Buckle up, I'm about to lay it all to bare, it's a long story and I don't know how it's going to end...

Back in March of 2016 I was playing around with Game Maker 8 and thought that I could maybe make an RPG. So I made a mock-up of a dragon quest/earthbound-ish battle screen and a sprite of a zombie I had drawn. Then I posted a vid to my friends about it because I thought the background was cool looking.  I didn't have an internet connection at home at the time so most of my work was done in the evening at my local Starbucks. But to get there, to that night in the star bucks we have to rewind a bit. SlumberNapped really didn't exist back then what I had was a few failed game projects that didn't have a home, one of them was the Woods game and the other was the Whale Kid game.

The Woods Game:

 

The Woods game was meant to be an action game in the vain of the Legend of Zelda 2. This is where I learned how to make 2d Platformers.
I thought my first big game would be the woods game I had already made Professor Neely years earlier and decided that I wanted to try to make a 2d high-resolution game. So I decided to skin the low res game with high-resolution art using Game Maker's rudimentary 3D functions it looked good but I severely misjudged the workload of producing an entire game's worth of artwork at such high fidelity. More so, skinning the low-resolution game with flat 3d made drawing even the simplest of objects a total pain. 

So after some time, I decided to scrap the project and moved on.

The Whale Kid game.

I worked on the whale game off and on not sure what to do with it, which brings us back to 2016.  

I kept playing around with the very simple turn-based battle system. 

It too was recorded in a Starbucks.

I had improved my background, added simple text boxes, and held it together with hope and some chewing gum. You were able to do one on one turn-based fights with a rhythm game-style dodge mechanic and a 3-button attack combo that required the player to memorize different combinations to do different attacks, which made battles long and overly complicated. I also intended it all to be set to music but there was just one problem... I don't know how to make music. 

By this point, I had taken the most fleshed-out platformer ( the whale game ) and added the old tile set of the Woods game to it, and strapped it to the RPG battle system, It was barely playable.  The project would languish for years only getting worked on when I got the urge to do some pixel art or a small bit of coding.

Life has its twists and turns. There would be long stretches where I wouldn't touch the game at all. Then in 2019, I moved and then Covid happened, I decided to try and finish the game but this time I wanted it to be a real game and not just a giant Frankensteined mess of orphaned projects.  A LOT of code got completely rewritten a lot of assets remade and a solid story was outlined.  

I quickly realized my code skills weren't up to snuff so I'd periodically pause development on Slumbernapped and work on one of my old unfinished game projects to improve my skills. If you've played one of my games it's probably one of those projects.

There are other things I could talk about, you don't work on something off and on this long without a lot of stuff changing but I'll leave those for another time.

That basically brings us to today. the Game is being developed in Game Maker Studio 2 and now the Battle screen looks like this.

This Is the biggest game I've ever made and I feel Like I'm making something that somebody will probably enjoy. That being said It's already been a long journey and it feels weird to talk about it in public. This is the first of many Devlogs so I hope you'll give me a follow here on itch.io and follow me on this journey as I continue to make Slumber Naped a reality!