Holy Crap, I Made a Game in Two Weeks

The End Screen to The Fetching Family

I’m writing this blog post entirely for me. I want to remember this moment, when I designed, wrote, drew, and coded a game in two weeks for Funni Game Jam #2 .

What started as a simple hot dog joke became a game about a family that loves fetch quests. It’s simple, it’s silly, and I love it. The Fetching Family came to be when I had a joke about feeding a guy a vegan hot dog. The joke was that the guy wants a snack, but is also a hardcore carnivore who hates vegetables and tofu. Unfortunately, the only snack you can find him is a vegan hot dog, so you give it to him without telling him it’s vegan. Then when he eats it, he winds up loving it. I knew the joke couldn’t stretch that far, so I decided that the game would be a series of different fetch quests, rather than a whole game dedicated to feeding some dude a hot dog.

Eventually that strange carnivore-loving man turned into an uncle named Booker, and he no longer was a carnivore, but a simple man that wanted a snack before dinner. Uncle Booker was the first family member ever conceptualized!

This is a good time to talk about Art. I already knew Uncle B’s storyline, so all I needed to do was figure out his look. I am not an artist, not in drawing sense, but I knew that one of the things I really wanted in this game was classic, cartoon art. Think Ed, Edd, n Eddy, Hey Arnold, a smidge of Rugrats: All Grown Up, and a wee bit of The Proud Family. I wanted to make this game by myself, but I also knew that I wanted the art to actually look good, so I spent the first week of the game jam just on art. I got a subscription to Skillshare and took two classes on cartooning, one on faces, and one on poses. I highly recommend both classes. They were very simple, easy to understand, and legitimately fun! Cartoons as incredibly special to me. I loved cartoons as a kid, but even as I got older, and a little edgier, I still adore watching the goofiest shows. I wanted to really show my love for them in The Fetching Family.

Uncle B., in another life.

Uncle B. and Gia (the main character) probably changed the most during the first week. Because I’m not an artist, I didn’t really trust my eyes (or my hands) to make good characters. So originally, Uncle B. looked like a middle-aged Harold from Hey Arnold, and Gia looked like a weird Rugrats: All Grown Up OC. I was looking to these shows for inspiration, but I wound up accidentally ripping their style.

This is basically Suzie from Rugrats: All Grown Up

Something I learned in my cartooning skillshare classes is that most people can easily draw a circle if they loosen up their grip. Don’t think about it too much. If you trace a circle a few times, you’ll find a good circle in there. I think, when I finally drew my cast of characters, it was because I loosened up my grip and my expectations on myself. I was trying to make Cartoon Network quality art…with no art background…in one week. I didn’t need each character to be perfect, I just needed them to be done. When that happened, all of my characters took shape. Just in time too, because it was nearing the end of week 1, and I had scheduled week 2 to be writing and coding.

The characters were done and colored in all thanks to paint.net (I cannot recommend paint.net enough. It’s free, it’s like MS Paint but much better), now it was time to actually figure out the story.

Luckily, spending an entire week drawing these characters helped me figure out how they were. Gia was a college kid just coming home from school. Mama just wants everyone home for dinner. Jade is a money-hungry tween. Simone is baby. Uncle B. is kooky. And the two grandmothers are best friends who currently hate each other. Because I only had a week, this story had to be very simple. Simple to write, and simple to code (with one exception that I’ll get to in a moment). I used Murder at the Cat Show (which has its own blog post) as my template for this game. The code is more or less the same, but with way more imagebuttons, making the coding portion a bit quick to produce.

I knew that I had one challenge in this game, and it was the Fetching Family’s youngest child, Simone. I don’t often write children (I’m also rarely around children), so I worried that her voice might not sound genuinely young. I figured kids around 5-7 either talk very little or talk way too much. I tried to make her speak little, just to make sure that any time she did talk, it was cute and adorable. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I used Anya from SpyxFamily as a bit of a template for Simone. I don’t know how Anya feels about poop and boogers, but I think the two would get along.

The one portion of the game that was pretty difficult to code was Simone’s word bank game. I’ve never made a mini game in renpy before, so figuring out how to make a game where you drag and drop words was very, very challenging. Well, that’s not entirely true. Getting items to drag and drop was actually very simple. But getting it to do anything else, was challenging. It still does not work entirely as planned. It took around 2 days to get it where it is now, which is workable, but only workable in a very specific way. On one hand, I’m sad that my game isn’t perfect (this is unrealistic, I know), on the other hand, I think I was able to make some good jokes out of the somewhat janky word bank game. I’m a poet; by that I mean, I am an expert on making something good out of limited spaces.

Somehow, with 10 hours to spare, I had a finished game. There are obviously things I’d like to fix in the future: I would love for the characters to have body poses, rather than just face poses; I’d like the word bank game to work as intended; and I’d like to add more audio to the game, including bleeps and bloops for voice sounds. But I can’t help but be incredibly proud of what I could do in two weeks. Murder at the Cat Show took a little over a month. Because I had code to work with (which my husband and I have been jokingly calling the Shontengine), I was able to make a short, funny, cartoon game in half that time. That’s actually amazing. Making a game is hard, even harder when you have a short deadline. I gotta give a standing ovation to those who make games in a few weeks, or even a few days. Even if it’s short, you made that. Let’s celebrate that!

This was the best 2 weeks of the year for me. Every day I woke up excited to work on The Fetching Family. It was certainly stressful, in an incredibly exciting way. I want to remember this forever. I feel like every time I make a game, I get better at it. Every time I hit publish on Itch, I feel a rush of pride and excitement and wonder. Who will play my game? Will they enjoy it? Will they find a bug? Will they maybe pay me for it? The game industry is so tough, it’s so hard, that finding these moments feel so rare. We must cherish them.