And her awareness was filled with strange symbols, which she knew she should recognize but couldn't quite place, and then the symbols consumed her and there was only confusion.

- Roger Williams, "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect"  (content warnings on site.)

https://taliaellib.itch.io/isekaionline-beta-test-blues-mfgj-summer-2020-edition

Isekai/Online: Beta Testing Blues is a short RPGMaker MV game about a group of extremely queer people stuck as their MMO characters, who are investigating an area of the game that one of them fears is glitching out the rest of that area of the gameworld.

It features:

- a transfeminine main character, Deedee, freshly hatched out of her egg and exploring what being a girl means to her, with four distinct character builds

- a cast of characters with cute concept artby Emma Glaze that Deedee is a bisexual disaster about

- at least one set of dialogue choices that the other characters will remember

- at least one dungeon with one boss battle

If there's enough time I'll expand on it, but these are the only things it absolutely needs by the end of the jam for me to consider it a success.

Credit to:

mechanical design inspired by Valor: Heroic Roleplaying (a better tabletop game than this will be a jRPG: check it out!)

combat and glitch effects programming by Benbjamin123, drawing on the Yanfly Engine and the Himeworks plugin library

story by myself and FoxHana

concept art by Emma Glaze

creature design by PastelDeity

pixel art by O530

groovin elecronic tunes by Bibichu 

one track by Kevin McCleod at Incompetech.filmmusic.io (you'll know it when you hear it)

sound FX by gunner.basinger

concept, production, direction, eventing and mapping by me

Booted up RPGmaker today and put in the classes (Monk, Thief, Paladin, Evoker, Warrior, and Exorcist) and started making abilities and equipment.  To do: adjust the stats across the board to be lower.  The characters aren't levelling up in this vertical slice, which means if I want to I can cheat and just do 6th level, but I'm going to backport from 1-6th at least.

I also tried to add some maps and writing but the game crashed on me, bleah.  Gonna go to bed after that.

Todo:

- Write some dialogue on gDocs to later port to the game

- Re-add the maps

- Finish the character leveling stats

- Work on the default character builds: create moves and equipment

- Create the boss fight encounter 

Today is proving a much better day.  Installed a bunch of plugins and well on my way to getting the relevant equipment done.  Set up a github for the project (after changing my handle from my deadname to my real name, oops).  My cowriter did the first scene and I'm editing it, which is helping me actually get started with my own writing.  After an editing pass, this was one of the standouts:

DEEDEE:
ANYway. We all tried to log in, and then we all got isekai'd to Mundus, like we're in one of those trashy anime Sekh loves-

SEKHMET:
Ehn, those are more of Hikaru’s thing.

HIKARU:
Are you sure, Sekhmet Clanclan?

DEEDEE:
All of us are kinda weeby.
We do all play AWO.

HIKARU
I’m actually Japanese. Y'all are weebs.

yes, I was surprised Hikaru used "y'all" here too, but it was the objectively correct word in this situation.

Yesterday went well.  Got all the equipment I need for the demo done, and my programmer got me some interesting S̷̺̾Y̸̘͌S̵͙͐Ť̴̥̊E̶̡̜͛͒M̵͕̝̍͠ ̶̭̂͌Ẹ̵̤́͝R̷̘̰̾͘R̶̩̗̃Ǫ̸̻̃Ř̶̨̈ to show off for dungeon so that's neat.

Lots of progress in the last two days!  

First off, I finished up a tabletop game prototype of the combat engine with monsters and the PCS!  Eventually I hope to get the license to develop this as an adaptation of Valor: Heroic Roleplaying (the devs are amenable but I haven't quite gotten the scratch together yet),  so i just mocked it up using thier character sheets in Roll20.  If anyone is interested in doing a testrun with me over this weekend, comment here!

Second, my artists, sound designers and musicians have been dropping some very cool stuff!  My cowriter was totally incapacitated by her dayjob this week (which is streaming, check out the extremely queer and chill streams of FoxHana, M-W-Th at 3 Pacific with some occasional offday special streams) so I'll focus on writing with her later, but I did get some very cool and good draft sprites from O5:30 (also on twitter as Scribulls) -

- as well as some chill lo-fi tracks to flirt to teammates with by Bibichu which I'm not sure how to link.  They're real good tho.

Hello, as I am the music creator Bibichu, or Bibi on this site, and would like to provide a few music examples of what the game will have, here you all go!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o5Qdu5hayyAh0yxo80VT_8S-j96uMzOd/view?usp=shari...  Here's a dungeon theme for those who want to see!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L76ELfV-zbE-uu4Do1aR5Qo3aPYALTsZ/view?usp=shari...https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Q8_oy3Tiwpdimz6rMSaC52FSA1X7NLmc/view?usp=shari... And here's some of the character themes, specifically Ace's on the bottom and Hikaru's on top!

Spent 5 hours on a spreadsheet full of every single goddamn active Skill in the game!  Didn't get to the passives yet, but I did give the programmer my source material as well.  I also made some sprites in RPGMaker MV's engine (designed to look different from the game-in-a-game style) for the purpose of causing Deedee emotional pain.

...gonna slap a CW: Dysphoria on this thing, on a related note.

Taking a break now, hoping to edit some scripts from FoxHana and write some of my own before implementing them tomorrow.  We're doing these in screenplay format first because we eventually want to do a voice acting patch after the jam, then I'll implement them using the eventing system.

I will have to push back the tabletop playtest to Monday because whoops I forgot that's when my D&D game starts.  (I'm playing a trans urchin disaster helf  Transmuter who got thrown into a penal colony because I have a type).  I am still open to running up to 4 and our programmer through it if people are interested!

Did a bit more datawonkery, including translating the TT stat builds to the game.  

An advantage of the stat system we're mangling to resemble valor is that the growth curves are usually very simple to automatically generate within RPGMaker; each character wants to raise their two most important stats by 1 each time they level, so that's as simple as plugging in (1+7) at Lv 1 to (99+7) at Lv 99.  This breaks down with the more granular HP and ST (Stamina; basically MP) but the growths for most other stats are simple and need only minor tweaking to just math out.

Also, some of the characters literally never gain any points in any stats from their base value, so you have the amusing situation of Alesha having 5 Agility at first level and extrapolating that out to... 5 Agility at 99th level.

Also did some idiot checking of one of the Chinese-derived terms running around and discovered that I had gotten it wrong... in a way that it would be entertaining for the American server to also get wrong, while Morgan "Ace Striker" Zhu screams internally every time the non-Cantonese speakers mangle it.

I'm dead tired, it's 4:20 am where I am (nice),  and I'm going to sleep very soon.

Important updates!

We are well on track to have this done by Friday, happy to say.  I've been checking in with the rest of the team and it looks like the combat engine will be ready late tomorrow, while I'll plug away at implementing the story.

I also added this little guy by PastelDeity to the game.  Ain't he cute?

I'm real excited about this.  Now it's time to prep for my dayjob tomorrow and then promptly collapse.

Extremely important update!

The final sprites from  O5:30 are done, and not only that, she donated them to me for use in any commercial versions of the game I might care to make!  Hot dang!

Not only that, but Benbjamin implemented almost every bit of combat code and I've assigned descriptions to each and every Skill.  It looks good!  I'll need to implement Standard Time Battle and report some bugfixes (for starters, the bad guys are far wimpier than they should be, the final boss not withstanding, and they don't seem to realize you can use Support skills and attack in the same turn), but the only bottleneck now is completing the screenplays and implementing the scripts.

And I got a fair bit of that done, too!

We are well on our way to having the proof of concept I was hoping for, and I hope to upload it on Friday!

Version 1.0.0 of the Game Jam edition is notionally done.  As soon as it actually packages itself properly, I'm submitting it.

It is done!  Sound effects aren't implemented yet, that's a patch before the end of the jam with any luck, but it is playable and hit my milestones! Get it here!