Starmen.Net

The world is feeling down. As a creature with a combination of Happy and Puppy in the name, you will have no such thing! Donning your trusty scarf, you intend to head out into the world and cheer everyone up. It’s your duty!

Happup is an exploration-based puzzle inspired by Yume Nikki, Monument Valley, and Hohokum. It centers on the titular character, Happup, a dog with a cool scarf. The game aims to offer many varied areas to explore, presented with an abstract art style.

Some Features!
•A funky soundtrack!
•Puzzles that’ll have logical conclusions! Nothing too outside-the-box, don’t worry!
•A crazy artstyle!
•Cute dogs and cool scarfs!
•It’s a really cool scarf, I swear. Scarfs are cool, right?
•Right?
•Interesting designs and mysterious characters! (I’m looking at you, one-armed-violinist.)
•Lots of eyeballs!
•Eyeballs where eyeballs shouldn’t be!
•Eyeballs?

Happup was actually a game I started off five years ago, but lost all the data when my computer crashed. It was amateur, but I was pretty proud of some of the ideas I had come up with. Now that I’m older and wiser, I picked the game back up and started from scratch. I’d love to give it a proper development! I plan to make this as interesting as I can and something you’ll remember for sure. Seeya on the flipside!

i-is flipside still cool to say..?

Thank you! I’ve got a lot planned, just you wait!

please

This looks great

Thank you guys so much! I really appreciate all the good thoughts.

Happup is very early in development still! I have quite a few assets and skills implemented, but I’m still mapping out the worlds and how the different areas interconnect. It’s quite a bit of work, but it’s gonna be all worth it to mean I’m actually organized for once!

I don’t think I’ll be needing any help on Happup, though. The assets are relatively easy to create and assemble, and I’m mostly covered on the music front! I’m think I’ll be fine with a one-man team.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this, this looks like something I’d want to stream for my friends in the future.

Happup is being made in RM2k3, as that’s the engine I have the most familiarity with and the one that I find works best with the graphics. (Easier to implement, too!)

I’m going for an open exploration type of game. What I’m aiming for is a hub world where you’ll be able to acess seven worlds from the start, then go deeper and deeper from there.

Alright, got a special little update for you guys! I’ve made some custom music for the game that I think is okay to show for the moment. Special areas in the game will have very distinct themes to go with them to make them more memorable.

This theme is for one of the more darker areas of the game. It’s a little hard to spread the joy down there.

Maybe Melancholy?

Warning: This one’s kinda loud! It’s not that loud in-game, don’t worry. Clubscene is for Club Sinoper, a club named after the color that dominates the room. It’s found between the Crow’s fields, and another area that shall remain undisclosed.

Clubscene

Oof, same here, but I don’t have enough solid gameplay just yet! I’ve been working on creating the worlds first, then assigning the puzzles to them, then getting all the effects and coding added in. It’s quite a bit of work and I only have a few areas fully finished! I’ll show off some gameplay when I think it’s a good time.

Here’s a quick peak at the hubworld, however! Or at least a small part of it. I’ll add some more details on that a little bit later!

The colors actually fluctuate. You can see in this much older .gif of a prototype of the world!

Hey, what do you know? Guess what’s coming along!

I just made a new blog post about how the designs of Happup’s worlds work, and how it incorporates color theory!

Go give it a read if you’re interested in Happup’s development! It’s…it’s the only blog post I’m actually proud of! Yeah!

Aw yeah!!

Yume Nikki is one of my favorite games of all time. Well, think 2kki tops it, but still. I’ve always wanted to make a minimalist, ambient puzzle game.

Sorta, yeah!

i am so hype for this game it’s not ok. it’s looking amazing

Maybe on certain shades of the color wheel, Happup has black fur, and on their opposite shades, he has white fur.
Or it could just be another character, idk

Glad to see the sleeping cats won you over!

Thank you very much!

Working on worlds. I plan on editing the ground tiles for this area.

Ssssort of! You can’t really talk to anyone in the traditional RPG sense. Instead, they give short little hints or clues on puzzles or what their predicament is. Sometimes the bubbles will feature text, and others will feature images. It just kinda fluctuates.

(This bubble isn’t meant for this character, but whatever.)

Ahhh, this looks really rad and adorable!

By the way, if this is helpful, I’ve made a super-simple and easy Run Button script for RPG Maker 2000 and 2003 (I’ve tested it and it works in both), if that’s of interest to you!

Oh, so the white one is a cat.
This is getting so interesting!

I’ve since revised the dialog bubble and added a new one! Hopefully this is clear enough.

If anything, I’d like to hear about Happup itself. What’s this dog’s deal? How did Happup get such a neat-o scarf? Where’s Happup from?

Perhaps you should elaborate on the plot. There must be a villain!

Those dialog bubbles look awesome. Are they made using the battle effect display command thing, or some other new-fangled kind of game dev magic?

Oh shoot, they do! Never seen that show before, but that is quite the coinkydink. Huh!

Thank you very much! I’ve been busy recently, so not much work has been done, but I diiiid decide to use Happup graphics for the RMN birthday event, so if you like the asthetics of this game, check it out!

In the meantime, have some art I did of one of the predicaments!

Just finished up the first version of this area’s tileset. Perhaps you’ll see some fish swimming in those clouds? Who knows!

New blog post will be up sometime next week! I’m either going to be talking about the Sniffing mechanic, or answering those gameplay questions you guys asked. I’ll be back tomorrow with more screenshots!