One hope

- A post-Mortem

30 days. A game engine I had never used before. An overly ambitious idea. A lesson in managing expectations and focusing efforts on the things that count.

As far as game jams go, I’ve always found the time crunch to be far too significant. 2-3 days of non-stop development wasn’t the way to go. It wasn’t until the Indie Game Maker Contest! came around that I would finally give the concept a chance. Unlike other game jams, the setup of this contest was significantly more long form. Contestants are given 31 days to develop, complete and submit a game.

My journey throughout the contest was nothing short of incredible, and frustrating. So let’s start from the beginning.

The concept

Unlike other game jams which have a central theme around which the contestants design their games, the Indie Game Maker Contest! was open ended. It instead listed requirements that each contestant must fulfill with their entry, such as the game being complete and of reasonable length.

This left creators, and me, to create whatever their hearts desired.

I started by creating basic game design document to keep track of primary goals, assets needed, story & gameplay elements that were to be strictly adhere to. This process helped refine the scope of what I wanted to accomplish for this game.

The story itself would be straightforward: aliens have ravaged earth for generations and the few who remain wish to escape to the stars.

I chose this story in part because of how open it was. I didn’t know what my time schedule was for the next month and therefore needed to allow myself a level of flexibility when it came to the content of the game. I could start with the broad strokes at first and, if time allowed, later on add finer details and nuance to the story.

Inspiration, of course, was heavily drawn from the Mass Effect series of games. In particular I aimed to emulate the story style of those games, where choices would directly influence later aspects of the story and gameplay. I knew this would require extensive planning, but I felt confident that it would be feasible as long as the scope of the story was contained.

What I did right

Going into this I had a few resources at the ready:

• An RPG Maker VX Ace license

• Various 2D character and terrain assets

• A variety of sound effects and music assets

• Plenty of time and a passion for games

All which were purchased as a single Humble Bundle. This allowed me to focus on the design of the game itself and let the art and sound be what they were. I played to my strengths.

This left the following to be developed:

• Maps/rooms

• Programming game logic

• Writing quests and characters

• Planning story and branching story lines

• …and a lot more

Finally, there was the matter of learning a new game engine. I again leaned on my personal strengths. I went into full research mode, and within days I formed the basic skills needed to utilize the engine. These skills would become further refined as I progressed with development.

Environments and the quest for artistic vision

If you aren’t familiar with RPG Maker styled game engines, the normal method by which rooms and maps are created are by using a sprite texture sheet and placing 2D texture “squares” in a defined grid. Each square within this grid had a resolution of 32x32 pixels. There were also 3 layers within the game engine that allowed users to place sprites on top of each other, so long as the sprites had transparencies enabled.

This is where I made my first major change to the game engine.

I wanted to create a seamless map where various textures would be blended together to blur edges of where one material ended, and another began. Furthermore, I could layer textures together in a more “believable” fashion. I could create scenery that felt alive.

I didn’t just want this.

I also wanted this.

After extensive searching and reading, I discovered that several modifications existed for the RPG Maker game engine. By utilizing third party parallax and (later) action combat systems I was able to come much closer to my initial artistic vision for the game.

Combat System

Where RPG Maker shines is its Final Fantasy-esque turn based combat system.

This is where I implemented a second major change: a real-time action combat system.

This addition changed two primary attributes of my game

1. Combat no longer occurred as a separate room instance and would instead happen in real time.

2. Movement was changed from a restrictive 4-direction tile-based system to an 8-direction system with full freedom of motion.

As a direct result of these changes, I had to carefully consider player abilities when designing combat encounters. Players and enemies could now attack at will rather than per turn, and the freedom of movement also applied to the enemies. What I discovered was that there existed a fine line between skillfully defeating opponents and blindly attacking them until they were defeated.

This made balancing combat an interesting challenge. At what point does it get too difficult? The answer to this would come after eventual testing. What I found was that, at the start, between 2-3 enemies at once could be handled with minor issue, beyond which the encounter became too difficult. As the game progressed, however, I observed that players began to figure out better ways to deal with enemies. This allowed me to scale up the overall difficulty of later encounters to continue to challenge players and providing them with an intense experience.

Consistency is key

By this point I had started to develop a daily rhythm. Half of the day would be spent creating the various assets each map needed, like ground layers, parallax layers and collision layers. Then there would be a definitive shift towards working on the game itself. Programming player functionality, designing combat, event triggers, and so on.

The purpose of this was to maximize my own effectiveness. With only 31 days, I needed to balance the workload upfront to make equal progress on all fronts and leave any increased focus for the final week where the game should be reaching completion.

This came with the important lesson: setting a schedule and sticking to it.

Oten times it was tempting to spend the entire day just drawing up maps or programming gameplay, but this would’ve only have been to my detriment. Having a regular schedule let me set realistic short-term goals that were achievable. It also gave me the benefit of being able to monitor the progress and health of all aspects of my game by having some level of daily contact with them.

Collaboration

Finally, when it came to writing the story and dialogue for all of my characters, I knew this would be a personal weakness. I therefore reached out to a friend of mine, Michael Heubel, and asked for his assistance with the process. After discussing the initial aspects of the story and explaining the traits for the core characters, he set off on his own to flesh out the finer details of the story.

During this time, giving each other the respective space and time needed to work proved critical to our working success.

This helped to create a flourishing partnership throughout the remaining 2 weeks of the contest, all while aggressively pursuing our target goals.

Things I can do better next time

This contest didn’t come without its fair share of challenges. At the forefront of them were:

• The right tools might not exist. Don’t spend too much time searching for the ideal and improvise instead.

• Ambition can blind you to reality. Keep goals realistic. Under-promise and over-deliver.

• Learn fast and fail faster. Experimenting with ideas is a great way to discover what works and what doesn't.

• Spending some additional time in pre-production can drastically reduce headaches later in development.

While I personally consider the game a success, there were definitely several pain points that I should have dealt with in a more efficient manner.

In particular, the movement system proved to be rather uncooperative when dealing with certain types of event triggers and NPC interactions. From what I could tell, there was no way to restrict the movement system of NPC’s to prevent erroneous collisions without restricting the movement of the player. While I decided to keep the modded system, this came at the cost of several extra bugs throughout the game that proved difficult to work around. In some cases, the bugs weren’t completely fixed and were left in the game so that the game could continue to function.

In retrospect, giving up the total freedom of movement would have been totally feasible while retaining the real-time combat action system and resulted in significantly less development time spent of resolving errors that arose from a relentless pursuit of extra features. This would have also had the added benefit of making it easier to balance combat now that enemies had a more restrictive and predictable movement to them.

The combat, although fun, required very specific timing on the player’s part. Attacks that would be queued too quickly would be triggered after the movement step, resulting in the player missing their target and swinging backwards.

Finally, there’s the issue of pushing the game engine beyond what it’s capable of handling. The mods were a double-edged sword. They provided a heightened experience for the player and drastically set apart this game from the others. The cost of this was game stability on certain PC’s. The alterations to the way maps would load into the game meant that there were times where the engine would refuse to fully load in assets and simply crash to desktop. This issue was never fully resolved as I had immense difficulty replicating it and given the time constraints, I decided instead to let it be and hoped it would work for the majority of users.

The end Result

Ultimately, I am proud of the work that I did and the accomplishments that were made throughout the month-long development of the game. Though I did not win anything, this proved to be an exhilarating experience. I worked until the last possible minute and wound up putting in almost 250 hours. While it may seem like an excessive commitment, the planned structure of my work meant that each development day had its purpose. I would like to thank my close friends that helped and supported me throughout the project, and I can’t help but look forward to what comes next.

On a final note, if you’re interested in giving the game a try, it can be downloaded here: