Despite the results of the voting period being contentious, I feel I have a good overview of how I did - who scored around where I scored, who scored higher, and what makes an entry score lower. A lot of what I write here will have already been covered by earlier posts, but this post I will write to summarize what I had already wrote and then some more

My goals

Back when I finished my entry for last year's Harold Jam, the lessons I learned taught me that my main long-term project was not viable. I had to think, how would I move forward? What was immediate on my mind is that I make a miniature version of my long term project for next year's Harold Jam.

With my previous project, it was conceptualized to be a story that draws from some life-changing experiences I had from the Summer of 2020. It's due to these experiences that I will come from a very uncommon background which I think makes for a solid base of experiences to write an interesting story from! Among the lessons I learned was that real life violence isn't a simple battle of attrition but has a hugely psychological dimension. The violent protests I had experienced showed me first hand the asymmetrical battles between protesters and law enforcement which one side had all the weapons, but the other side had a fighting spirit and sheer numbers.

Another thing I learned was how creative protesters can get when using ordinary items in this sort of context. This was the inspiration for the name MILK quest, which was based on a hero who uses milk to treat those attacked with chemical weapons.

Once I had my story premise, I got started with conceptualizing everything else. This was what I had figured:

1. The best protagonist for this premise had to be Therese. For a "MILK quest" protagonist to make sense in their setting, they have to be a grocery worker. Not exactly the most glorious of protagonist ideas. That somber look she carries in her default artwork makes her very fitting for a working-class protagonist.
2. With the available RTP protagonists, an arrangement that spells out "MALT" was ideal to keep in line with the game premise. This meant my heroes were to be Marsha, Alex, Lucius, and Therese in the back.
3. A decision this jam inherited from my previous project also means that the protagonist cannot be the hero character. Games with heavy topics like these (to my limited knowledge) I believe work better if the protagonist is relatively unopinionated.
4. A main theme I settled with working on was to contrast the actuality of heroism versus the ideal of heroism. This was in part that my game premise means I'm working with anti-heroes. One of my bolder decisions was to include a B story which my 'neutral' protagonist is reading a story so I could juxtapose two versions of heroism.
5. I also felt I could also do a C story featuring Priscilla as the subject of an unwanted cult following. This is to give even more juxtaposition to highlight how leaders cannot spearhead a movement by themselves, that the people who do most of the legwork for society-level change are the people on the bottom.
6. I was also set on what the ending had to be, it had to end where the reformist gains power instead of the radicals due to being far more approachable. Not only was there a real basis that movements tend to end like this in the United States, I thought was most appropriate landing for a jam game with this subject.
7. This was a game I should do my own graphics for. The available RTP graphics were not suited to conveying my intended setting, and this was my best strength that I should put forward.
8. This game's premise is inevitably going to be dark with moments of humor and my art direction should reflect this.

My studies

The lessons I learned from Harold Jam 2022 meant I knew I had to do some serious homework on story writing. I jumped straight to horror as I figured I should start small and learn how to use some of their genre's conventions to build suspense. So far so good!

Getting started with art production

Since I was sure of what I was doing, I hassled with almost zero experimentation with finding an appropriate art direction

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! This plus the decisions to ignore north/south sprites were the only aesthetic decision I changed after conception. 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 'cartoon' 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!

Musical Selection

I had found this music pack sold as part of official DLC which I thought was absolutely perfect for the intended mood and tone for MILK quest. The lack of melodies and emphasis on drums seemed really fitting for dark and urban settings with very high energy. I got the pack some time during a sale, and have listened to it during conceptualization to better coordinate my direction with sound and graphics.

Mid-development pivots

So while I was extremely sure of myself in graphics, writing isn't my strongest suit. There were multiple times I changed direction because it became clear mid-development some parts of my original idea would not work.

• I originally planned on doing a friendly parody with Marsha and Lucius being stand-ins for two variants of radicalism. I realized you can only write your fellow protagonists so unfavorably before they stop being protagonists. So I scaled back on the original intention and wrote them as sincere characters.
• I also originally planned that Therese would eventually get disgusted at her book for having a 'reactionary' portrayal of heroism. Reasons for this is due to portraying 'the girl' as passive and only the man of the story could be the hero, which in turn helps keep Therese also as a passive actor. This was a very complex point that I could not execute in the limited storytelling time I had. Instead I decided her book with 'traditional heroism' end up having the princess not be a passive character, and become an active player in the main conflict. This then becomes the turning point of events where Therese does the same thing in her own world.
• Some valuable feedback I got included that (before my turning point), the story was headed towards a direction of being thinly veiled propaganda for my portrayal of law enforcement. That lead to my decision to pivot the story less about opposing the "bad guys", but add a touch of solidarity with friends trying to protect each other during chaotic times. There were certain common denominators that are above ideology that I knew I needed to touch base with.

Unavoidable hazards

The genre research in horror that lead me to winning Hawktober, I did not do for the JRPG genre. Most of my mental energy was focused on aesthetic direction and writing. While the hard work I put into story had it coming out as my second-best category, gameplay was my weakest. For a myriad of reasons, I know my execution of that battle system was sloppy.

The story's subject matter was also something I realized should ideally have a long bake time to touch base with numerous nuances. Most of the great games I know that deal with heavy topics take their time to explore the topic from multiple angles. This was not quite possible in a jam. I will also stick more closely with 'black and white' morality stories for future jam entries.

Moving forward!

For next year, serious genre research in JRPG will be done, I will do better with a more rounded approach. I've been able to jump back to a haunted mall project which will help build my code base and my asset library. I'm looking to switch to a Standard Turn Battle system instead of the default system, and to be more familiarized with action sequences. Looking forward to attempting a survival horror for my next jam, and am starting to rebuild my long-term project for an eventual reboot.