In 2025 my husband discovered RPG Maker 2003 and together we have been making a game called
Dog’s World.
The initial concept for the game was a simple Stardew Valley style game, where the
player character goes around the town helping the townsfolk.
After completing a certain amount of missions the player would receive a dog as a gift or maybe
choose to adopt.
The dog will then be available as a second player character that goes around fighting monsters
that live in the town that the humans can’t see because they are too busy being worried about
silly things in their life. (That’s capitalism for you)
We want to put some of our real life friends and family in the game as characters you can
interact with and do quests for, with their real dogs being monster fighters as well.
The process has been so much fun and I've learnt so many new skills already! Here is a rough outline of the process and experience so far:
We designed the map first, which I did most of. I did this in RPGmaker 2003.
Then we designed some of our main characters, initially using the presets.
We planned the plot out, including some basic dialogue options for the NPC’s, as well as our
first story lines.
Then we finally figured out how to edit the tileset for the map using GIMP and some free assets
from this website
We redesigned all of the characters once we figured out how to make sprite sheets and found this handy website where you can make sprites.
We kept expanding the story, map and plot lines, although most of these haven't actually made it
into the game yet.
Joel added a few battle scenes, including some really funny options.
We need to fix the shop and figure out how the player character will actually make money. This
is our biggest to do at the moment, because it’s going to impact the story. We don’t want it to
be a farming sim, but we aren’t really sure what we want it to be instead!
For Christmas I bought Joel a hand held emulator (fake game boy thing) and we put the game on
there. Which makes it feel like a proper game and super satisfying to see our work properly in
action.
We let our friends play the game just after Christmas and it was so fun to see their reactions
to being in the game! It also helped us find bugs and think about how other people play games,
because they both took ages to find the beach which is where the main story should take you near
the start. The game is still a work in progress, and probably will be forever.
*Insert youtube game play*
We have lots of ideas for so many games, we are beginning to work on a different game now and
Dog’s World is on pause. But we will definitely revisit it in the future.
It's so nice to have a simple, silly game be our first project together. We have both put so
much humor, creativity and passion into it and it really feels great to be able to see that work
realised into something others can play.