or "Is it possible to finish an RPG Maker project??"

Potentially biting off more than I can chew and jumping into this game jam a little late, I am nevertheless starting to make this silly little adaptation of Pinocchio. 

Any plans? Any progress?? Not really, but so many GRIPES!

Opting to leave behind my one true RPG Maker love (VX Ace) behind to switch to MV for html5 exporting (what can I say? I think people are more likely to play trash in their browser than download stuff if my analytics are anything to go by) - I am bewildered by some of the stuff in this version of the engine. The choice to change default tile sizes to 48x48 is perhaps the weirdest aspect - who came up with this shit?? It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that a 16x16 sprite increased in size by 300% would give me 48x48 (math was never my strongest subject - don't @ me) which means I can still achieve the sort of thing that I want. However, in the interest of posterity please enjoy this early screenshot which contains gross mixels:

That's a snow/grass tile which is 12x12 but scaled up 400%, a 16x16 mountain tile scaled up 300%, and a 24x24 character sprite scaled up 200%. I am stupid. Please end my career.

Okay, but art stuff aside - what's the plan for this game??? An RPG is a big task so I'm going to be keeping things very very simple. I will not be adapting the entirety of The Adventures of Pinocchio but instead riffing on the chapter(s) immediately after the puppet is hung and left for dead. Starting in medias res with the protag's death seems fun! A lot happens after the fact, and I'll probably be sidestepping the encounter with the snake (although...) and the Gorilla judge? But I'd like it to end with the puppet being swept out to sea. Driftwood. The title is "Driftwood".

I have no grand aspirations for ludic-narrative harmony, and will even forgo my usual advice of sticking to one key verb for the game's action (which on surface level would be "lie" - but real Pinocchio fans will understand that "bury" or even "lose" would be better choices) to instead focus on making a goofy, short, boilerplate RPG - as simple as Dragon Quest but as short (if not shorter) as the first world in Makai Toushi SaGa.

So why then appropriate Carlo Collodi's fantastically dreary, didactic, industrialized fairy tale?? 

I think the original text (I'm most familiar with the Chiesa translation from 1926) is really wild and so so totally at odds with itself all of the time. I would love to write my thoughts on the trans allegory of the story - though I don't think there's much of that to explore in my shitty RPG Maker game (besides me deliberately choosing to keep the puppet's gendered pronouns and other language fairly neutral - less done as a means to create some sort of enby protag, and more as a means to reinforce the fact the thing's a gosh-darn sentient puppet that everyone sort of hates and curses and wishes would do as its told and be what they want and oops I guess this is the trans allegory after all :>). Instead I suppose I'm more interested in what the story has to say about ludology staple concepts like "work" and "play". And gosh if old 8-bit Japanese Role Playing Games don't straddle the line between those ideas often enough as it is. Will there be grinding?? You bet your butt!!!

So I need to actually plan the thing out. But I've at least started the darn thing. And already solved some of my initial gripes. 

I've got a week. That's plenty of time...

Oh! And it's not a real problem but I do sometimes get funny graphical glitches when I test it out. look at this goofy shit!