HBW2: Reid Shift - Scope Retrospective

One of the prevailing themes in the feedback I received for The Legend of MV: A Harold Between Worlds (known henceforth as HBW '22) was that despite the game being non-linear and exploration-heavy, it was almost perfectly scoped for what it was.

When this year's Harold Jam was announced - and, more importantly, the fact that Human was going on indefinite hiatus after this jam - I realized that, while the medium for this project would in fact be a jam game, the goal of this project would be to offer a sendoff worthy of such a wonderful developer/community leader/cool dude. All the proverbial stops had to be pulled out.
So, with that in mind, and also being never one to leave well enough alone when it comes to gameplay concepts, I tried to come up with a gimmick that would integrate the ideas of community and unity into the gameplay itself, while meanwhile spotlighting some of the projects, developers, and characters that I've encountered in RPG Beta Testers and the adjacent social circles. This meant lots of characters (playable and cameo), and potentially even several game worlds. In a manner of speaking, my core concept was over-scoped well before I even started fleshing out details.

Great start, huh?

Meanwhile, I've been working a lot on writing recently. A fair and common critique of both my long-term project Soul Survivor: Trials of the Goddess and past jam entries is that they are not story centric, and even could be seen as lacking a significant "hook" to grab the player's attention.
It's true, I like mostly just dropping the player into an unfamiliar sandbox (but with some sneaky guard rails!) and letting them discover stuff on their own. Some mystery and intrigue combined with a slow trickle of exposition is plenty for me, more often than not.
But I also wouldn't have lost anything but providing more of a compelling set-up for folks that are more interested in the storytelling aspect. So, this already overstuffed project needed to leave enough room for a more satisfying narrative as well.

And then???

And then the realization hit that I had to create the majority of the assets that would be used in this project - assets that would be based upon a variety of games with markedly differing aesthetics from one another, ranging from Axial's retro 8-bit look to the slick, RTP-plus environments of ODW and the Katina saga. Sure, I had the RM2k3-to-MZ tileset and map sprite conversions I made for HBW '22, but that could only get me so far. Finding a unifying style based on the 2k3 conversion would take a bunch of time and effort, but I decided to forge ahead as it was the only way to get the look I wanted.
While I knew in advance of the jam announcement that my project would feature Reid as a protagonist and several of the HTML crew in (at least) supporting roles, I was still only partially done with creating that small handful map sprites when the theme drop occurred; the result being, about the first 4 or 5 days of the jam development period, I was basically still making sprites (to be fair I was also writing plot outlines on my lunch break).

If you've read this far you probably played the game and have an idea of how it turned out in the end, but there are still some noteworthy behind the scenes details I'd like to share.

Milestones (not necessarily in a good sense)

• Basically nothing of substance besides a test map was entered into the engine prior to the 10th day of the jam. Said test map was just to confirm that my small contingent of map sprites (and my Reid battler) looked OK during actual play.
• The "ruins" world was put together in 4 hours, the day submissions were due.
• I only made it through a single end-to-end test of the entire game, start to finish, before submissions were finalized. (amazingly, my incremental testing was very on point, since I have yet to hear of any game breaking bugs in this installment, whereas HBW '22 did have a very critical progression bug if you took dungeons in a specific order).
• Up until about a week before submissions were finalized, the plan was to feature 5 worlds. rather than 3. The two dropped worlds (Retro City and Shonen) would've been where Chip and Zaphreal were recruited, respectively. Hence why they are kind of shoehorned into the main world. I should note, the original route would have only required 3 of the 5, not all 5, to complete the game.
• Katina was originally going to feature a timed attack system, but I ran into too many technical issues and punted on it in the 11th hour.

My advice to prospective game devs out there is to to use my experiences as a road map of "how not to make games". Kidding aside, I do feel there's some value in recognizing mistakes that were made along the way. Even though the game delivered (barely) on time, and so far the receipt seems very solid indeed, it was a photo finish getting across that finish line, and not the kind of experience I'd like to repeat.

One last note: special thanks are due to Oath Games and Sawyer Friend for their early testing and feedback, without which I would likely not have succeeded at all in this effort.