The Sickness Details
For The Sickness, I set out to create an adventure RPG with a morality system. The first thing I did with these constraints was to look at what makes the adventure and RPG genres. I created a list for both genres and started ideas on how to work with the morality system. Combining these lists helped me to decide what the most important aspects of my game would be.
After I had the idea that this game would take place on Mars with a mysterious illness, I set out to make a paper prototype. This was my first narrative-focused game so I tried to figure out how the dialogue should read and what would be most appealing to players. The original concept for The Sickness including a branching narrative for the player to make decisions, but I ran into programming roadblocks that prevented this to be done within the five-week time frame.
The next step was writing the story. I followed a simple three-act story structure in an attempt to keep the story from growing too long. I planned out the major beats that the player would need to follow in order to get to the end. I also planned out a mind map to get a feel for the decisions the player would be able to make during the game.
Finally, I was able to go into Game Maker and start digitally prototyping The Sickness. I started with the layout of all the different rooms then moved to putting in all of the NPCs and getting the textboxes working. The step took the longest as I wanted all the mechanics to work right before putting in any art. The character selection screen was the biggest difficulty, but ultimately it had a simple solution that required me to change my thinking to find.
I am very happy with how the final game turned out. The art I used was from a pokemon tileset found online, there are multiple sidequests for the player to gain or lose friendship with the colonists, and the player can interact with the maps found around the game. Players during the final playtest really enjoyed all aspects of the game. They found it aesthetically pleasing and enjoyed trying to get each of the multiple endings.