A former UCA gradaute following his creative passions in game jams, artwork and mods.
About
In January 2023, me (Designer, artist and programmer) and my friend Frank (Composer and SFX artist) decided to participate in 'Touhou Fan Game Jam 10', which featured the theme of "Winter Games". Inspired by the video game series "WarioWare", we produced a microgame collection of winter activities featuring characters from the Touhou series.
The game was very well received by participants of the jam, and won 1st place overall, also placing highly in other criteria: Challenge (2nd), Concept (2nd), Gameplay (2nd), Audio/Music (2nd), Use of Theme (3rd), and Visuals (6th). For the last criteria, Story/Writing, we placed 29th, however the project was never intended to have a story beyond the loose premise on which the game is set.
The goal of the game is to complete as many microgames as you can before you lose 3 lives and game over. Throughout the course of a playthrough, the speed of the game will increase, and become more difficult over time (The speed does cap after a while, however). The microgames are contextualized via the character Suika having a series of dreams, and reacts to your performance until you game over and she wakes up. There are 9 microgames total and all have a time limit.
Snowball Fight
Using the reticule, the player must hit the flying doll with a snowball. Missing or timing out will fail the microgame.
Snow Angel
Move the mouse up and down to mark out a snow angel.
Skiing
Dodge the incoming rocks and survive.
Figure Skating
Starting from marker 1, click and drag to the next sequential marker without releasing the mouse or moving to the incorrect marker.
Click on the ice block until it breaks and reveals a statue.
Click the ice block until it breaks into a sculpture.
Sweeping
Use the mouse to sweep away the snow on the path.
Sledding
Left-click to jump over the oncoming sled. A warning indicator will blink before the sled appears on screen.
Snowman Building
1 of 3 faces will appear on a scroll, and the player must select the right one.
Snow Boulder
Rapidly press left-click to run away from the boulder.
Originally, the target engine we were planning to use was Unreal, however my team felt this did not fit the scale of the project. Instead we used GameMaker Studio, as it was a lot quicker to throw together, test and iterate for the short time window.
For the concept of the game, we found it difficult to settle on an interesting singular idea to fit the theme, so instead I suggested combining them in some sort of compilation. Our team also were trying to find a game format that hasn't been attempted with the Touhou series, and because of this it lead us to conceptualizing a project based on the WarioWare series.
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In the WarioWare series, the microgames fit to a theme, story or character that is used to string the games together. However, this is usually through some kind of device, and in Touhou there is not a lot of technology present in its setting. As such, I decided to make the transition be via a drunken dream as this feels in-line with Touhou, and would be a funny way of presenting the microgames.
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From that starting point, I listed 10 ideas for microgames, and dropped one (snowboarding) when we struggled to think of how it would play in the style we were aiming for, and how it would differentiate from the other ideas. This ended up being beneficial as it allowed time for bug fixing, testing and balancing to create a polished experience.
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Some proved harder than others to program (Sweeping and the Boulder), and the art ended up being more and more rushed throughout the development time. It didn't help that my art program couldn't directly paste into GMS's sprite editor. On the other hand, syncing up the minigames to a timer and having that timer speed up ended up being far easier than I thought.
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When it came to submit our work, we found out that the deadline was extended by 24 hours, which gave us extra time to polish what we had made. With this time I refined a few minigames such as tweaking the UI, sound effects and rebalancing some minigames. As for the latter, it was rather difficult to iron out some balance issues within a day and as such there did end up being a microgame that scaled rapidly in difficulty as the game progressed.
Design
In the end, I am proud of how many microgames I was able to string together in such a short amount of time, and how efficiently me and my teammate cooperated when developing this project. If I were to change anything about this game, it would probably be the visuals and balance as some assets came out unpolished, and the difficulty of the microgames were a little all over the place.
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While some of this could have been achieved by making fewer microgames, I felt it was necessary for there to be a satisfying variety of challenges to prevent an "endless" style game from getting too stale before the player gets a game over. Needless to say, the positive feedback and constructive criticisms I've seen affirm that I have achieved the goals I set out at the start of the project.