Background
Game Link: https://clemboy.itch.io/the-wallbreaker
I changed my personal goals with game development a little bit, so I am no longer doing weekly Game Jam stuff. But I still like to have projects completed within a week.
- From 8th December 2023 to 15th December 2023, I worked on my first RPG Maker project. It is a short comedy adventure game where you break out of a prison. In terms of tone, it is similar in genre to something like Monty Python or Shaun of the Dead.
- Originally I had a few different ideas, but as I worked on them I knew I had to scope down more and more.
- Some examples of earlier ideas I had was one where you played as a mercenary whom could rescue adventurers being held hostage by a necromancy cult. You could rescue them in different orders and progress through the dungeon to defeat a boss enemy.
- I settled and committed to a linear adventure of less than an hour.
The format of these posts are different as ‘What Have I Learned?’ and ‘What Could be Better?’ are kind of two sides of the same coin. Aren’t mistakes/failures in a creative project like this also lessons that we can learn from? It is a bit tricky to separate them.
Instead, it makes more sense to divide my thoughts into three categories: What Have I Learned, What I Liked, What I Disliked. It is nice to just share subjective opinions, such as feeling like a mechanic or joke didn’t land well. Not everything I ended up disliking in a work of mine has to be some ‘objective mistake that we could learn from’.
What Have I Learned?
Actually making the RPG Maker MV Game
This goes without saying that since I finished a short RPG Maker MV game in one week so it goes without saying that now I know how to make a short RPG Maker MV game.
I learned a lot about how to write for an RPG just by the process of doing it. How to think about the level design layout, how to use the RPG Maker program to make… well… everything. I learned a bit about the scripting/plugin system and even made a bugfix to the healthbar plugin that I downloaded all on my own.
It was actually kind of surprising how much I was able to learn by just doing. The tool is pretty intuitive and I am impressed by the workflow. I just made mistakes, observe what worked, and learned from that.
The only tutorial/course I needed to get started was the one included with the program, which taught basic features and the layout. From there, I was able to figure out how to make cutscenes or alternate endings by just raw intuition. I got out of the tutorial hell with RPG Maker very quickly, in less than 4 hours.
There were maybe one or two forum posts explaining some basic tips that really helped. The main three I remembered was the following. The links are to the respective forum posts I learned it:
Making sure the tile that you use to enter a room is not the same tile that is used to exit the room. (I can’t find the forum post that listed it among other tips anymore)
Scoping
The core idea and concept was just barely within scope for one week within my skill level, and only just. The idea of having multiple ending slides, three bosses, and having the mixture of combat, narrative writing, cutscenes and the dungeon crawl, was surprisingly bigger than expected.
However, by trying it, I know have a more clearer idea of how long these elements can take. How to plan out an adventure with the start, middle and ending in mind. I also learned other things that reveal the true scope of certain ambition, such as what kind of details I needed to start paying attention to, such as character arcs and continuity, or how much time testing a simple idea to implement actually requires (even if it ends up working well on the first try, I still have to test it).
This meant that sketching out a flowchart of expected player choices, locations and so on is very helpful, and through this project I have developed some ideas of how to make them in a way that benefits me.
This will definitely be very useful for planning the next RPG.
It only just barely made it with 45 hours of work within a week. Some ideas were cut even after being scripted, as they didn’t follow the flow and the tone of the idea. This was not ‘wasted work’ even if it didn’t show up in the final game, but part of the iterative process.
As I get better at making RPGs, I predict I could return to this scope and execute a higher level of quality with half the time spent. That would be exciting to see.
I can’t wait to see what skills from making the beginner friendly stuff in RPG Maker will carry over to doing an RPG in something like Unity, and what new stuff I’d have to learn in return. I imagine the principles of writing a good story will stay the same no matter the engine.
Testing
A feature is not just a feature. The cost of adding a feature into a project is not just the literal time and work it takes to implement it. Even if the feature was implemented well and fast, without any mistakes, the first try, there is still the time investment of testing it.
This is especially true for anything that is more story-driven, because you are not just testing that the thing you added works in a literal objective sense such as coding or game balancing, but also that it works for the story you’re telling.
There were a few fights that worked as expected without much work and time implementing them, such as the skeleton fight, the captain boss and the vampire fight, but I still had to spend time actually playing them to see if it ‘worked.’
There was a lot of work that had to be added and adjusted to fights even though the actual mechanical challenge stayed the exact same, because their dialogue had to be edited through playing through the fight a few times, in order to ‘feel right’.
So the lesson here is when accounting for features to add, especially for a narrative driven game, we have to account for the time it takes to test it, not just the time it takes to implement it into the game.
Testing (Quality Assurance)
Another thing I neglected to consider for a game with narrative choices is whether my event flags work correctly. There are debug tools to enable/disable switches for story events, so I could go through the ending a few times to make sure that the cutscene plays properly.
Despite these debugging tools and tricks, there is a sense of insecurity when hoping that the game will work as expected. I knew what parts ‘should work in theory’ in isolated testing, but I only rushed through the game once from start to finish after I was done in order to catch any crashes. I had already seen the various parts of the game working correctly many, many, many times already by that point… but still, I only realized after release that I don’t know for sure whether something would break if done in different orders than expected, even if ‘it shouldn’t in theory.’
I should have created a checklist of each of the game’s possible choices and go through them one by one in a playtest (maybe with multiple edited save files if I must save time) to make sure that there aren’t unpredictable game breaking bugs from their interactions.
This is a considerable time investment to do, though, and it’s not a ‘creative outlet’ type of productivity either… all you can do is record playing through the same video game over and over.
The web build also had a major crash in one of the boss fights that I did not encounter in the desktop build, which showed that I needed to have checked each route on each platform. This doubles the time it takes to do this process
Scoping down the project, however, so that this process of playtesting, catching bugs and refinement happens much earlier relative to the deadline would be extremely wise. Ideally in a game jam setting, I should be ‘done’ in terms of adding or revising content a full two days before I wish to release. In a full project, this would be much earlier, maybe even a full month. The project at this point should not have any changes beyond fixing issues that prevent playing the game, and imperfections with the actual content is locked in, at least until release.
This is so that I could dedicate an entire day’s session of work to just playing through the game… over and over and over again, just to be sure that the players are getting the experience that I created. Major bugs and typos fixed.
What Did I Like?
Player choices and optional content is fun
Having the option to save certain characters or defeat mini bosses. Being able to explore to get hidden items. Writing and making stuff that I know is impossible to see in only one playthrough?
That stuff is fun. Really fun. There is actually something captivating about making entire boss fights and story moments that I know that a player might not see. I think it’s because it makes the world feel dynamic and alive, that you as a player can impact the story in a way. If almost everything that can happen, does happen, in the same linear timeline, then the player becomes an observer of someone else’s story.
It’s weird as you might think ‘oh this is content the player might not see is this wasted effort to work on it?’ is a common instinct, but no. Not at all. I enjoy it.
I like writing stories the most
It’s my favorite part of the game development process. I think the games that appeal to me that I want to make tell some kind of story. Whether it’s a story written by a writer that’s told to a player, or a story that happens to the player from dynamic play, I think the story matters to me.
To me, writing isn’t just about the literal plot, text or worldbuilding, but being able to say something through a game. A form of expression. It is very fulfilling writing a game that has something to say.
The game doesn’t have to say anything avant-garde, profound, controversial or pretentious, but I do think it has to express something. This comedy game is light-hearted, but it still has my voice and opinions on how I feel about the death penalty, whether people can reform or change, or poking fun at bad managers in the workplace.
That voice might not be very loud and easy to ignore in this project, but the fact that it is there adds a bit of a soul to the game, a bit of myself in it. The previous game I made for a jam about fishing had some of my own views inside it too, also for comedic effect.
I think I definitely feel more attached to making games where I can express an opinion, compared to making the more mechanical and abstract stuff that I made in the past like the isometric ball game or the wave shooter thing. Those games are important too, of course, sometimes we need a pure escape from everything, away from humanity. I love those marble platformers precisely because their detachment from the world.
But when it comes to what I want to make in my free time, for myself as a hobby, I want to keep making games that say stuff.
Decent structure
The player’s objective and goal is really clear. The layout of the map actually follows the structure of Town, Story, Dungeon. The prison cell you break in is a safe zone to heal and save. The shop is right there too.
I like that it loops back into itself when you unlock the shortcut and unlock the door. I think I can do better from here. I am just glad at this point that the players didn’t get too lost to know where to go, honestly. For my first project I’d consider that a good milestone as a developer.
What Did I Dislike?
Messy
Have consistent naming formats. Have more of a structure. I did attempt one earlier on but it became messy as I wasn’t experienced and was focused on making stuff.
Luckily, it only became too much of a mess right at the end by the deadline. So I ended up barely making it through. If this project were to have a bigger scope or be worked on longer than this period it’s need to be tidied up.
Yanfly has some advice here I can try. I am glad I made the mistakes first so I can better understand the advice too, rather than following along blindly.
Closing Thoughts
The above post is a bit of an unfinished draft. I didn’t feel sure or comfortable over how to finish writing it or what I wanted to share or edit.
There was also a weekly post associated with this entry, but I didn’t feel comfortable uploading it publicly.
I know that I should finish the draft at some point, but its been sitting in my computer for a bit and at this point I rather just post what I have so I can focus on the next game project. Maybe I’d revisit and edit this draft.
Just going to upload it anyways.
Comments powered by Disqus.