Introductions and Making Mariposa

Hello everyone! Welcome to the start of VGDC’s consistent biweekly blog posts; you may have seen one before posted in August of 2024 written by William Kim. My name is Josh, I’m a second year Business Economics major and an officer for the Video Game Development Club - you can read more about me in the “team” tab up on the top. You’ll be seeing a lot of me around here, so it’s nice to meet you all. We’ll discuss the plans for this blog a bit more towards the end of this post, but this is something we hope to continue doing going forward.

Now that introductions are out of the way, I’d like to present you with this week’s topic of discussion: our Winter Quarter 2025 iteration of TCP, Mariposa!

Short for the Chanel Project, TCP is our long term community game development project open to all enrolled UC San Diego students. It all starts with a pitch submission from which a handful are chosen to be presented at our Pitch Showcase. From there, it is up to those in attendance to vote on the pitch they found most interesting and would personally love to work on the most. For more information on the last TCP season, you can click here.

Mariposa is the second iteration of this project, a 2D puzzle platformer that revolves around the relationship between Mariposa and the Unnamed along with the ability to swap between the two during gameplay. The two protagonists exist an indescribable amount of time apart, but are connected through their ability to communicate throughout their paralleling journeys. There’s a lot that can be done with the idea both in terms of narrative and gameplay, so it’s no surprise it won the vote at this year’s pitch showcase.

The idea was presented by Jess, Projects Officer of VGDC and Writing Lead for Mariposa.

Me: “What’d you feel when your pitch was chosen for this year’s TCP?”

Jess: “Fear.”

Development on Mariposa is divided into 5 teams: art, programming, audio, design, writing, and UI, each team managed and directed by their respective leads. That’s not to say there can’t be any overlap, participants are free to choose a secondary and have the ability to switch between any team they want at any point. Only 5 weeks into the project and each team has managed to put out some impressive work! That said, there are challenges that arise when you develop a game with a team solely composed of UCSD students.

As anyone who knows anything about game development will tell you, it’s a time consuming process. And as anyone who’s ever taken a class at UCSD will tell you, you’ll need to sacrifice a lot to get stuff done sometimes. In the midst of the quarter when everybody has midterms, it’s hard for people to find the time to do their respective work on the project, myself included. That said, we have a lot of appreciation for the time people have put into it amongst their busy schedules and the enthusiasm they’ve shown working on the project.

As far as progress on the game itself goes, the design team has solidified areas and the sequential order of them for the game! There was a lot of discussion toward the start of the project regarding giving the player the ability to switch between Mariposa and the Unnamed. It was ultimately decided on having it be “locked” to specific points during the game. Since then, the design team has been devising plans for the actual layout of each section as well as giving a lot of thought toward other decisions gameplay wise.

First image by Kiichiro, Jacky, Justin, James, Grace and Chanel. Second image by Tamika (@tmkkaa.h on Instagram).

Audio is crucial to a game’s presentation, so we’re lucky to have such a great team of people working in that department. It’s been a concern in the past, but this year we saw a big increase in the amount of people interested in helping out with the audio. They’ve been cooking up a bunch of motifs, ambience, etc. Right now we’re very happy to share the BGM for the Subway area! It was composed for the game by Ani, Projects Officer and Audio Lead for Mariposa (Check out her SoundCloud here).

The art team has been hard at work bringing Mariposa’s world to life, too. They’ve established a couple of different styling guides (think environments, protagonists, etc) to really encapsulate the aesthetic and thematic vision that the team working on it has in mind. On top of that they’ve been whipping up tons of concept art, animations, backgrounds, etc. Lots of good stuff coming out of that team!

Environment concept art by Jolina (@j.xuli on Discord). Storyboard by Olivia (@celshii.art on Instagram).

Of course, all teams working on Mariposa have been equally as diligent in their contributions. Big thank you to the programming, audio, writing and UI teams for their talent and dedication put toward the project!

The current goal is to have a minimum viable product done by week 9 of this quarter and to continue working on it into this coming spring quarter. If you’ve become interested in participating in the development of Mariposa, join our Discord for more information on how to get involved!

As far as this blog posts goes, we plan for these to be uploaded throughout each quarter on a biweekly basis, starting in week 1 and ending in week 9. We plan to use this as a platform to showcase the work done within our club, talk about game development topics, and be a resource to those who follow it. We’re really excited to talk about some of the things we have in store for everybody, so we hope you continue to check in.

Special thanks to Chase Peterson for getting audio files playable on the site on such short notice. Thanks to the tech committee for making this blog post possible in the first place, and thanks to everyone else in the club for giving me the opportunity to write this.