Hey, first time player. Long time watcher.

Small Mart is a game inspired by the awkward encounters we all have when seeing an old friend we may not want to see. The game is made to simulate the dextrous challenge of shopping while trying to ignore people you know. Our game is a comedic stealth 2D RPG which tried to embody the phrase “It’s a small world.”

Our initial goals were to develop basic movement and detection mechanics. We also aimed to create a dialog system and to procedurally generate levels and implement a 2-player mode. Of these initial goals, we were able to create a dialog system by modifying an existing dialogue system we created for a previous game. By the end of the first day, we had the detection, movement, and dialogue systems all working, we then moved on to assets and left the goals of multiplayer and procedurally generated maps as stretch goals. We all spent the following day creating assets and story. We found many of the assets from a studio called Kenney (kenney.nl) as well as opengameart.org. We used Tiled to create the maps and import them to Unity. We used autotracker (http://ludumdare.com/compo/tag/autotracker-py/) to generate the music for our game and we used aseprite to create player animations. The asset creation took much longer than anticipated as we learned how to use Tiled while we were creating the maps. Our game actually didn’t break at the last minute (take that murphy’s law!).

As for future work, over the next two weeks for our Interactive Game Development Class we plan to fix some small bugs that we noticed during our play testing. The first thing we want to fix is some missing colliders and correct some sprites. We had messed up some visuals in the game, such as an old man in the gas station being the sprite of an old lady. The second thing we want to fix is adding a sound when you’re detected along with reordering the instructions. We found that people couldn’t tell what was going on most of the time and it was because we misplaced the instructions and didn’t give the player enough feedback while playing the game. We hope the sound and reordering the instructions will fix that. A third revision would be a sprint mechanic which allows the player to have a faster-pace experience. The last thing we want to fix is that we want to add a proper ending to our game. We were missing an epilogue because we didn’t have enough time to write and code one up before the deadline came. Overall, we had a fun experience and are proud of the game we produced. We hope you enjoy it too!