Most games in this genre are made in RPG Maker, more out of tradition, I think, than anything else. The choice to make Retrace in Game Maker was in the end quite a simple one. Here was my thought process:

• RPG Maker is fine, but seems limited if what you’re making isn’t actually a RPG. Plus, being unemployed at the time, $79.99 was a pretty steep price.

• Unity - just about every indie dev I’ve met has asked why I’m not using it for Retrace. Truth is, I’ve used it before, and while it’s great for 3D games my attempts to use it for a 2D game were absolutely miserable.

• Game Maker Studio and all its extensions were on sale on Humble Bundle for, like, $10.

And that was my thought process.

More seriously, I’d also used Game Maker in the past. It had the right blend of simple UI that didn’t scare off non-programmers (me) and the ability to use code for more powerful functions. Plus, there are lots of resources for implementing just about anything. Over the course of a few months, I made the skeleton of the game — movement, save/load functions, menus, puzzle mechanics, the dialogue engine. If I couldn’t get that working, I told myself, there was no point writing the story.

It was a painful, slow process, but each success spurred me on further and eventually I had something almost resembling a playable game. Next, I would need two things: the story, and the art.