When Animals Cross the Road

Meet Katie! She works with instructor Erica as part of Game-U’s Accelerate program. Katie’s got a great wit and she loves the game development applications RPGMaker and GameMaker. When she comes into the studio for lessons with Erica, she makes a point to combine her wit with her games!

To earn the Game-U “Animal Crossing” achievement in RPG Maker (it’s worth 200 points!), Katie added a new forest town to the dungeon level of one of her games. Earning the achievement takes some serious RPGMaker skills. Using the map tool, Katie needed to draw out the entire town from scratch, taking care to include at least one inn, two shops, a two-story house, and a minimum of five random, animated non-player characters (NPCs). But that’s not all! Katie’s player needed the ability to enter and exit every house, while the shops, inns, and NPCs all had to be functional and interactive. RPGMaker makes use of “tiles” to build games, and for each page associated with the tileset, Katie also must use a sprite (think a digital flipbook). Katie took on all these challenges with her usual wholehearted enthusiasm and dedication! In fact, she went even further. As a creative writer (with a great sense of humor), she also coded hilarious exchanges between her characters – because when animals cross the road, things just get silly.

Check out the video of Katie’s work! The game developer herself gives us a tour of her Animal Crossing town and shows off the functionality of her level. Great job, Katie! Keep us updated. We hear you’ve also got a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure game in progress that we’d love to see!