Inspiration
The inspiration for this project was a lighthearted yet meaningful story about self acceptance through a creature on another planet who had the ability to create stars. I was also especially inspired by Chloe Burbank by Joji and the artist Qing Han.
What it does
Rainikyo is a shooter-esque visual novel strategy game where you must use the least number of stars to unlock the bigger stars inspired by cartography. In between the levels there are pieces of the story that change depend on your choices during the level.
How I built it
I used Unity's Game Engine and C# to build my project. I used procreate to draw the assets and design the characters. For audio I used audacity and piano.
Challenges I ran into
- One challenge I ran into was producing music. I had never produced music before, so this was a big challenge. I had previous experience in performing piano and violin, but never in composing music. I stuck with a small clip to and edited it to make it sound decent.
- Another challenge I ran into was the shooting and Unity's particle system. I had never used this feature of Unity before because I used to only make visual novels, so this was very challenging especially the code. I was mostly art based until this summer when I decided I wanted to also get into computer science.
- This was my first ever game jam and it was difficult to grasp the concept at first but it was really fun and informing especially the minigams that were hosted on discord!
- The biggest challenge I ran into however was the time restraint. The first time I designed a game it took me two months, and this time I only had two days. I wasn't able to create the complete game I wanted but rather a prototype of it, which is fine because sometimes things just take time.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The accomplishment that I'm most proud of is probably the "shooting" of the stars by the player using the particle system. I'm really proud because I managed to figure that out in a few hours even with minimal coding knowledge. I'm also proud that I managed to participate in this hackathon. This was my first ever hackathon and it was a blast. I will definitely participate in more in the future if time allows it.
What I learned
From some of the zoom meetings/twitch streams I learned a lot about entrepreneurship. It was really interesting especially everyone's specific stories. The biggest takeaway from those videos that I received would probably be to go for it and take the risk. I have been leaning more towards the sciency stuff and less towards the marketing side of product design and game design, but the panels gave an interesting new perspective that I'm excited to explore in the future.
What's next for Rainikyo
Rainkiyo will hopefully be completed within the next few weeks and then released on itch.io or steam. If it does well then I will possibly create a sequel or a website for it.
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