Ladies and gentlemen,

It seems my dabbling in Unreal Engine 5 might be of some use after all.

In today's post I'd like to semi-officially introduce you to Riddle Grove, my little project that doesn't seem to want to be finished.

What started as, might I say generic top down action adventure game with cute and horror elements, is finally on the right path to being something I can be proud of. My frustration with this idea of mine, or lack there of in some regards, was expressed in my previous blog post over on my Ko-Fi page, so I am not going to waste your time with that, I'd rather introduce you to Riddle Grove and show you my progress so far!

So what even is Riddle Grove?

A town. Riddle Grove is a town, one might say in the middle of nowhere, it is a town where Wendy, our main protagonist, along with her father have to move after a series of tragic and unfortunate events.

The story is an integral part of the whole game, the reason why all of it happens.

The game play of Riddle Grove will consist of free exploration as well as linear quests/missions to complete. You get to help Wendy explore the town of Riddle Grove and its surroundings, complete puzzles and meet strange folk.

You can think about it as a combination of The Legend of Zelda and Mario games, with less emphasis on platforming.

Of course a very important thing to keep in mind is scope, I really only want to create a small game, something you can enjoy in a couple of sittings so by no means expect a big game.

Development hell

Now, I came up with the idea back in August of 2022. I have written a story I liked with some interesting, fun and creepy characters, twists and turns.

The next goal to complete was to bring it into action. For the longest time I toiled around in Godot, I tried to achieve a look that I'd truly be happy with but to no avail. I nearly abandoned the project altogether trying to come up with something special, that all changed one faithful day when I installed Unreal Engine 5.

Light bulb flickered on, if 2D is too generic and 3D is too expensive, why not combine both? I decided to try out a 2D pixel art character in 3D world.

Only the beginning!

2D character in 3D world, that sounds like a fun idea. It's not the most unique one but I always loved that approach.

There are many ways to do that though, I managed to bring it down to two possible paths forward. 8 directional movement, where Wendy always faces the direction she is walking in or simpler, Paper Mario style controls.

The left GIF was created by u/fikiy on Reddit!

With some help from social media, this conundrum is no more, I decided to fully commit to the Paper Mario style. I truly feel this is the best way forward, I intend on utilizing over the top expressive low frame-count animations, which gives Wendy a lot of personality while being very quick to work with.

Now these animations are in no way finished and won't be for a bit, but they give a nice representation of what you might expect!

While moving around is alright, I think jumping can really enhance Wendy's exploratory capabilities, so I implemented that!

Another thing I really though about, especially early on, was what way should I deal with combat. It surely can add a whole new layer of fun. While not necessarily integral to the story I decided to go with a very simple approach, at least for now.

In the beginning Wendy will only have a simple attack ability, I might expand on this in the future with "drop" attacks and abilities like that!

I implemented it to test it out and this is how it looks so far! I think I am going to change it to more of a spin attack in the future but for now it works well!

And that's about as much progress as I am able to show for now.

I have also been experimenting with creating 3D buildings with pixel art textures using Blockbench and while the workflow is very quick and the results can look fantastic none of the buildings are presentable so far, more on that in future devlogs!

Conclusion

So, while not much to show I am feeling great about the progress so far, in just two weeks I have managed to get done more stuff that in months prior.

I think this is truly the way forward and I can't wait to show you more.

Thank you so much for reading this!