New Seeds: An RPG Platformer

Inspiration

Team Tree-O is made out of video game enthusiasts. We love the peace of mind video games can bring and also how they can make us think about both imagined problems and real world problems alike. We wanted to make New Seeds to create a fun, intriguing game like Stardew Valley that also connects to real world problems.

What it does

We also wanted to make a game with an overarching theme - taking care of your world - that would stay with the player and hopefully inspire them to also make a difference in their own world, our world. The problem we chose to focus on, climate change, is a real problem and reversing the effects of the past aren’t as easy in real life as in games like these. With New Seeds we leave the message to take responsibility for our actions and start the initiative to take action as well. In this case, the character goes about restoring and helping nurture plants back to health, but in the real world this can translate to many other types of environmentally minded action.

How we built it

We used GameMaker Studio 2 to put together code and sprites to compile our game. It was all our first time using GameMaker, so tutorials from the community and YouTube was a big help for building the foundation of our game. We used Piskel to create our sprite sheets, as well as using some from the range of free community assets on itch.io.

Challenges we ran into:

We had some technical issues with many aspects of the game, from controlling the scene changes to character movement to getting the actual studio to work. We also had problems sharing our various parts of the project and compiling them all together, which made it hard for our code to be consistent, organized, and functional. Throughout the process we kept getting stuck on various errors and bugs, but through teamwork we were able to resolve them and learn even more new things.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have never made a game like this ever before, but this turned out way better than we could have imagined. Maybe a week before, we started brainstorming a simple idea. During the hackathon, we were able to do so many more things with the game design than we thought, and were able to add even more aspects to our game than we had originally planned. We had planned on making just a simple platformer with no items, just simple movement, but here we are with a fully functioning game demo!

What we learned

We learned a lot about making games in GameMaker, including aspects such as creating projectiles, items, text, and a moving player. For most of us this was our first hackathon, and we learned a lot about how to conduct a project, plan it, and actually execute it to produce a finished product, or one at one stage of completion anyways. From the workshops on AI and Blockchain to our actual project, we learned a lot more than we thought and we are excited to extend our learning on our own.

What's next for New Seeds

Since this is merely a demo, there are so many more stages and features that we could possibly create. For example, our story was shortly summarized since we only had enough time to create a few levels. The full completion of New Seed would take a lot longer than 24 hours to completely build, with hopefully the development of collectibles, a menu, more role-playing aspects of the game, NPCs, and more variation in character actions and movement.

Built With

• gamemakerstudio2
• piskel