I'm Making a (tiny) Game!

Welcome to my very first dev log! It’s not my first game (I’ve made a few small things before, you can see most of them on this page, even if the old 2014-2016 Unity web player… doesn’t work anymore), but I’m making a tiny puzzle game based on true events called My Hot Girlfriend. I’ve been concepting a bit since the summer, since the initial spark of inspiration (the true events!), but since there were mass layoffs at my primary job, I’ve had more time to play with this prototype and build it out a bit. 

At its heart, this is a cute, goofy little narrative puzzle game where players, taking on the role of one girlfriend, need to drag and drop “cooling items” into slots next to their girlfriend character in order to drop the ambient temperature down. Finding the items in busy levels, matching them to the correct “cooling slot” next to the girlfriend, and lowering the room temp quickly will improve your score! There will be brief interactive cutscenes (a sort of light visual novel layer) in between stages.

I’m scoping small! Very small, as I’m hoping for about a 5-minute overall experience. It’ll depend on how many levels I decide to build, how long the visual novel/dialogue layer will run, and whether I do decide to build another interactive layer or two, but most levels will be lightning quick, maybe 30-second affairs. 

And that’s about it! It’s a very, very simple game that I hope will be charming. I’m making it to teach myself a number of skills in unity/C# — primarily simple UI integration, music and sound effect integration, and I’m looking to sharpen my Yarn Spinner skills on the visual novel layer. I’m also hoping to make something cute that my real-life girlfriend will appreciate!

One thing I want to be clear in the writing and design is a playful tone. I’m not looking to make fun of the temperature-sensitive! Or make something where the thesis is “women are fussy” — it’s much more about the struggle to make someone you care about comfortable. If I’m making fun of anything, it’s Brooklyn in the summer. And maybe my apartment.

Here are a few of the tools and assets I’m using to work on the project!

Unity and Yarn Spinner! (Yarn Spinner is a very cool system for writing dialogue and stories in Unity! There’s an amazing tutorial here if you’ve never heard of it!).

Edermunizz’ Pixel Art City Backgrounds tileset.

LimeZu’s Modern Interiors tileset (as well as their Modern Exteriors and Modern Office sets!).

I’ve also been learning a great deal from Tarodev’s YouTube Tutorials and based much of the early puzzle prototype functionality from that!