I recently took part in the GMTKjam. It's a gamejam hosted by the GameMakers Toolkit guy on youtube.

The theme was revealed to be "Roles Reversed" And we had 48 hours to then develop a game around that.

I'll preface by saying i didn't finish all i wanted in time, but if you wanna cut to the game you can see it here

https://stannco.itch.io/quest-giver-07

Here i'll post my thoughts and development progress as it happened while i was working and brainstorming

The brainstorming started

Decided to go with quest writer idea. And base the gameplay off of papers please.

Idea being you write quests to gather certain items and pin them on the towns board for random adventurers to take on.

After a while i had the base of a paper's please style setup down. Being able to drag an object from one scene to another.

What's happening here, is there is 3 scenes, actually really far about in the game world. Each then has a camera attached, and the camera's contents are drawn to the window right next to eachother.

When the cursor drags some object to a scene, the object is actually teleported all the way to the other scene, and it's state is changed to be either big or small to fit the scene.

I imagined you would have a maximum of 3 papers at a time you could manage, and write on. If you did something wrong you can then trash it and get a new fresh piece of paper. Having new papers spawned in worked pretty well. Though making sure the object you drag pops to the top of all the other objects turned out to be pretty difficult. And my perfectionism for neat animations started early here

I wondered how you would actually write on the pages. So i thought you would have an enclopedia filled with both game instructions and specific words you could then paste onto pages.

Some extra hours later, way more tired i managed to get a start on the enclyclopedia and added little pages you can sift through. I realized my artstyle might have become a draw-back because i had to draw all the text manually in aseprite, with not much to use. And i wasn't completely sure on what to write either. so it was very messy. I'm happy i included some funny doodles in there though.

nap time

After a long ass rest, i continued with my idea on having text samples you could click on to paste them. For that to work, i made every sample be an object that spawns in at the right location, when you turn the page. Though that alone doesn't mean the text actually sticks to the book haha.

Some extra hours on that, and now the words stick, i also decided i wanted to add funny images. The text here would be purely for flair and not actually do anything on the quest. But it would be fun to spam different phrases and images regardless i thought

I also pondered for long how i would actually tie meaning to whatever quests you write. Even though you typed words and phrases on a paper, i would need to code it in a way so a simple game npc's can actually understand it, this would continue to stump me till the end.

Finally came the crux of the game, being able to paste from your book onto quest papers. I spent extra time making it look fancy with the quill and ink-bottle. Which may not have been neccesary, but it also just felt better so...

Despite it being a game about putting quests on a board, i only made the board really late. And here spent a super long time making the transition back and forth look good. Behind the scenes it's a codey mess, so if i started over i would try to come up with more modular approaches. But under the tight deadline, i just forced my way through it

Continued in part2