Welcome to Week 5 of my project, “I Created A Video Game in 8 Weeks, Using RPG Maker MZ,” where I create a self-contained video game quest with impact, choices, and multiple endings, from scratch, using RPG Maker MZ!
Last week, I focused on villains, theme, tone balance, and map design. Read all about it, here!
Want to play the game in its current form? Click this link!
(The password to access the game is: beginning.)
A few things to know before playing the game:
-- The game works in Firefox and Safari, but people have experienced loading issues when using Google Chrome.
-- You will need to make the game full screen in order to read any of the text boxes. You can do this by clicking on the ‘fullscreen’ icon on the bottom right.
--If you reach the “naming your character” screen without seeing any text appear, you need to restart the game in fullscreen mode.
--With the exception of outside walls, fences, cliffs, and border trees, everything that the player can touch is interactive. This means interior walls. This means beds. This means empty countertops. If your character meets resistance while moving, it probably means that he’s touching something interactive.
Let’s Dive In.
My Goals for this Week
To finish the bedroom map
To design the town map, and all of the necessary narrative elements within it
To figure out how to force necessary exposition on the player in a fun and enjoyable way (and then write and program said exposition)
To redesign the Messiah’s character to make him a more interesting, 3-dimensional villain
Hard Skills Learned
Programming a Game-Over screen (and the preceding dramatic sequence)
Automatically-triggered events (or “how to force exposition on the player and/or block off map entrances”)
I almost achieved all of my goals: my town design is about 70% done, and redesigning the messiah character...well, that wound up having a ripple effect that completely changed the second half of the game.
I’m happy about the changes, and I think the game is better as a result. My new problem is: I now have several brand-new endings that I need to choose between.
So that’s next week’s goal: finalize the new game endings, and then begin programming them. No big deal, right? (I ask, nervously.)
To read about how I designed exposition dialogue, click here! [Coming soon!]
To read about the Messiah’s new character redesign (and the new second half of the game), click here! [Coming soon!]
First thing’s first: each of my test players thought that they had explored everything my game had to offer (one of my test players even made it his mission to do so), but when I went over the game with each of them later, we discovered that they hadn’t even found half of what I had done.
Naturally, as someone who just spent the last five weeks creating the first 10-ish minutes of a fully-functioning, playable game, with the intention of showing the game to potential employers as proof that I can do this professionally, the prospect of having less than half of my work seen by players was scary.
Therefore, if you’ve already played the game (or if you haven’t), I invite you to watch this video of me exploring each object interaction within the opening Bedroom Map, in order to give you a sense of how many interactions there are available throughout the game, and an idea of how to find them.
Missing from this video: the hidden Game Over screen! Do you think you can find it?
...I cover the finished bedroom map in more detail, in the post Creating the Bedroom!
The Town Map
Welcome to Town.
This town doesn’t currently have a name, although I should christen it. As I expect is exceedingly obvious, the map design is incomplete.
I’m having trouble deciding what to put into the blank spaces. If I create buildings, I either have to cut off the player’s access to them, or build interiors (which would double my workload) with people and objects to interact with within them (which would triple my workload).
If I decide to do something else--say, have a kind of town square, with one central visual (like a fountain, if I can dig up some appropriate tiles), and a few characters to interact with, or create an outdoor market--I face the same problem: limited tile options.
It’s difficult to create a town with visual variety when you already used most of the available tiles to create the potato church and its backyard.
Speaking of the potato church, I’m pretty proud of it.
This design took me hours. Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to put there, but because most of my creations wound up too visually distracting or off-putting when exploring the map, visually unbalanced (one area would draw the eye too heavily), or didn’t communicate the silent narrative story I was trying to tell: that of an area laden with food, and seemingly rich with bounties that they hoarded for themselves.
I wanted the potato church to be an area that your eyes slid over easily (without being held captive by the sense that something was visually weird, wrong, or unbalanced).
In the end, I think I came up with a design that successfully signals the visual narrative I wanted to tell, without being a distraction or an eyesore.
Before I started making this game, my game development daydreams all involved the excitement of having the writing sing. I had no idea before I began, how important map design was to the storytelling of the game--both gameplay-wise, and narrative-wise.
I have so much respect for people who do this as their job: creating and designing maps that steer a player through the game while telling visual narrative stories, all while maintaining game logic and world logic and establishing relationships, politics, socioeconomic information and overarching worldbuilding--so seamlessly that a player doesn’t even notice. True masters of their craft.
But back to my first-time map design efforts...
The Graveyard
Several years ago, the area was ravaged by a famine. As a result, several townspeople died in rapid succession.
Have you ever written epitaphs for an entire town?
I have, now.
Did this add anything to the plot of my story? No. Did it make a scene feel infused with tension, introduce a tone that wasn’t already there, or give you any insight into the main character? No.
Was it fun, absolutely worth it, a 10/10 experience, and something that I would do again? You bet your ass it was.
But this week wasn’t all fun and games (games, geddit?).
Problem-Solving: Alphabetical Self-Switches
I made a frustrating discovery this week.
When play-testing a fun bedroom interaction where the main character has the choice of freeing a teddy bear from behind a pillow or “letting it suffer,” I found out that self-switches must be triggered alphabetically (A-B-C-D) in order to work.
See these tabs?
Each one represents a change within the event: something leading to something else. For example, in the screenshot above, the red lines each represent a self-switch (and its corresponding tab). In the case of a player selecting “Let him out to breathe!” on a choices tree, “Control Self Switch : B = ON” triggers a self-contained event switch where Mr. Fluffybuns is freed from his pillow prison.
I wanted this interaction to consist of a series of three choice trees, where the player was given the option to keep Mr. Fluffybuns trapped three times. I then wanted to unlock a special event for those sadistic (or curious) few who chose to keep him trapped for the entire time.
The only problem is: RPG Maker MZ has a limit to how many self-switches you are allowed to use per event (your self-switches options are A, B, C, and D).
With two of my self-switches already dedicated to freeing Mr. Fluffybuns and this little hidden “if you went back, you found it” moment (GIF below), I didn’t have enough space.
I still feel like the solution is staring me in the face, but--for a hidden easter egg that few players will ever find, within my strict project time-limit--I can’t justify the time it would take to figure this out.
That’s disappointing, but fine. Not every object interaction can play out the way I see it in my head. I could fit in two choices, though, so that’s what I did. However, on my playthrough I found out that my event triggers weren’t working for the choices that I had managed to program.
Which led me to the self-switches discovery.
Turns out, you need to program self-switches in alphabetical order. This means that I cannot trigger “Self-Switch A” if I am already on the “Self-Switch B” tab, etc. I can only move forward.
This may not sound like a problem, but if you have to go through event switches in a particular order, your choices are then limited to: programing the most consistent switch (the one players have the most chances to make) las-- which can get confusing when you’re going back through and checking your work--or using up valuable self-switch slots while programming an event.
In my case, I chose the former, and re-programmed Mr. Fluffybun’s freedom to be a later self-switch.
Conclusion
This week was a doozy.
So much happened, and by the end of it, I felt like a wrung-out sponge. A really proud, wrung-out sponge.
That eight-week goal feels less and less realistic by the day, but I’m still hoping to have a completed version of my game by the end of that time frame.
My goals for Week Six:
--Write a full plot outline for the brand-new, redesigned second half of the game
--Finalize the design for town
--Split the expository character “Siegfried” into two expository characters--each with their own separate “Here’s what you need to know” dialogues.
Click here to read all about it! (Link coming soon!)