I’ve had a lot of fun making some games for my daughters to play. I started this “Blue Witch” project a couple of years ago. It’s based on characters that they came up with for bedtime stories when they were even younger than they are now.
I used RPG Maker XP to make a retro-looking game that involves some of the characters they came up with.
For the second part of the game, I added a new environment and some mini-games. The scripting in RPG Maker is mostly built around the RPG formula, but I found I could change the monster combat into a math game.
A few years ago I decided the game needed a full remake. My kids initially said they didn’t imagine their characters to be as cartoony as I’d made them in RPG Maker. Using Unreal4, I tried making a hub for a new game. It was buggy, hacky, over-scoped and a lot of fun to work on.
I tried out some multiple cameras that track the player, a CSV-driven dialogue branching choice system, hooking up animations to events, and listeners for contextual events.
Note: the initial screen is just a randomizer to determine who’s turn it is. It turned out to be the game’s best feature. (Once they’d played the very-unfinished game a few times, it was more fun for them to just see who’s face the randomizer would land on.)