Welcome to Week Two 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 learned about map design, how to make objects interactive, and how to transfer players in-between maps. Read all about it, here!
Want to play the game in its current form? Click this link!
(The password to access the game is: potato.)
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.
--Everything that the player can touch is interactive. This means statues. This means barrels. This means weird demons in the corner. If your character meets resistance while moving, it probably means that he’s touching something interactive.
Let’s Dive Into Week Two!
My goals this week were to:
—Write a full plot outline for the entire quest
--Finalize the design for my potato church, and make every single object within the church interactive
--Learn how to create characters and NPCs
--Learn how to use “self-switches”
A Full, Spoiler-Laden Plot Outline
This quest is titled “The Man Who Promised the Moon.”
Once upon a time, there was a starving community, struggling through a famine.
One day, a man came into the community with the promise of a better life. He had been to the moon, he said, and discovered that it is a giant potato--enough to feed everyone in the community for their entire lives.
Everyone was thrilled. Their children would no longer die from hunger, frail and withered, in their arms. But there was a catch.
This stranger proclaimed that in order to protect the potato moon from being stolen from others who would take the potato moon for themselves and leave this community starving once more, he would safeguard the secrets of how to reach it. For the good of the community, you see--not because he was lying his face off. (By the way, the stranger was starving during this time as well--not that he let the others know this.)
The stranger--the messiah--the church founder--”HE”--set up a system. Once a month, anyone in the “We’re going to reach the potato moon” community (cult) needed to pay him an elaborate tribute--Food, drink, women--and if the tribute were worthy enough, the stranger would give one yes-or-no response to a single question about how to reach the potato moon.
So, for example, they would bring up dozens of goodies, and then get to ask something like “Did you use a rocket?”
They would get something useless, like “Hmmmm…yes,” and that would be their question for the month.
By the time the player finds the church, this has been going on for a while. For so long, actually, that the outside community isn’t starving anymore. The famine is over. All non-church members are enjoying prosperity and full stomachs, which the church members are still sending most of their food, goods, and women as tribute up to this messiah figure, in exchange for their one-question-a-month.
The quest begins in the throes of one of these tributes/offerings. The church members are getting ready to create a tribute good enough to earn a yes-or-no question, because they have to earn that knowledge. If their tribute isn’t good enough, the messiah says “Ha, nice try; bring me more next month,” basically.
The player winds up going to the messiah’s house (only it’s huge), speaking to the messiah, speaking to the women there, and learning what’s going on. I think that the player gets introduced to what’s happening, because a family begs them to safely escort their daughter up to the mansion to become one of the tributes.
Along the way, the player can speak with her and find out how she’s feeling, and get more details on the whole situation. The player can attempt to reason with the girl to run away, but the girl will FREAK OUT and refuse. She is fully indoctrinated. She may even threaten something with G.R.A.N.D.M.A. if the player doesn’t take her, to give the player a reason to do so, rather than just feeling peer pressure to deliver this sex slave up to a literal cult leader.
When the player delivers her, the women take her in, and the messiah says. “I haven’t seen you before. And you look extremely well-fed. You’re not from the church, are you?”
The player calls out the messiah for his deception. And then we get background on the messiah--will definitely get backstory and a sob story, and show the messiah’s personality as a sniveling, cowardly loser, who displays no remorse.
Example:
--Messiah: “Listen, my mother told me I would never amount to anything, but look at me, now! All of these people love me! They send their daughters to me! They trust me to help them eat when they reach the potato moon.”
--Player: “But the potato moon isn’t real.”
--Messiah: “Well, sure. But they don’t know that.” (The messiah’s character portrait will wink while saying this line.)
It’s likely that the messiah will offer the player a cut of the pie, so to speak, in order to entice the player into keeping the messiah’s secret. OR, much like the girl’s threat from earlier, threatens to mess up the player’s journey to G.R.A.N.D.M.A., or their experience there, or chances of being let in, or something (depending on what G.R.A.N.D.M.A. turns out to be).
Example:
--Messiah: “I have connections! Do you want G.R.A.N.D.M.A. to turn you away? I can make it happen! I WILL make it happen! You watch!”
The player will then have two choices: to expose the lie, or to maintain it. Both have severe consequences, but for different people.
If the player chooses to expose the lie, the messiah gets torn to shreds by the church members. Or eaten (they are starving), or--this is the really dark version--kept alive as a prisoner to “pay tribute” every year in the form of a body part in a celebratory stew that they DON’T EVEN EAT. They just make it, celebrate making it, and leave it under the moon for irony, and let it rot or get eaten by animals. Those are three ideas floating around. But safe to say, the messiah is in for a world of trouble if he gets exposed.
Also, the women go home to their friends and family.
If the player chooses to maintain the lie, almost all of the potato church members will die. They will starve to death--probably with the exception of a small child in order to give us an explanation, while they cry over their parents’ bodies.
The women up at the mansion with the messiah will be wracked with guilt and horror: they entered into sexual slavery to save their families, and it did nothing. And here they are, with full bellies but in hell, with all of their loved ones dead. The player can speak with them after the rest of the church community starves to death, and the women will share their guilt and fears, and worry about what to do or where to go.
They are worried about going back into town, and having people see them not as tragic heroines who sacrificed themselves in order to increase their loved ones’ chances of reaching the potato moon--but as women who ensured that their own stomachs stayed full, while their family and friends slowly starved to death.
They aren’t sure what to do: do they stay where they are, do they take the chance in town, or do they leave for somewhere new, altogether? The player can convince them to do any of the three.
If the player convinces them to stay where they are, where life is awful, but food is ensured, then if the player returns, the women will tell the player that they’re miserable, but fed. And the messiah will confide in the player that the food stores are running out, and he’s not sure what will happen when they are finally empty. He’s nervous about the near-future.
If the player convinces them to take the chance and go into town, then when the player next visits town, he will see that the women have been welcomed with open arms, have adopted the child that survived the mass-starvation, and are working together in a kind of commune to build a better life.
If the player convinces them to take the chance and start an entirely new life elsewhere, then the women just disappear off of the maps. And when the player next visits the messiah up at the mansion, the player finds him surrounded by alcohol, lamenting his lost luxury.
Example:
Messiah: “I had everything. Food, wine, women...where did it all go wrong???”
If the player chooses to maintain the lie, they will end up indirectly killing a LOT of people.
Regardless of what they choose, the maps will change, the interiors will change, and the conversations with townsfolk (hopefully; I only have 20 general switch slots, which [as I understand it] means 20 “if-then” computer triggers. For example: if the player chooses to expose the lie, this dialogue gets triggered, this map change gets triggered, these NPCs disappear, etc. I’m really hoping RPG Maker MZ has the space to accomodate all of the changes per each ending, in the same game file) will change.
The player will know that they have shaped the world in a huge way. Their choices had really big impacts on the lives of a lot of characters, maps, communities, etc. Whatever they decide will be the catalyst for what will become a whispered story from town to town for generations (I mean, there’s no proof of that, but the gravity of the situation implies it).
Surprise! I actually wound up redesigning the messiah to make him a more interesting, three-dimensional character, and it wound up changing the entire second half of the game!
To read the full plot outline for the new second half of the game (including the new multiple endings), click here! (Coming soon!)
Potato Church
This week, I put everything I learned last week to use, and created my potato church.
The potato church design has been set, every single object in the room has been made interactive, and NPCs are available nearby with finished designs and dialogue (with the exception of the main-quest dialogue, which is evolving in time with the project).
Here’s a breakdown of what I learned this week:
1.) Self-Switches
2.) Character Design
3.) Sound Design (I’m at the very beginning of learning this)
4.) Dialogue text manipulation
5.) Branching Dialogue/Text Choices
Character Design
LOOK AT THIS VERY GOOD BOY
