Devlog #1 - About the project

Tail of the Shopkeeper is a game we are developing as part of the Senior Capstone Project for Kent State University's Animation & Game Design program. In this course, after writing a 10-page research paper, we are given two months to develop a game. My team chose to explore developing an action-adventure game with cozy elements, framed around a series of two loops: shopkeeping, and dungeon-crawling. This, in essence, is akin to the gameplay loop of titles such as Moonlighter (Digital Sun, 2018).

The team involved as part of the course:
Dawson Turska - Project Lead, Programming Lead

Jalen Rankin - Level Designer

Logan Jackson - Animation/Game Design

Autumn Lewis - User Interface Design

Jada Woods - Animation

Joseph Berlin - Animation/Programming

Nicholas Hansen - Programming/SFX

Tyler Sisley - Level Design

Additional support outside the members of the class include:
Pann Prechachevawat - Technical Artist

Julian Selvaggio - Narrative Designer

Makiyah Harris - Item Sprite Artist

Anna Stevenson - Music Composition

Wil Schaeffer - Project Management


As part of this project, we are aiming to demo the first dungeon, fully fleshed out with art assets fully implemented. While ambitious, this is contingent on the rest of the content coming together during development (more on that in future devlogs). We spent early development fully fleshing out the core systems, leaving the rest of the time of development for developing narrative, building assets, and making sure everything is to the highest possible level that we can manage in the time provided.

In the next devlog, we will detail the programmed systems in full detail, showing off how everything works so far. Additionally, we will provide documentation of the environment building experience, as part of this work involves using a real-life, mixed-media approach for building out our levels/environments.