My First Game Jam - 19 Days Left

Well, this is it, folks: my entry for my first ever game jam.

I’ve always wanted to join a game jam, but have never had the opportunity or time. As a developer, I’ve participated in a few hack-a-thons (mostly through work), but I never seemed to hear about game jams I wanted to participate in within a reasonable time to actually get them done. And the “build a game in 7 days with no time to prepare or think about it ahead of time” jams are really intimidating to me!

But recently, out of curiosity, I checked out itch.io to see how easy it is to actually sell games on here. The answer: really easy! So I uploaded my old Memoirs of an Angel game and started looking around. Lo and behold, there’s a plethora of game jams here on itch.io of all varieties. So, I joined a couple I thought were flexible enough that I might actually be able to submit something for.

The first is SuNoFes 2021, which runs from July 1st 2021 to September 3rd 2021, and is for visual novels or story-based games. I (perhaps stupidly) went ahead and joined it at the end of July even though there was only a month left to prepare my submission.

The second is Yuri Game Jam 2021, which runs from September 30th 2021 to December 1st 2021, and is for games focusing on queer relationships between women. But that’s a story for later.

Designing the Game

I joined this game jam that was already half-over but allowed unfinished entries, thinking, “Oh, I can probably make a short visual novel in a month.” Unlike the Yuri Game Jam, I started with no ideas of what to make at all. I just started browsing free visual novel assets and hoped something would spark some inspiration.

And that’s when I found her, my main character:

She was so adorable with her little book, I knew I had to use her somehow. I looked up the artist and found that she had a few visual novel sprite sets for sale in a similar style, so I picked those up, too. Then I found that the artist also had some beautiful visual novel backgrounds for sale, so I bought those as well.

But what can you make with only three girls and a bedroom?

Designing an RPG

Since I have an abundance of fantasy assets from Humble Bundle and other sources, I got the idea to have the girls be playing a tabletop RPG in one of the girls’ bedrooms. Because of the game-within-a-game concept, the jarring differences between the art styles of the purchased assets and the assets I already had made perfect sense, and it also gave the main character a reason to carry that book around, since it’s probably her notes and resources as the Dungeon Master.

It also gave me a chance to design a simple tabletop RPG system. Game design and programming are my favorite aspects of game development, so designing and implementing some sort of more complex 2D gameplay was important to me. But I also wanted to keep the system as simple as possible since my main character is playing with her two friends who are new to RPGs, so I ended up going with a simplified version of this already very simple system: https://www.instructables.com/Pen-and-Paper-RPG/

I knew I wanted to have three attributes in this system, one for each of the characters to specialize in. In order to figure out the best attribute for each character, I had to flesh them out a bit first.

• Lisa: the nerdy, bookish type. I imagine her voice in my head as Kanna from Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. She embodies my introversion, proud love of books and videogames, and not giving a ****.
• Christine: the sporty, headstrong type. She reminds me of when I let loose and let myself be loud. I have to be careful to sensor her voice, because otherwise there would be a lot of swearing.
• Jane: the perfect, goody-two-shoes type. She’s the type to be president of the student council, valedictorian, and captain of the softball team. She reminds me of a friend I had like that in high school, but she also embodies my need to always be right.

I thought about each character and what they would prioritize. Lisa was the most obvious - of course she would value intelligence, a.k.a. Wisdom. The others were more challenging, but then I thought about what “class” each character would be. When I determined that Jane would be some sort of witch or sorceress (she was originally a “Punk Witch”, then a “Rainbow Witch”, then finally a “Moon Sorceress”), it was clear that her strength should be Magic.

But what about Christine? Intelligence and Magic are both pretty typical attributes for a RPG, and in the usual triangle, Christine would have some sort of rogue-based class and/or attribute, like finesse or agility. Christine doesn’t scream “rogue” to me, though - she’s too loud, too in-your-face. She wouldn’t quietly backstab someone from the shadows, she would just walk up to them, say hi, and punch them in the face in the middle of a public square. So, what attribute would she value? That’s when I came up with the idea of her RPG character: a Fairy Princess who rides a skateboard. The idea is so ridiculous, but it’s so Christine. That led me to my final attribute: Style.

Once I had my main characters and three attributes, I started designing some of the enemies and NPCs. Once again, I had a bunch of fantasy assets lying around, so I decided to just use a pack of generic monster icons. For each monster, I rolled literal dice to determine how many points each one has towards Style, Magic, and Wisdom, and then I determined which values were considered high (“Expert”), medium (“Average”), and low (“Novice”). The goal is to eventually base each monster’s personality on what attributes are high or low, but for now they’ll simply be used in combat to determine whether the enemy’s attack succeeded or failed.

Advanced Settings

Another thing I was putting together throughout this process was a list of Advanced Settings I would want to include in the game for players to be able to customize. Usually designing the game inspired new advanced settings, but sometimes it was the other way around and thinking about advanced settings inspired aspects of the game. I’m really happy I started thinking about it so early in the process.

Drafting the Story

Finally, I began thinking about the overall story, both for the “real world” of the game and the game-within-a-game.

I brainstormed some worldbuilding ideas, but since I was using pre-made assets, not all of them could be implemented, or will be implemented in minor ways. For example, there will eventually be Priest NPCs who could represent the gods of the pantheon, though I also like the idea of them each serving some very specific monster-related god.

As I brainstormed, I tried to think like a young girl, like my main characters. Children are so incredibly creative - they aren’t restrained by common sense or conventional wisdom, which allows them to think outside our reality. That’s hard for me, honestly, and I’m afraid it shows in what I’ve done so far. I started out with the idea of a crazy, nonsensical fantasy setting, but ended up with a fairly generic one… but hopefully I’ll be able to clean that up when I have time after the jam.

Because I had five fantasy RPG backgrounds in the pack I was using, I had the idea of making each one a chapter/act, and looked up what a five-act story structure might look like. I wrote the Overall Story with that in mind, and briefly noted how that might play out across the five chapters or Encounters.

Building the Game

After a few days of planning to come up with all of that, I started working on putting the actual game together. Since I knew I was going to use a visual novel format, I chose to use Ren’Py, which is a visual novel engine I’ve used in the past (like…10 years ago).

In one day, I managed to get the main “Encounter” game loop implemented. I wrote mostly pure Python, building out Python classes for Encounters, Scenarios, Heroes, Enemies, NPCs, etc. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that pure Python generally doesn’t play nice with Ren’py’s rollback feature, so I had to turn that off until I can find the time to make all my Python code work with it. Sad trombone.

Since then, I’ve been making steady progress. Most of the gameplay systems are implemented, including merchants, treasure, campfires, and story scenarios. I still have a few pieces of the battle system to implement, but then I’ll be done programming-wise.

…Which means that all that’s left is the writing, my least favorite part. Writing is hard for me. I’ve always loved coming up with stories and characters, and I used to love writing as a kid. Whenever I had some downtime, I would write short stories about the characters living in my head. But somewhere along the line, writing became a very stressful activity for me, and now I avoid it.

Honestly, the main blocker for me making progress on my work-in-progress games (like the Memoirs reboot) is the writing. The fear of writing a sub-par story is paralyzing. I don’t get like this with writing code or anything else, but something within me thinks that if I can’t write a perfect, amazing story on the first try, then I’m a failure of a game developer. And like Jane, I don’t like failure, I want it to be perfect.

I’m really trying to get over this fear and force myself to write. I’m about 1/5 through writing the main story so far, so we’ll see how it goes.

Going Forward

I’ve made enough progress on this game that I can at least feel confident enough in submitting it by the 3rd of September, even if it’s not “done” by then. Even if I only submit the first chapter (1/5 of the game), that’s still more than I’ve done in the last 10 years.

And once I finish writing the main story, I have a lot of features I’d like to add. Some of it will require more writing (ugh), but a lot of it will involve some fun programming work, so I’m excited. We’ll have to see whether I get to those before or after the next game jam, though.

Anyway, thank you for reading this ridiculously long post! I’ll try to write smaller, more frequent updates in the future.

Hope you all get a chance to play the game. And don’t forget to let me know if you enjoyed it. :)