Riya: A Day in the Life

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  Starting screen!

What Inspired Me

I've always been drawn to the light academia aesthetic — the worn books, the cozy cafes, the feeling of being a student with the whole world ahead of you. I wanted to build a game that captured that feeling, so I created Riya, a college student navigating her day-to-day life on campus. Riya is actually modeled after me, which made this project feel really personal and exciting to work on. I wanted to see myself represented in a game I actually made from scratch.

What ILearned

This project was my first real deep dive into GML (GameMaker Language) and I learned so much. I learned how to manage global variables across rooms, how game objects communicate with each other, how sprites and objects work together, how to build a dialogue system from scratch, and how room transitions work. I also learned that game development takes way longer than you expect, and that debugging is basically 80% of the job.

How IBuilt It

I built Riya in GameMaker. I started with the graphics — designing all of Riya's outfits, poses, and room backgrounds myself, modeling the main character after my own appearance. Then I moved into coding, building the systems one by one: first movement and gravity, then the time of day system, then room navigation, then dialogue. The textbox system has a custom light academia aesthetic with a warm parchment background and gold borders to match the overall vibe of the game.

Intended Features

The game was designed to include:

• A full time of day system with Morning, Evening, and Night, each unlocking different locations
• 7 explorable rooms: Dorm Room, Closet, Cafe, Library, Park, University, and Classroom
• A visual map room where players can navigate between locations
• Riya with 5 outfits changeable in the closet, each with sitting, standing, and walking poses
• A classroom system with 4 randomly assigned lectures (Italian Language and Culture, Political Theory, British Literature, and Rhetoric and Debate) with full dialogue and a time-skip to the end of class
• Two NPC friends — Blair, a sassy diva, and Edith, a funny bookworm — with time-of-day specific dialogue
• A barista NPC who gives Riya coffee
• A teacher NPC who delivers lectures and assigns homework
• Room backgrounds that change visually depending on the time of day
• A cozy light academia styled dialogue textbox system

What Works

• Riya moves left and right with gravity and floor collision
• She starts sitting on her bed in her PJs and stands up when the player moves her
• The time of day system works and the advance time button correctly cycles Morning → Evening → Night
• The map room exists and players can navigate to different locations
• The room transition between Dorm and Closet works via walking to the edge
• The dialogue/textbox system works with a beautiful light academia aesthetic
• The classroom lecture system works with random lecture selection and full multi-line dialogue
• Outfit changing in the closet is functional

What Doesn't Work / What I'd Fix With More Time

• The outfit sprites don't always update visually when switching between rooms — the logic is correct but there's a persistent sprite reset bug I ran out of time to fix
• Blair and Edith are coded but not fully placed and triggered in every room
• The barista coffee interaction wasn't fully implemented
• Background visuals don't fully swap per time of day in every room yet
• The University to Classroom transition had a persistent bug that was partially worked around
• With more time I would have added a study progress tracker, more NPC interactions, and a full day cycle with consequences for how Riya spends her time

Challenges

Honestly, almost everything was a challenge. This was my first real coding project and I was learning GML from scratch while building. The hardest parts were getting room transitions to work reliably, managing global variables across rooms, and debugging sprite issues with the character. One room (University) got corrupted and had to be deleted and recreated entirely. I also massively underestimated how long game development takes — what seemed like simple features took hours to implement. Despite that, I'm really proud of what I built and I genuinely fell in love with the process of making a game about a character that looks and feels like me.

Built With

• gamemaker
• gml