How Family Dinner was made in the "wrong" engine

by Mayara Albuquerque

Back in the Christmas of 2008 when I got my first game console ever, the Playstation 2, I never thought that, ten years later, I would be making a game all by myself. And I definitely would NOT have thought that this game would be a text adventure horror. However, because of my love for games and literature, and because of my terrible lack of resources, Family Dinner happened... and it changed everything.

In 2016 I went to college to study Digital Games. I was very surprised to see this course in my city, and very happy with the fact that it was among the most affordable ones around. During college, I met a special group of people, and from the friendships that lasted beyond that period of time, Boto Alien was born. Despite our best efforts, however, life happened and we went through a hiatus of a few months. Then, when I suddenly decided to make a game, the team got back together and we were determined to pursue this as a career.

I was never the programmer nor the artist of the group. I was always the writer and manager. Programming for me is a nightmare, and unless the visuals of the game are made of stickmen and simple geometric shapes, I will fail on that. So how the hell did I make a game?

One of our teachers introduced us a wonderful engine called Construct 2. For those who never heard of it, it's an engine that doesn't use lines of codes in the traditional way. Instead, you just have to worry about the logic itself to make the events that will make the game work. You still have to know the basics of programming, though, as the engine still uses things like variables, etc. I had fun programming on Construct because there were none of these little fuckers ( ; ). So, if I had to make a game by myself, that would be my engine of choice.

But the catch here is that Construct 2 is a tool made, as far as I know, mainly to develop games of genres like 2D platform, side-scroller and point-and-click. I was already very fond of Twine, an engine for interactive fiction, but I did not want to use it, since it's made for games in the Choose Your Own Adventure style, where you just click on the choice you want to make. I wanted to make a game that resembled the classic text adventures like Zork (that I was playing a lot at the time), where you have to input commands to make progress, and I wanted to have more freedom with the layout in general.

There weren't many really useful tutorials on YouTube that taught how to make text adventures on Construct. But they were useful enough for me to start. As i progressed through the development, I had to use my creativity to make a text-based game work on an engine that wasn't made for it.

Most of the visual elements like the background, the text (it's not a good idea to use Construct's text object, most of the time) and the map were all done in Photoshop, which I learned how to use just in time for the project.

The development had it's ups and downs, but overall it was very satisfying everytime I tested the game and could see a puzzle finally working, for example, and to be able to say "I did it". By the time I finished the 1.0 version of the game, I had changed my mind completely in what I wanted to work with for the rest of my life. Before, I was pretty sure being a book author was my path. But Family Dinner showed me otherwise. Now, Boto Alien would be my life.

This game's existence shows how the lack of resources enhances our creativity, and also shows that, sometimes, you really don't need the best of all engines to make a cool game. Sometimes, even if you're using the "wrong" engine, you can make your project work. You may think that Family Dinner is not a very good game, but we had to start somewhere, we had to take the first step to put Boto Alien into motion.

Although the development of Family Dinner was a great experience, it was mentally exhausting to make everything in a game and still have to manage the developer's social media, download pages, marketing, etc. So now that our programmer (Yago) and our artist (Caio) are able to develop projects with me again, our productivity will improve, and we'll be able to bring even better games to you all.

If you want to start developing games, just remember: the beginning is always hard, do the best you can with what you have, and be prepared to receive criticism. Listening to feedback is the key to improve your game and to grow as a developer. Know that your game is not the best in the world, so don't be a dick to players that don't find it very enjoyable. Just work hard, be creative and take the first step.