An action RPG made with my daughter during November 2025 as part of Game Off 2025. The theme was "waves" so we decided the ocean needed to be prominent 🌊
When a young girl is shipwrecked, she must take up the call of adventure as she explores the island, searching for a way home.
- We've learned a lot about collaborating since last year's effort
- Setting goals beforehand helped, and we achieved most of them
- use a tool we're both comfortable with so we can both easily contribute (RPG Maker)
- do something different: an action RPG (similar to A Link to the Past) instead of the usual turn-based kind
- avoid hurt feelings — last game jam I "fixed" some things without prior discussion 🤦
- use version control — it's a bit awkward with RPG Maker, but the DB gives an option to format the JSON to avoid conflicts
- I was pretty excited about her first git commit! 🥹
- There were still last minute submission issues submitting on itch.io 😡
- when deploying, the "Exclude unused files" option in RPG Maker is not very smart and easily misses files
- the game was crashing
- but not using it lead to 3000 files (over itch's limit)...
- in the end, I added a small plugin just to create references to missing sound files etc.
- She came up with the title 💯
- Making an action RPG in RPG Maker is not easy, and lead to a lot of frustration
- in particular there were last minute load/save bugs that made for a late night 💤
- it was good experience but not sure we'll do it again
- Tools used:
- RPG Maker MZ
- Asesprite
- VS Code
- Next time, we're thinking we'll try to make 100% our own art