the result was a pretty big clash between the hand drawn pixel art, the commissioned art, and the default RPGM MV assets. If there was a weakest aspect of our game, it's the art for sure. But it was still a lot of fun getting to muck about on my tablet again. The solid black design of the enemies gave me a lot of leeway! Oh yeah I even imported a shopping cart into blender to 90o turn around renders of it, that was cool.

Closing: I'm a little astounded at what kind of game we were able to make with RPGMaker of all engines! I really want to return to this format for a longer term project. I think with more time and more focused art production, you could really make something unique out of it. And, well, I think we DID make something unique out of it. Hope it performs well in the judging.

What a jam!