Manifold Love

The Idea

Our team Märkä Peruna (Wet Potato) attended the #1 Fux Game Jam, a game jam intended for the first-year students of game programming and game technologies. The intention for this game jam was to learn new skills since most of the first-year students have little to no experience of making games. The game jam was held at XAMK Game Lab from Friday 21st of October at 6 pm to Sunday the 23rd at 6pm, so we were given 48 hours of time to make a game.

Theme for this game jam was “Déjà vu”. We started brainstorming and made a mind map to put everything that the word brought to our minds. We had an idea of experiencing the same stuff again, but with different results, but we deemed that it was too hard to execute with our current game programming knowledge. Other thing that came to our minds was the song “Déjà vu” by Dave Rodgers, a popular Eurobeat song and being synonymous with drifting and the manga and anime series “Initial D”. So, we started to work on the idea of a game featuring cars.

I’ve discussed with a friend before, that we should make a visual novel or a dating simulator at some point. We discussed about somehow making a dating sim, but our game needed something else to it than just a visual novel element. We thought about making a puzzle game or a match-3-game, but we settled on a rhythm game since it was interesting and fairly easy to implement. Plus, using Eurobeat for the rhythm game was a match made in heaven. Inspired by other unconventional dating sims like Hatoful Boyfriend and rhythm game Audio Surf, our game idea was a car dating sim with a rhythm game element. Some inspiration came from Outrun 2’s Heart Attack Mode, having car driving as a dating element. The name of the game came from the Eurobeat song "Manilofd Love" by Hotblade, since it fit the theme we were going with.

The Game Design

Aleksi would handle the game programming and building the game in Unity, Tuulia started on writing a script and working on coding the visual novel, I started on 3D-modeling with Blender, and Peppi was working remotely on the game art.

We needed some 3D models for the rhythm game portion and first we needed a car. Sticking to the theme of “Déjà vu” and inspired by the hero car of Initial D, I decided to model the 1983 Toyota Corolla Sprinter Trueno, a.k.a. the AE86. I’ve made a low-poly DeLorean before, so modelling a car was familiar stuff. I got a blueprint of the car as a reference image and the dimensions to make it to the scale. I made the mesh as low-poly as possible while retaining detail. Then I marked the seams and UV unwrapped the mesh for texturing.

On Saturday, I continued to texture the car. For the design, I wanted to retain the iconic black and white panda look of the AE86. I edited some parts of the texture in Blender’s own texture editor and more details in GIMP. The text on the side of the Initial D AE86 “藤原とうふ店 (自家用)” reads as “Fujiwara Tofu Shop (private use)”, so we changed that to “クサムクゲームラブ” which can be read as “Xamk Game Lab” or “Xamk Game Love”, a fitting pun for our game.

The car was done, so I made some more game assets. I made a heart that players can collect and gain points and a cone for losing points if you hit them. Amidst working on those assets, I had to modify the car to better suit it for the game: I had to make the wheels as four separate objects and move the origin point so the car can rotate properly in the game engine.

We had some trouble with the script, and I was asked to give ideas to start of the game. I’m familiar with car jargon, so I made the character’s dialogue more of what a petrolhead would say. I also helped on making the game design more coherent and solid by suggesting chances. For example, we made the items appear synchronized with the BPM (beats per minute) of the music, so it visually represented more of a rhythm game.

After helping with the script, I started to build a map for the rhythm game. We wanted to have four lanes in our game, so I made sure the road was wide enough for four car widths. I made the road longer with the array modifier, made a few different buildings and used the particle system to populate the plane with them. The buildings were inspired by the Japanese “Danchi” styled apartments. Then I helped with overall things in the project

On the final day of the game jam, we started on working with the visual novel portion/dating of the game. I was finished with the map and fixed a few errors with it. Done with 3D modelling, I did some renders with the car and made some game sprites out of them.

Game art was finished as well and backgrounds, sprites, and UI elements for the visual novel were done. Pleased with the results, we put the art assets, the sprites, and the dialogue together, and it worked well. We implemented a meter to the rhythm game, which told you how well the player is doing on the date. For example, if over 86% of hearts were collected, the player would get the best ending. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to make different endings. Meanwhile with my limited knowledge of Unity at the time I made a working start screen with buttons for the game and a splash screen, where our team logo was shown.

The last hour was the most stressful time in our project. We merged the visual novel and the rhythm game, but not without hitches. A lot of problem solving and reapplying textures took a ton of precious time. Thankfully, we barely managed to submit the game to itch.io, with 2 minutes to spare. The game was at quite an unfinished state, and we barely playtested it, but at least it was in playable condition. Unfortunately, as we tested the final build, the visual novel scenes were repeated, so after the rhythm game part the game goes back to the first visual novel scene instead of the second one. We joked about that being the “Déjà vu” element of the game.

We were pretty satisfied with the result, and the other game jammers like the game and the idea. Personally, it felt great to make an actual working game together, compared to the last game jam’s disappointing ending.

The Gameplay

The game is a mix of 2D and 3D elements. The 2D portion is a visual novel focused on dialogue and options for dating. The only environment for the dialogue is in a car dealership. The main character Jesse talks with the car salesman. The salesman tells the story of an abandoned car he can’t get rid of, since it’s rumoured to be cursed. The main character takes his chances with the car and wants to test drive the car in question. Suddenly, the car starts to talk and the character questions his sanity. The car introduces herself as Rokukuyy and challenges the player to a driving date.

Then the 3D portion of the game starts, which is a rhythm game. In the rhythm game, player needs to collect hearts and avoid cones to fill up their heart meter. The heart meter tells how well the date is going, and better scoring gives better endings. Hitting cones will redact points from the heart meter. The hearts and the cones are spawned with the BPM of the song. There is only one map, which is placed in a city and is a straight line. There are four lanes, and the player is able to change which lane the car goes on to collect or avoid objects. The player plays for the duration of the song and depending on their score they’ll the corresponding ending.

As previously stated, due to an oversight during the last minute of putting the game together, the game loads the first visual novel portion again instead of the next one. However, going through the dialogue, the player will get a “thank you” message and the game closes.

The Learning Experience

I learned some basic game design and how to translate it into a game. Team communication, sketches and prototyping was the key elements during this jam. Especially communicating with our programmer was essential, so our vision of the game was unified and coherent. I think we need to learn more of managing the time and the size of our game jam projects. We had to downsize the game to make just a tutorial level. We were planning on having more dialogue, more options, and more dates, and implementing a player name input.

It was interesting to work with different team members this game jam, and I want to thank all of the participants for their hard work and fun time we had! Well, more or less fun.

Project Manifold Love, January 2023-

The Continuation of the Project

We started a project in January 2023 to continue the development of the game.

Since the concept of the game was really fun, we decided on continuing to develop the game further. Our aim was to make a playable demo of the game by the end of the school year. The game needed to be reworked, making a concrete script for the story, creating a better map for the 3D rhythm game, adding animations, visual effects and shaders, sound effects, UI elements, new art and so on.

We had a slightly different team, some left from the project, and some joined. We had a new script writer to create scenarios and dialogue for the game, and our programmer changed. I was the lead of the project. We had meetings every other week, going through what we’ve been developing and what we needed to develop next. We started on creating the game design document, going through the current state of the game, what needed to be changed, and what new elements we wanted to introduce. I helped on improving the game design, gave ideas for the script, planned on our schedule, and ideated on the map design.

I did some research on the genre and focused on developing the character designs in the game. I dove into characteristics and tropes in character design, mainly taken from similar dating games and Japanese animation. Then, I documented my findings in a handy PowerPoint. I made some concept art for the character based on the knowledge I gained from the research. I wanted to make a humanoid character for Rokukyuu that mirrored the car’s elements and give a reserved personality to her. Originally, we thought about having three different characters with different traits and the player could choose one of the as their partner as the story goes on. We realized that it was a big task to do different dialogue trees and choices, so we decided one character for the demo was sufficient.

Currently the development of the game is on hold. The game development stagnated, since we had difficulties with our ongoing studies, scheduling and motivation. We decided to pause the project for now, but I’d like to return to this game idea with a better drive to create or fuse the elements from this idea to another project. But it was a good learning experience, dipping my toes into leading and managing a project and trying to make a game as a team without the panic of finishing it like in a Game Jam. Character design was really interesting to learn and I’d be interested to learn more about it.