As soon as I heard about the Harold Jam just a couple weeks prior to its start, I immediately wanted to join. I dropped what I was doing and started thinking how I wanted to approach my one-month project.

Spoiler alert!

My starting assumptions:

One of my favorite things to learn is how different devs work with different skillsets and different starting assumptions so they make different decisions on the kind of game they want to make. Some of mine included:

• Emotional impact is my highest priority. After all a game should be fun, or if I'm doing a story game then emotional impact would be my number one priority, not so much technical execution. Often I will ask myself questions like "what emotions should the player be feeling when they walk through this empty map?"
• I should try writing a story from most essential to plotline first. I'm too scatterbrained a person to be writing from start to finish, I wrote this game from finish, to start, to middle, then added smaller details. When I began this story from the finish line, I now have a central point of focus and a theme to build all my content around!
• My overarching theme would be the contradictory nature between the actuality of heroism and the idea of heroism! When I set my mind on doing a Harold game, I took a good look at who Harold is. Sword-wielding, casts heal and spark... My thought process went like the galaxy-brain meme where the next premises get more and more absurd:
  1. Harold uses a sword.
  2. Harold needs a sword to be a hero by definition!
  3. It MUST be a longsword. No rapiers, no katanas!
  4. SPOILER ALERT: Does giving the longsword to the spiky-haired bad guy make them a hero?
• For this jam, I should minimize production time for code and graphics in order to prioritize story content! I've done many jams where I did graphics, I felt it was time to work on my writing skills instead!
• Elements need be qualitatively different from each other! Because I decided Harold should be a leading mage protagonist due to the premise of my story, this meant I had to figure out a spell system suited for a jam game with a short play time. I wanted to avoid spell systems where I can functionally identical spells with different attack animations and a different associated elemental ID. So, I decided on:
  1. Fire being low-MP single-target spells
  2. Thunder being multi-target to stay faithful with Harold's Spark
  3. Ice spells hitting harder with successive  use
  4. Water attacks removing buffs
  5. Wind and earth hitting physical damage, acts first and last respectively.
  6. Holy spells hit percentage damage so they function as "boss" spells
  7. Dark elements have a drain effect
• Rules of the game need to be simple! I made sure all player attacks had perfect accuracy, equipment slots are limited to three for simplicity.

New lessons learned mid-jam:

I wasn't going to know everything about executing my game idea and learned several things on-the-go:

• Battles should be easy, but long enough so the player has to react to enemy AI. I should expect players to be using ineffective techniques as there will be a learning curve. If players guess wrong, there should be room for forgiveness for bad luck or bad plays. The first battles need to do tickle damage to give time for players to figure out what strategies are optimal
  
• Battles are most fun when you kick ass. They are least fun when you lose. So, I balanced the game so the player won't get immediate payoff but must work to snowball their way to victory. This was executed by making buffs and debuffs a central mechanic of this game.
• Being more consistent with establish a writing style. Some conventions I nailed down before hand but new issues came up on-the-go. Most of them I don't have the vocabulary to describe. How often do I use line breaks to maintain sentence readability? Do I split a characters response into one message box or two? Some of these questions I have will only be answered as I go.
• Quality of jokes matters more than quantity. I found I threw in a lot of low effort jokes to fill in the space before it became clear they did not add quality to my work.
• Comedic tone gets much harder to maintain over a long time. I cannot tell if this is a me-problem or a consistent challenge built into the genre. I have researched individual tropes a lot but not so much have I learned about the process of writing itself. Jokes that had been central to the overarching theme can get stale very quickly, and I had to take care not to derail the plot with new and irrelevant jokes near the climax. My EPIC Dungeon idea comes to mind, which was added mostly to add padding to build tension towards the finale.
• Meta commentary isn't usually amusing and a better first priority for me is to learn to play tropes straight. Eventually I found I still require a semi-porous 4th wall due to the central premise of my game. Still I had to remove many low-quality 4th wall breaks that do not contribute to the narrative. 
• I now realize I cannot only write for myself but be considerate to the audience. However my ideological biases are going to unavoidably bleed into what I write and I should carry that with pride. For example, Lucius was a convenient sockpuppet to satirize a common belief that ideas are what changes the world where I see a world that operates in a "might makes reality" sort of deal.  I think I have a reasonable expectation people may find the way I wrote this character to be unfunny and shocking. Things I may think is highly cathartic may be shocking or unamusing to another person. I will be more considerate next time.

The downsides:

• I almost wrote myself into a corner. I had a great opportunity to write an aesop on how heroism needed to be understood by the personality content of the person and not surface appearances. This would completely undermine the punchline I have saved up at the end. It took a while before I realized my best workaround would be that heroism is about the journey, that way my overarching theme is communicated without contradicting the internal logic of the narrative.
• By the time I thought about it, it was too late to export to HTML5. Preloading is a great feature but would be very difficult to implement in the middle of production as an afterthought. Next project I start will be designed to play in-browser at the very beginning!
• This project taught me how unfinishable my previous project was. What this month-long jam showed me were challenges I never dealt with when I wrote individual scenes, not finished stories composed by the sum of its parts. I now had to think of continuity errors, I looked at how much tighter a project is when I use a workflow that prevents feature creep.

What went right:

• This workflow of minimizing graphics work and maximizing cutscene writing let me finish this project extremely early and gave me over a week and a half for polish!
• Because this project was so short, I was able to whip up ideas I wanted to implement but would have added to feature creep or aimless worldbuilding if I kept to a larger project!
• I didn't expect to receive a compliment for a wide, varied soundtrack but it shouldn't be surprising in hindsight
• Story writing I found has much more potential for me to communicate a philosophical point nicely where being direct might make me sound abrasive!

Things to try next project:

1. Relatability is key to people identifying with a story. This I learned while I was researching the craft of writing and a mistake I learned only after the fact was that my main character Harold doesn't have much for internal struggles aside for trying to attain an idea of heroism.
   
2. Limit the number of playable characters. Large casts are a fun idea and all but finishing Harold's SWORD quest showed me exactly how much more work that large casts become when you have to find room and time to introduce and flesh out a new character.
3. Make and finish my next project in three months maximum. Harold's SWORD quest gave me a chance to learn about base-level mistakes I did with my previous project. I should make more small projects to learn even more before I shoot at years-long projects.

Looking forward to Harold 2023:

Once I get the hang of how to write well, I can easily switch back to my tested strategy of art-heavy, simple-narrative jam games with simple mechanics. Now that I have a solid RTP game under my name, I should be ready to move on!