Project outline

A Merchant’s Life was a short 2D adventure game about a merchant who comes across a mysterious disease and tries to cure it.

Just like Nam-Cap, this was made during the early period of my training. It was a school project and one of the first times I worked through a game in a more structured way, including an actual GDD and some pre-production planning.

The basic idea

The player mostly walked from the left side of the screen to the right, and later back again.
Along the way there were few simple obstacles and monsters that were to be avoided rather than fought directly.
Also coins could be collected to buy potions in a shop. These potions could be used to cure sick animals.

Your goal after all was it to progress through two levels toward the source of the disease.

Tech / production

It was built with MonoGame / XNA, which at the time was actually a really fun way for me to get deeper into object-oriented programming as it really teaches you the fundamentals.

One thing I still remember very clearly is the audio. I think almost all of the in-game sounds were done by myself, and I mean literally. For example, if a bottle opened, I would just say something like plopp into a microphone and then edit it afterwards. It was silly, but still funny to me to this day.

Like nam-cap, this was also a lot of pre-existing stuff mashed together.

The player character used the default Terraria player sprite as I remember it. One enemy was the Wandering Eye from Terraria which I found to be horrifying. The backgrounds were taken from existing pixel-art forest assets, and another enemy resembled SCP-173, which is basically one of the most well-known early internet horror creatures. A statue-like figure from the SCP fiction project that only moves when nobody is looking at it.

So visually, this was again very "whatever worked, got used".

Submission state

It got far enough to be a proper school submission and it was playable, but definitely rushed.

There is actually a mail still included with the project where we basically wrote that the last three days had been absolute hell, that things kept randomly breaking, and that the required save function was still missing in the final submission. That probably tells you everything you need to know about the state it shipped in :D

Looking back

I learned a lot with this one. It was probably the first time I had to think about a game in a more structured way first, instead of just throwing things together immediately. That included writing a GDD, planning mechanics beforehand, and then translating that into actual code.

So even if the project itself was rough, it was a great learning experience as it was one of the first times I got a better sense of planning, architecture and implementation coming together.

Available material

I still have the original Game Design Document and screenshots aswell as the source code.

Menus:

In-Game:

The source code most likely will not be published publicly, even though I still have it. This is because the whole project relies heavily on borrowed third-party assets and I do not feel great about redistributing it without no knowledge about how the original creators would feel about that.