Oh, first blog post! This is about my dev work on JARPUG. JARPUG is a JRPG starring a pug with a jar on its head, made for VR. Here’s some old footage from LVLUP Expo in early May:
That expo served as an excellent deadline for focusing on controls and gameplay after piddling around with various back-end systems for months before. My friends drove over from Phoenix to help, and people liked the game! I was able to make big tweaks to gameplay and get fairly immediate feedback. It was good.
Also, Japanese Curry Zen’s in Vegas. Jeez. Any excuse for that. A Japanese curry house is a wonderful thing and they’re the best I’ve been to.
About that game though
JARPUG’s gameplay style paddles in the same pool as many Japanese role-playing games. The player explores the world to find things and progress the story. They’ll run into occasional turn-based battles. JARPUG applies a bit of an actiony tilt to these ideas.
In JARPUG’s exploration sections, you’ll be able to jump around to explore the world and solve puzzles.
You can swap your brave pug from JARPUG to PUGJAR mode. At LVL UP Expo it was mostly useless while exploring, but now you can use it for various jar-based challenges!
Things like rolling down ramps to launch over gaps, floating through water, or just rolling over spikes. Standard jar stuff.
In JARPUG’s battles you can run your characters around to position them and avoid attacks.
A battle menu pops open when it’s time to do some moves. You can quickly tap your controller to use them or poke things with your VR fingers if you’re feelin’ wild. You can also swap to PUGJAR mode for a more defensive move selection.
It’s been like two months so
In the last month or so I’ve been working on things to improve puzzles in the world. Things like spikes, ramps, switches, and water are all new since May and should be a big help when trying to design interesting challenges for the player.
But the most important thing I made lately is a bunch of tools that make it easier to generate INFINITE DOGS.
Myriad puppers is certainly an appealing thing on its own, but it’ll also make level creation quicker. I’ve made things like dog size and dimensions editable, so I can generate those long dogs you crave.
I’ll try to make devlogs a monthly thing, but feel free to check my JARPUG tweets for more frequent, tiny updates.
Obviously things are very early, but I’m several months into this project. I’ve spent a lot of time working on back-end stuff like level editing tools and character creation. I plan to spend much of the next month working on improving battle mode. The current prototype is encouraging, but I want to be sure I can expand on those ideas and keep things fun with multiple player characters.
Bye!