During Summer 2025, I participated in the Toasty Jam, a game jam hosted over a 1-week period to make an RPG with themes of horror or discomfort. Submitting with a 2-man team, I worked as an artist and designer on the project, creating an hour-long experience over the short period.
Working off a concept by my teammate, we wrote all dialogue, mapped out all areas, and designed all of the enemies within this week, and built off the initial idea with new mechanics, including an intricate crafting system and a diverging storyline.
After the initial work of outlining all the needed graphics and layouts, I began on the actual graphics. The Jam rules stated that this game needed to be made in RPG maker MV, an engine with a very limiting graphics system- sprites needed to be a certain size, animations couldn’t be too long, and any intricate or more stylish graphical effects would need to be done in very round-about ways. The process of the visual work also required me to establish a coherent visual style for the games’ two perspectives- the top-down overworld, and the more detailed battle screen. The limited palette and resolution for each was a challenge, but a challenge I have faced before.
The design work going into the game took up a large bulk of the game’s development time- the engine handled a lot of the more mechanical aspects, but in return we had to manage with a severely limited system- some of the games more unorthodox planned features needed to be scrapped, like a more detailed attack targeting system or the full crafting system. A large challenge was designing an RPG that got incrementally more difficult with three characters- each bringing completely new skills to handle battles.
The deadline for the project cut off a few features that we had planned- the ending area and boss fight was especially ambitious for the allotted time, and its lengthier portions had to be cut. ( good to show off more of how we handled these constraints )
