@reiyuguigui

"GHOSTLING MAHJONG??? GHOSTLING MAHJONG OH MY GODDDD ... WHATTT THE HECKKKKK ;W;"

I modeled these tiles in Blender and drew Reiyu's mascots myself; Reiyu made the back design.

A Fun Idea

Around the beginning of 2023, I decided that I wanted to make a game. I recently became addicted to Balatro, so I thought: What if I made a roguelike deckbuilder? But I wanted some sort of twist, so I decided to combine the idea with a classic game I like - mahjong. Specifically, mahjong solitaire, since I thought that regular mahjong had too steep of a learning curve; I wanted something that wasn't going to be hard to start playing. Lastly, I had always wanted to make something for the VTubers I watch and follow, with an emphasis on indie VTubers; so I figured that I would make this game feature a bunch of indie VTubers. I introduced this idea to Reiyu, who is the VTuber featured in the current version of this game, and she showed a lot of interest. I worked on this game independently for a little while before I decided that I'd use it as my final project for my Master's degree.

From Idea to Reality

There's a lot going on with my idea, and I kept coming up with more ideas; so I quickly opened up a new Unity project and just began working. I didn't really want to spend money on assets, so before diving into any code, I spent a small amount of time in Blender modelling the mahjong tiles and drawing the textures for them. Once imported into Unity, I added the material and visual effects that I wanted to use; I took a lot of inspiration from 51 Clubhouse Games for the Nintendo Switch, which has a mahjong solitaire game mode. Once I had the "main" game object ready to go, I started working on coding the game.

"Matching tiles, how hard can that be?" I thought. But the logic behind the game was a lot more complex and difficult to program than I had originally thought. There are some rules to mahjong solitaire pertaining to what tiles can be matched, and tiles that are available change as the game goes on. Writing code for the yaku was even harder; with so many possible hands, there was no way I could write an if statement for all possibilities. I decided to try and write down all possible hands and determining any similarities between them, so as to consolidate the logic for determining the correct hand. The logic for the joker tiles was definitely the easiest to write; they add unique modifiers to the game, so I made a base abstract class that all other jokers could inherit and implement their own modifier. As for debugging, there was a lot of back and forth between me and my friends who helped me, and I really enjoyed our live debugging sessions, where my friends would share their screens and identify bugs and I would fix them on the spot.

Once I had the logic down, I was able to work more on the other aspects of the game, such as scoring, earning money, showing different layouts, etc.; as well as the aesthetics and UI. I designed all of the UI using Figma, and I took a lot of inspiration from Persona 5; I've always loved the unique aesthetic of the game and wanted to allude to that look in my own game, but I also had recently saw the UI from Valve's new game Deadlock, and some of those UI elements influenced my design. Lastly, I drew all of the game art myself, with the exception of the tile back designs.

Some screenshots from the game.

Reality Hits Hard

Honestly, as I was developing this project, I became more and more dissatisfied with what I was making; I had a vision but it felt like I had failed to realize that vision. I had some friends play what I came up with for my final project, and despite good reviews, a lot of time and effort spent working on this game, and a Master's degree; I just couldn't feel proud of my work. I can admit that the game play was decent, although it needed some balancing in terms of scoring; and the UI was clean and looked great aesthetically. But overall, it just wasn't what I wanted it to be. It was disappointing to feel that way, but I know that my game wasn't total garbage; there's always room for improvement and it was time to start looking at next steps.

Hit the Ground Running, Again

I asked some friends about where I could go from here, and one response stood out to me. They said to make it more like a HuniePop game. This was actually one of my original ideas, but it was surprising that someone else had the same idea. I think I do want to incorporate a dating sim or aspects of a dating sim into my game, but I still want to keep the roguelike part. I find that dating sims are rather boring, and it feels wrong to complete a person's story or quest line to never interact with them again. Anyway, I have a few ideas that I've already began testing out, including what I had just mentioned; I just gotta keep at it and something will stick, I'm sure.

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