Hey everyone!

I’ve been developing a game called “Pirates of the Memory Crystal” since January 7th 2022 (on and off since then, not like non-stop since then^^;). I’ve written about it on Twitter, DeviantArt and Gamejolt, but I’ve been missing a way to centralize everything and as I consider itch to be my main way of getting my games out there, I should as well put my devlog here! I started the devlog on Gamejolt, so I’ll first upload all of those here, and next ones will be published at the same time to both places. This entry, “Devlog 0” serves as an introduction as I didn’t do any there.

My goal with this devlog is to document the production of the game. It’ll be more of a journaling kind of thing, and not necessarily very technical (though feel free to ask me more details if need be^^).

So here’s the first things I posted on social media about the game :

January 7th 2022

(no comment or like^^;)

I like doing those moodboards / inspiration boards. This tells you everything about the game.

• Simon : the game’s basically that, a memory game
• FF7 : big aesthetic inspiration.
• One Piece : it’s about a team of pirate friends
• Rock paper scissors : combat is just rock paper scissors!

My idea is to make an RPG-like. As -I think- it’s not possible to do it alone, it will be more like a single chapter of an RPG, a self-contained story part of a much bigger one, and not that long to complete (maybe 1-2 hours of gameplay?).

The rock-paper-scissors combat-based comes from a reflection I had about combat in RPGs and how it’s just doing “attack”, “attack”, “attack” without really thinking about what the opponent is doing. However, rock-paper-scissors is just random - so that’s why I threw in the memory idea. That way, it’s reactive and less about just attacking without thinking. However, a memory game is not that deeper than a random one, so there’ll be some variations to keep it interesting, but don’t expect a deep strategic game (maybe next time!). As long as it’s fun and fresh, that’s what I want.

So what is PMC?

Here’s the pitch :

"Pirates of the Memory Crystal" is an upcoming adventure game, featuring quirky jankenpon & memory battles. Play as the sky pirates Teph and Kom to save their ship from mutiny and take back the fabled Memory Crystal.

January 7th 2022

Working on my jrpg-ish prototype! #screenshotsaturday #swissgames

This is my very first game made in 3d. So I wanted to start very quickly with a prototype to understand how everything works and what I should be thinking about. Thankfully Unity is not hard to use and my experience with it previously helped me get up to speed quickly. However, as I am learning along, a lot of trial and error has been involved… Part of the fun I guess^^

So here I had a prototype character moving and talking. All good to make an adventure game! Yay!

January 15th 2022

Continuing work on the jrpg prototype #screenshotsaturday #madeinunity #gamedev #swissgames

Combat! Doors! I was so happy when I made that door mechanism. It worked with triggers and gameobjects activating/deactivating. And then some months later I scrapped it and found a more efficient way to do it with culling masks and layers^^

The game takes some inspiration from Final Fantasy 7, so I wanted to have a separate looking overworld and combat aesthetic.

mid-January to mid-July

From January to mid-July I was pretty busy with work, my wedding and the together jam on gamejolt, so I didn’t work on it a lot. The next post I made about the game was :

July 30th 2022

(yay, 2 likes!)

This was a video, but I can’t figure out the best way to embed it here (don’t want to put it on youtube either, as it’s really short).

This was the BIG part of developing. The meat of the game, the “combat” system. It took something like 30 hours to make it all work as I wanted. And then I made a secret minigame that is a variation from this and it took me another 30 hours to make XP

And that’s it for the first posts about the game! After this, I decided to write a devlog. I’ll let you catch up on those to see how it progressed from there^^

Feel free to share and leave a comment if you want to see something in particular, and until then, thanks for reading!