MILK quest Design Philosophy

I had a vague idea for what I wanted to for Harold Jam 2023, but it went something like this:

1. I wanted a game that took inspiration from the messy experiences I had from the George Floyd protests of 2020 and my time at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. Among the lessons I learned was that battles in real life isn't purely physical, but has a psychological aspect as well. The battle system designed for MILK quest reflects my real world experiences with violent conflict.
2. A game that would be a spiritual successor to a RPG project I shelved after realizing how overscoped the project is and that my writing skills would not be up to par to execute it to its full potential.
3. The protagonist ought to be a grocery store worker who supplies milk to people, an accessible DIY remedy used by protesters to treat pepper spray and tear gas attacks.
4. My highest priorities is to score top if not second in graphics, score reasonably high in gameplay, and score reasonably in writing. Comedy will be put on the backburner because the premise of my jam is fundamentally not funny. SWORD quest, from last year's Harold Jam was destined to be a comedy RPG because I had a funny premise and a funny ending punchline, but not this round for 2023. MILK quest will contain heavy topics with occasional comedy relief to prevent the story from becoming too serious.

But there were several issues I had to address if I were to take this vague idea and make an amazing 1-month project.

• One, is obviously project scope, turning my idea of an overscoped project and condensing it down to the most important essential parts. There are many planned mechanics from my shelved project, I have to pick just the most important ones to display.
• Two, is the aesthetics. I could not reliably use RTP assets to convey the world required to embellish my story. The available modern RTP tiles are stylized around a Japanese aesthetic which would be very difficult for me, an American to use.
• Three is I need to be mindful that all kinds of people will look at my story and I come from a very specific world view. Being a jam game, the target audience would be very different than a full-featured version of my game premise. So, I must find a balance between authentically expressing my perspective while being agreeable to a wide audience. While the George Floyd protests were the largest protests in American history, the spirit of rebellion isn't something everyone takes interest in.

The Morale System

I'm glad to have done a lot of research into what makes a successful jam, though I certainly can still do more. My goal would be to pick select few game mechnanic, and showcase it. With a 1-hour limit, I can only put out so much game for the limited attention span that jams must contend with. I felt it was right to use some old plugins from my shelved project and my options include:

•   A Morale System which creates a 'second health bar', which if it depletes causes the battler to flee the battle.
• A supporting state system to compliment the morale system, built around emotions. Battlers can be angry, anxious, hopeless, calm, inspired, and more.
• My own custom shop and trade system, which I designed to be able to convey non-capitalist relations of distribution. The default shop system that comes with RMMV doesn't cut it!
• A text messaging system, since the default messaging and eventing system cannot properly convey the asynchronous communication dynamic we deal with in the modern world.

The most obvious choice is probably to make a jam game with my morale system. It originally transformed the TP bar and TP mechanics into a Morale bar which acts like a secondary health bar. Once that morale bar depletes, that counts as a loss condition which leads to the battler leaving the battle. That was a massive mistake. A TP system would make more sense with the style of combat I was building so it would be a much smarter idea to transform the MP bar and mana-based mechanics into a Morale bar. So far this has caused far less problems compared to the original approach of turning TP into my Morale bar. A rehaul of that old plugin was very well worth it! While my morale system was originally designed for a modern/scifi setting, I found it's actually not that difficult to apply the concept in a fantasy setting.

If I were to use my morale system as my main focus, it definitely means I am doing a game that primarily features battles! Though, I need just enough story to contextualize this.

For my latter plugins with my trade system and text messaging, I may have to showcase in a jam where battles are not my main focus. I will have to think about how to bring those mechanics out to properly showcase.

Aesthetics

Not being able to use RTP due to how poorly they work for my intended game feel, I figure that this round I would have to bring my own art skills to skin the game. This is a decision I had to cautiously make because this greatly increases the project scope. I thought about my ideal art direction for this project and it came down to something like this:

1. NO OUTLINES! They are a time sink and I already know how to convey forms without contour lines. I will definitely lose potential readability if the boundary between my subject and the background is less clear, but it is not worth justifying the extra minutes required to draw them.
2. No North/South sprites! I decided that it is ideal that I go with a side scroller perspective to avoid needing North and South sprites which are honestly extremely time consuming to draw and animate. They also tend to read poorly because the silhouetting is much harder to convey with so much foreshortening. By designing an art direction that does not need North/South sprites, I cut drawing time into roughly three quarters of the time.
3. Fully animate run and walk cycles! This is a strength that I would not be able to bring to the table had I went with RTP. So, if I were to win graphics first place, this is basically mandatory. In general it's a strength I need to bring out regardless.
   
4. Tall sprites! I originally thought of doing simple 24x24 map sprites but they're much harder to be expressive when most of the sprite's area is face. By doing 24x48, it becomes much easier to draw gestures and convey personality with walk and run gaits. 24x24 limits me to cute faces with stubby and unexpressive poses.
5. Minimal shading! The theory goes is that the vast majority of your emotional expression comes from how you use your positive and negative space. You get diminishing returns the more highly rendered your style goes. Speed is far more important than technical flex. As such most of my background tiles are solid color, the theory also goes is that its effectiveness relies primarily on how they occupy the game screen, and whether they are correctly proportioned compared with our characters. It gets awfully funny because in a vaccuum, these tilesets won't win any awards as they will look extremely cheap if it was theoretically packaged into an asset pack.
6. Anime-ish faces(?) I could have easily gone with the silly and exaggerated styles I attempted for my shelved project but figured it may be worth using a more animesque style that has stronger likeness with the RTP heroes.
7. No name window! Maybe one of the weirder decisions but I pay very close attention to the space not just used in mapping and character design, but for how text fills a space in a message box too! Trust me, having four whole lines for writing was actually very clumsy to have and I could not notice it more strongly from my previous jams. The name window also bleeds into the space reserved for walkable areas. So far I do not regret ditching the name window!

The Writing

This is probably my biggest weakness. I should remember that I relate with the world differently from other people so my attention can be overly focused on the wrong parts. In what ways, I'm less sure about. Maybe something I should research in depth as the year passes by. However my hunch is, whether it's a good or bad hunch, is that I should focus on how the events within my story affect the characters in the narrative. Human empathy has a much stronger effect than any biased portrayal I would write with law enforcement. Time will tell if that's a good hunch to follow. I will definitely have to engage with media discussions to have a better grip of how other people relate with characters and story; it's not enough for me to rely only on my own feelings for guidance.

What next?

There are just eight/seven days left of the jam. Plenty of time as I have literally nothing else going on in life. The three testers who gave me feedback tells me that I mostly have a very solid game going on. Let's see how the rest of the jam plays out...