Week 1 Recap

Introducing Yashin Janaru! My entry into Dream Diary Jam 6.

A lot of updates and sneak peeks have been posted over on my Discord for this dream. I didn’t want to leave my audience here behind, but itch.io isn’t particularly well suited to short-form updates. So instead, each week for the next month I will be posting weekly dev logs (every Saturday from now on). A recap of the progress that has been made.

Now, onto the recap…

Yashin Janaru will be a game about exploring dreams, just like Yume Nikki which the game is based on. It will have worlds that you can travel through, items you can collect, scenery to interact with. With so much to work on, my primary goal is to reduce the amount of repetition. Starting with worlds.

The game is being built using Love2D, a minimal game engine with no built-in editor. One advantage is that everything can be made very exact. A disadvantage is that there are no editors. So I design maps entirely in Affinity Photo. Affinity Photo has 3 key features for this game.

1. Swatches of fun yet consistent colors to choose from!
2. The Pixel Tool, for pixel art.
3. And most important, support for vector shapes and an export view! The first thing implemented into the game was the ability for worlds to be defined using a png and svg file. A png is just an image, but svg is a text file containing shapes. This makes it incredibly easy to define what is a wall, where will items be placed and much more! While working on the visuals, all in the same program.

Next was the main character, very simple, 8 possible directions, but no walking by default, this ain’t the same main character, they run!

Thank you for sticking with me this far. I hope to have something more exciting to look at next week.